There is, however, something going on that has the potential to change that, and quickly. Not coincidentally, a team of core developers from Netscape's early days is now developing the equivalent of a virtual world browser for MMOs. Called Multiverse, the company includes the same portentous entrepreneur noted above: Bill Turpin. His team includes Netscape veterans known throughout Silicon Valley, if not the world at large: Rafhael Cedeno and Robin McCollum, who built critical Netscape server technology still in use today, and co-creators of RSS; Jeff Weinstein, who coded the world-changing SSL; and Corey Bridges, Navigator product manager who then went on to launch companies like Netflix and Zone Labs. On the entertainment side, ex-physics major and film director/producer James Cameron, of Terminator and Titanic fame, has thrown his lot in with Multiverse, joining its board of advisors.

Their plan is to provide virtual world creators the client, server, and development tools to create an MMO world. The entire technology platform is free for non-commercial use, so academics are paying nothing to create economic, architectural, sociological and other simulations. For-profit enterprises would pay royalties, but only when their games or other applications collect money from consumers, not before.

This is significant because, until now, creating a complex virtual world required tens of millions of dollars in initial development costs alone. The Multiverse technology, currently in beta-testing, claims to lower the cost of virtual world production to a fraction of its current stratospheric level. For many purposes, such as personal online spaces, there would be no cost at all.

Microsoft's implementation of tabbed browsing in IE 7 includes something called Tab Groups which enables user to collect their tabs into a group and open a group with one click. A native toolbar search box is also part of the new browser.

Perhaps most notably though is IE 7's new RSS (define)features.

"RSS is probably the biggest area of innovation in IE 7," Schare said. "We've done work both on the end user to expose the average user to RSS in a really great way and we've done a lot of work on the platform to enable RSS for any application to take advantage of."

Schare explained that the RSS capabilities allow users to subscribe to feeds within the browser and once subscribed that data is available to any application, whether it's an RSS reader or any other business or consumer application that might want to use the data.

It's all part of how IE 7 and eventually Vista will fully integrate RSS into the system.

WebTrends said that the percentage of users saying no to third-party cookies has risen four-fold in the past 18 months, from 2.8 percent in January of 2004 to 12.4 percent in April of this year. However, the firm also said that growth seems to have peaked. Some industries are being hit harder than others, with a nearly 17 percent refusal rate in retail, more than 15 percent in telecommunications and 12 percent among media firms.

First of all, Google has been noted to be purchasing large quantities of 'dark' fibre-optic capacity, on the cheap (much excess capacity was laid during those heady days of irrational exuberance) to increase its proprietary network bandwidth. To what end? Some of the most far-out rumours say that Google is developing a Skype-esque software that will allow high-quality voice communications over the Internet, costing virtually nothing to the consumer. If Google is making a play into the telecom arena, it would be a relatively late-comer in an arena that is widely populated.

Not unlike its e-mail and mapping software, which are entirely Web-based, Google will release an operating system that will be completely networked and centralized on its servers. You will literally no longer need any software running on your local computer (except the Google Web-browser of course, and a network connection). The computing experience will involve booting your computer, logging into the net, and having access to all your programs (and most of your data) which will reside happily in the ether — all protected and secure, we will be assured, by the good god Google.