Riverhall wins British Healthcare web site development contract

The new dynamic site will help bring suppliers and clients together.

Riverhall recently signed a contract to develop a new dynamic web site for British Healthcare.

The new dynamic web site will display up-to-date news and information relevant to British Healthcare suppliers. It will incorporate a powerful database-driven search engine using Riverhall search technology to enable enquirers to rapidly locate British suppliers for a wide range of medical products or services.

Ken Newnham, the British Healthcare Project Director, said:

"As a long-standing supplier to the Association of British Healthcare Industries, Riverhall have a good understanding of the business background. I was particularly impressed by Riverhall's understanding of the objectives, and their creative proposals for the web site. Their proposal also represented very good value for money."

Andrew Wedmore, Riverhall director responsible for the project, said:

"This project will use an open source content management framework, enabling British Healthcare to update the site easily and frequently. These benefits are achieved without the use of any closed, proprietary, technology."

British Healthcare was established jointly by UK Trade and Investment (the arm of government which supports exporters) and the Association of British Healthcare Industries to act as a focus for helping the UK healthcare sector to develop and exploit overseas market opportunities.

Web Security Threatens Internet Explorer

If you use Windows, you're probably using Internet Explorer every time you view a web page.

One security group lists fifty-one security problems with Internet Explorer 6 and such was the concern about the potential for widespread chaos that in June this year, CERT, the US government agency responsible for computer security, issued a bulletin advising people not to use Internet Explorer at all.

The first official release of Firefox gives web users a real choice.

When the Web was born, the first slick graphical browser was NCSA's (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) Mosaic. Some of the writers of the original Mosaic went on to found Netscape Communications Corporation and produced the hugely popular Netscape Navigator.

The First Browser Wars

When Microsoft woke up to the Internet some time later, NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator were quite advanced and mature products. Netscape dominated the Windows browser market.

Realising it had some catching up to do, Microsoft licensed Mosaic and re-badged it as Internet Explorer. Then, in an effort to topple Netscape as the number one browser, Microsoft decided to give their new browser away. Netscape had no choice but to do the same, relying on other software products for revenue.

The ensuing Browser Wars was closely observed by the industry but once every new Windows PC came equipped with a copy of Internet Explorer, most users didn't see the need to install anything else and Netscape all but faded away.

In an attempt to rescue something from Navigator, Netscape launched the Mozilla open source project and released the program to the open source community. However, after reviewing the program source code, the Mozilla project eventually decided to scrap most of it and start again from scratch.

Hunter Turns Hunted

That was in 1998 and now, nearly seven years later, something remarkable is happening.

Microsoft's browser dominance is being threatened. Some people are saying that the browser wars are starting again.

The Mozilla project grew into the Mozilla Foundation and worked on the browser and related software for several years. Then, a year or so ago, they stepped back and reviewed the project and decided to extract from it a smaller, streamlined browser which was eventually called Firefox.

Firefox became an instant success with the open source community and won many awards where its ease of use and innovative features were praised. Every review which compared Firefox with Internet Explorer put the upstart browser way out ahead. The word was out. Web users who were concerned about the safety of Internet Explorer, were downloading Firefox in their millions.

According to BBC News, Internet Explorer's market dominance dropped from about 95% in July to just under 93% at the start of November, losing 1% in less than a month.

Everybody Loves the Underdog

The uptake of Firefox was astonishing. Over two days this month, Firefox was downloaded over 2.5 million times.

Industry support for the browser is growing, too, with investment from big corporations like IBM, Nokia and Google, with Google now providing Firefox's new home page.

Microsoft have been sitting on Internet Explorer. It hasn't been updated significantly since release 6 in 2001, except for a steady stream of security fixes. With no competition to concern them, there was no need. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft respond to this significant threat to their browser dominance.

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