I remember the first browser I ever used. It was AOL. Does that really qualify as a browser? Man, those were the days. I soon switched over to Netscape Navigator, and I say now that it because it was more lightweight, but honestly, as a child, I didn't need a good reason to like it better. It probably had something to do with the Parental Controls.

Those things aside, my browser changes were pretty consistent for a number of years. From Navigator to IE, IE to Opera, Opera to Firefox, and then an amazing thing happened that completely changed my world. I got a Mac. When I first started using the Mac, I wasn't too happy with Safari, but a friend talked me into giving it a shot, and I fell in love. It was lightweight, fast, and easy to use. Safari quickly replaced Firefox as my default browser. It has been a nice 4 years with Safari, but today, I declare Firefox will reclaim its place at the top of my Browser list.

There are a number of reason that Safari was overthrown from its thrown, but the number one reason was, I got tired to having to switch to Firefox for flash or when Safari just refused to load a page. The straw that broke the back of the proverbial camel, was when yesterday, I was watching Hulu, and every few commercials, would completely freeze the player. Eventually I switched to Firefox and had no problems. I decided... why should I only use Firefox to bat cleanup, when I can use it every pitch.

Sayonara Safari.
Konnichi wa Firefox.

There's a new version of the Hype Machine! Cool. The mp3 blog aggregator's gotten a new coat of paint and a different flash player. It looks pretty nice, although I'm not entirely sure what substantive changes have been made. Nevertheless, it's at least much more t-shirt-compatible.

I decided to celebrate the occasion by digging into the workings of the site a bit more. Hypem provides a lot of music, but is understandably hesitant to provide direct downloads lest they be busted by The Man. But how do you go about providing an mp3 for listening but not for saving? It's as fundamentally unsolvable as any other DRM problem — more so, given the relatively open technologies in use.

Still, they do their best. For instance, only requests from known web browsers are allowed — try to use a command-line tool like wget or curl to fetch content and you'll get an "access denied" message. But it's easy to fake user agent strings (or just to do the dirty work within your browser). So let's have a look at the anatomy of playing a song on hypem:

A free flash-based 3D globe? That's scriptable? Neat! Throw in some IP-based geocoding courtesy of hostip.info and you've got yourself a demo.