Ongoing litigation for Microsoft Corporation was not the only thing occupying the internet blog space, but it certainly turned out to be important.
Google last week said it would apply to join a European Union antitrust case against Microsoft over the company's web browser.
The case, initiated by the EU in January, accused Microsoft of illegally tying Internet Explorer to Windows to stifle competition in the browser market.
It breathes new life into issues that were at the core of landmark Department of Justice antitrust case against Microsoft a decade ago.
The EU acted after it received a complaint from Opera, an Oslo-based maker of a competing browser.
Mozilla, which makes the Firefox browser, applied to join the case early last month.
Google, which last year rolled out the Chrome browser, said it was also applying to become a "third party" in the European proceeding.
All of this made Mack-Line start wondering about how much the case was to do with anti-competition and how much it was to do with who had the biggest browser.
Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Chrome are all firmly installed on Mack-Line's PC and laptop and each has their strengths and weaknesses.
After being a big fan of Chrome, the shine seems to have gone off the brand new browser.
It has some incredibly easy to use features, but it seems to stall too many times in a day to be of any use when working.
Explorer is fine, most of the time, but it has foibles that sometimes drive Mack-Line to distraction.
Opera is a personal favourite - at least now - but Firefox is the usual browser of choice.
Interestingly, the United Kingdom government said it would accelerate the use of open source software in public services.
The open source software would have the same status as proprietary software, such as Windows.
Open source would be adopted when it delivered best value for money, a government spokesman said.
Public services should, where possible, avoid being locked into proprietary software.
Sun Microsystems chief open source officer Simon Phipps said on BBC online that the UK government's stance was part of a "global wave" of take-up for open source in governments.
"We waste a fortune on proprietary computer software because of paying for licences and promises up front and not demanding value."
Schools, government departments and public services would have a "crucial freedom" because of the choice of whether to pay for support and training when using open source software.
The Government's action plan could see a wave of open source software being deployed in areas such as office applications (word processing and spreadsheets), document management and database infrastructure - the backbone of many large-scale IT, Mr Phipps said.
But do not expect proprietary software firms to lie down quietly on this.
Top level talks are understood to have been held between proprietary vendors and government management.
Traditional vendors were expected to cut prices back, end load contracts and do everything to appear cheaper.
"But the real value with open source comes from giving users a new flexibility.
"It's already happing to significant extent in the UK.
"Lots of homes are using Firefox and OpenOffice.org," he said.
While all of the battles between various browsers, and open source versus proprietary software developers are fascinating, another little problem seems to have surfaced.
Google's search engine late last year added the one trillionth address to the list of web pages it knows about.
But as impossibly big as that number might seem, it represented only a fraction of the entire web, according to Alex Wright's column on newyorktimes.com Beyond those trillion pages lay an even vaster web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogues, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in data bases that remained largely invisible to search engines.
A new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the web's hidden corners.
When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results.
It might ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online.
Anand Rajaram, co-founder of Kosmix, a deep web search start-up whose investors include Jeffrey Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com, says the crawlable web is the tip of the iceberg.
Kosmix had developed software that matched searches with the databases most likely to yield relevant information, then returns an overview of the topic drawn from multiple sources.
"Most search engines try to help you find a needle in a haystack, but what we're trying to do is help you explore the haystack."
As the major search engines start to experiment with incorporating deep web content in their search results, they must figure out how to present different kinds of data without overcomplicating their pages.
Apparently, that posed a particular quandary for Google, which had long resisted the temptation to make significant changes to its tried-and-true search engine results, Mr Wright said.
The feeling is that the deep web technologies are about to provide a major change on how businesses use data.
For example, a health site could cross-reference data from pharmaceutical companies with the latest findings from medical researchers or a local news site could extend its coverage by letting users tap into public records stored in government bases.
Also, web users should be able to find the cheapest, or most convenient, flights from Dunedin to New York on Thursday of next week.
The information is probably there, if only search engines knew how to find it.
Is Mack-Line the only one thinking that we would all benefit if browser developers spent less time fighting each other in court and more time in developing technologies that attracted users?dene.mackenzie@odt.co.nz
