Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference 2000 starts today. Just a wild guess, but I imagine there will be quite a lot of software-related news coming out of it.

Sites covering it: the usual Mac news sites (Macintouch, MacWeek, MacCentral, MacNN) and some less-well-known newshounds at http://wwdc2000.weblogs.com/, http://macosx.weblogs.com/ and http://www.stepwise.com/SpecialCoverage/WWDC2000/.

So according to Macintouch, Microsoft is discontinuing development of Internet Explorer for Macs. Which is really too bad, because it's actually one of their best pieces of software.

IE 4.5 had been my regular browser until about two weeks ago, when I finally decided it was safe to try IE 5. Basically, it does everything either the same or better than the old IE. In particular, there are more keyboard shortcuts for things (my favorite is the shortcut to swap between browser windows -- much nicer than using the mouse).

It renders faster and moves between already-visited pages much faster than version 4.5 did. Opera for Windows is still the champ, but IE 5 is at least respectable now.

It crashes about as much as the old one did, i.e. when I have JavaScript turned on and go somewhere with a bad script. So, I generally keep scripting turned off and everything works like a charm.

It handles interruptions less well than IE 4.5 though; if my modem drops a connection and I then quit IE, it takes many many seconds to figure out what's going on and quit gracefully.

Also, they took away the option to open a link in the current window even if it's set to open a new window (it was in the contextual menu).

All in all, though, the good far outweighs the bad and there's no reason not to go to IE 5.

I'm really not sure how to view their decision to gut the IE/Mac team. Hopefully the WWDC will have some new information on it.

Okay, now there are way too many 'Last Pages of the Internet' ["Please turn around and go back"]. Bets on when someone will post the first 'LAST "last page"'?

Hmph. Not only have They Might Be Giants put all their content behind a Flash-only interface (hello!?! No alternate version for the majority of websurfers in the world? Anh?), but they've taken down their old pages, breaking search engines everywhere. Used to be, you could find lyrics there...

It's almost enough to make me install Flash. Almost.

Luckily, Google still has some of their pages cached.

Linked from everywhere already, I present it here too: a Vermont mother has had enough and lets fly with a challenge.

• I've had enough of your anti-gay venom [Concord Online Monitor]
  For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will?
  
  If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

Another domain not taken: JustAFormality.com

Who needs to spend money on Entertainment Weekly or Premiere's special movie preview issues when you've got the Brunching Shuttlecocks' Self-Made Critic?

A few weeks ago I saw a preview for the Nutty Professor II and got the distinct impression it's not for little kids (that is, it looked very crude and stupid), when for some reason I had thought it was a Disney flick. So I checked on the older versions, and neither of them is a kiddie flick either. I must have been thinking of the Absent-Minded Professor instead. Oops.