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Back in 2006 Apple launched its “Get a Mac” ads, and they were amazing. Even being a PC developer I thought “holy hell those are funny”. Microsoft seemed to be attempting to fight back with it’s Laptop Hunter ads. The ads show how an equivalent PC laptop costs less than it’s Mac counterpart (which is true)… well, Apply has decided to retaliate directly, in two new ads.

The first one, “Top of the Line,” is notable because it employs the one-and-only Patrick Warburton as a high-end PC: “When you’re ready to compromise, call me,” he says.

The second ad, “Surprise,” takes a different visual approach (basically, it has John Hodgman playing “Mission: Impossible” in an attempt to get a nice lady to switch over to a PC), and comes to the same conclusion as “Top of the Line”: Windows PCs are virus-laden and slow.

Ok Granted the entire scientific community isn’t 100% on board with all of this but it’s still fascinating. Dr. Michio Kaku is fascinating to listen to…

Mashable does a great writeup on why IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On. The serious downsides to IE6 are:

- CSS v2 (Cascading Style Sheets): This is the code that enables almost all design on the web. In other words, designers have to hack up websites just to make them load in IE6.

- PNG Transparency: A great deal of .png images don’t display correctly in IE6. It basically kills using them in design work.

- General Security: Just like not updating your virus software can get you riddled with spyware, not updating your browser can be a gateway to attacks. There are even code snippets that will shut down IE6. I won’t tell you what they are, but you can find them on Wikipedia. It’s unstable.

- Digg , Facebook , and YouTube (soon): Both Digg and YouTube have announced that they’re cutting back on IE6 support. Facebook already gives you suggestions for better browsers if you try to log in with IE6. You won’t be able to Digg articles or browse YouTube via IE6 in the near future.

You should read through the entire article though if this is something that is of interest to you because they go into HTML5 as well as how IE6 is hurting web development progression in general. As a “web guy” I can’t wait for IE6 to die. When a client says they want to target IE6 (I usually say “current release + one version back” but sometimes they object) I utterly cringe because I know what a PITA it will be.

Catch the full article on Mashable.

Google isn’t known for using advertising to gain market share. But it looks like that wont be the case for their shiny new browser: Google Chrome.

Chrome ads have been showing up all over the Web on Google-owned sites like YouTube as well as third-party websites like LinkedIn. Now, the company is set to launch TV ads to promote the Web browser and they’ll be starting as early as this weekend.

The commercial itself was developed by Google Japan and is…. abstract. There is no voice over and no people. The video has the simple message “Install Google Chrome” at the end. It’s all very Apple-ish.  I almost expect the “there’s an app for that” voice to show up at the end.

What is now clear is that Google is committed to growing Chrome’s marketshare moreso than any other product in recent memory. This is to be expected, now that they’ve officially entered the browser game each Chrome install equals another user that gets Google as their default search engine. That said, Chrome is still lacking two key things: a Mac version (for those who run Mac’s) and an extension platform. Rumor has it that some announcements relating to those items may come at Google’s developer conference later this month…. until then I’ll hold onto FireFox.

YouTube has announced it will be launching a premium section with movies and TV shows. Google has been growing its collection of full-length movies. In November of 2008 MGM announced that it would begin adding some of its films to YouTube, starting with films like The Magnificent Seven and Bulletproof Monk. TEarlier this month rumors spread that Sony was working on a similar deal to add films to YouTube. Apparently, MGM, Sony, Crackle, CBS, Lionsgate, Starz and a handful of other distribution companies are now on board. Ok so this is Google’s move to monitize on YouTube. This puts them in direct competition with Hulu, which has a pretty good head start. Having said that, everybody knows YouTube and not everyone knows Hulu (despite their tv spots) so Google has the YouTube brand and existing traffic to help propel it moving forward.

The downside… YouTube will use third-party players from services like Crackle. “YouTube has agreed to display the films using a video player from Crackle, Sony Pictures’ own video site. The studio will control all the advertising for the films and Crackle will also get credit for the traffic,” according to CNet. That’s a shame… one of the attractive things about YouTube is that everything is displayed using Flash and let’s face it, everybody has Flash. So the premium content may end up requiring a bunch of different players to view all of the content. I’m sure this was done to appease the content providers, but it’s unfortunately as it will present a less unified experience.