My choice for best web applications

1. Photsynth: It needs an active x pluggin for Internet Explorer, but it's like using something from the future now. The way the navigation goes through the 3d environment is great and the way I order photos in a 2d model is superb.
   
2. Google Maps - Live Maps: the entire map can be seen as a gigapixel image, street view is truly useful and the directions tools that both sites offer are a great way to show how web 2.0 apps are afecting nowadays rutine.
   
3. Google Reader: the best way to keep you updated, it has a high performance and forget about having to check manually every feed either in your browser or surfing page by page. In 5 minutes I can overview more than 80 feeds. Apart from the mail web systems, I thinks this is the most useful web software available for professionals.
   
4. Yahoo: the ultimate usability portal, well studied components which give the user a lot of information in one page.
   
5. Flickr: great community where people can actually know the whole world with high quality photos taken from great photographers. It has great sense of usability (yahoo trademark), and you can spend a whole afternoon using it in conjunction with the apps described at point 2.
   
6. Microsoft's Hotmail: It's fast to manage, I can do a lot of things faster than If I were using gmail or yahoo mail, it's very intuitive with the "right click" options.
   
7. iGoogle: the extensions and the widgets offered are great, you can actually set your internet "dashboard" here.
   
8. Youtube: the ultimate web 2.0 site. Huge community, huge traffic, and very entertaining site.
   

IE8 Beta: Trustworthy Browsing

IE8 Team is about to post some articles about the end-user experience improvements that are going to be available in Internet Explorer 8. The first of those posts is about some basic definitions:

• Security is often where the trust discussion begins. Narrowly, security in this context means “as the user browses the web, the only code that runs on the user’s machine is code that the user allows to run".
• Reliability is relatively simple: the browser should always start, find the Internet, and show web sites without crashing.
• Business practices guide decisions we make in designing and distributing our products. The key principle here is respecting user choice. For example, when a user installs a new version of IE, IE respects the user’s choice of default search engine

Internet Browsers

Apart from the importance of the operative systems (windows, mac os, linux, solaris,...), internet browsers are becoming the most important software systems.

Browsers has become the gateway to Internet and that's enough said. Internet by itself is a universe where lays the future for businesses, and education, transforming political institutions and modes of communication.

Funny Video about those browsers that are changing the way we see the world.