Over the past few days, both Microsoft and Mozilla have released updates that Mac users can benefit from. But their respective value differs substantially.

As promised, the Microsoft Office for Mac 12.0.1 update appeared Tuesday, addressing a number of early-release defects for the newly released suite, plus a few of the usual security patches. On the whole, the update is useful, particularly if you encountered an occasional crash in Word or Excel. In addition, Entourage supposedly can rebuild large mail databases with better stability.

However, a most irksome bug remains unfixed across the suite, and that is the abysmally slow launch times. For example, a cold or fresh launch of Word 2008, newly updated, still takes roughly 14 seconds on the latest Mac Pro with a pair of 2.8GHz Intel Xeon processors and 14GB of RAM. However, it doesn’t fare much worst on my two-year-old 17-inch MacBook Pro with 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo processor and 2GB RAM. So I can’t attribute it to hard drive speeds, as I’m willing to bet that the Mac Pro’s internal drives are fast enough. These are Apple-supplied WD Caviar SE16s, with these specs: 500 GB, 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM. Benchmarks show this is a decently-fast mechanism for most normal purposes, including launching a word processor application.

The other Office 2008 applications don’t fare any better. But maybe Microsoft hasn’t put launch speed on its priority list, since I can’t recall any reviewers making a big deal of it. Or should we be waiting for version 12.0.2? Or maybe I’m alone in encountering this issue, although truth to tell, it didn’t launch any faster on a test Power Mac G5 Quad.

In any case, I was far more encouraged with the recently-posted Firefox 3.0 beta 4 release, since that worthy browser is rapidly approaching the point where you can use it full time. It’s available, as usual, for the Mac OS, Windows and Linux, and many of the improvements can be felt on a platform-agnostic basis. A long-standing issue involves rampant memory leaks, where Firefox would steal more and more RAM from your system the longer you run it. Lots of work has gone into cleaning out the application to reduce its long-term memory footprint.

In the Mac version, the interface is rapidly acquiring the cherished Mac-like veneer, despite being developed on a cross-platform code base. Even better, first launch is much quicker, and site rendering smoother, and far more accurate. Mozilla claims to have improved JavaScript performance by a huge margin, and published benchmarks indicate it bests Firefox 2, Safari 3, Opera and any version of Internet Explorer you can think of. The latter is, as you might expect, dead last in any real world benchmark.

One of the most important defects in Firefox up till now, as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that it doesn’t support printing as well as Safari. Some sites historically produced blank pages, or only delivered part of the content. The imaging engine has improved greatly and I don’t see this problem, at least so far. However, with my 10.5.2 Macs, there’s no print progress bar after you click the Print button. Worse, Firefox still doesn’t support Leopard’s new dialogs, which combine the Page Setup and Print features in one window, and include previews of the pages you’re going to output. But that’s also true for lots of third-party programs that also need to get some sort of update.

On the whole, the glitches with Firefox 3 are lessening. I still find a few on this site, particularly with the spacing of the banner ads on our sidebars, but I have dutifully reported all that to the Mozilla developers in the hope that they, too, shall be history at least by the Release Candidate stage.

What impresses me more, however, is the clear dedication Mozilla has shown to continuing to make Firefox a world class browser. Although I still frequently use Safari, the combination on the Mac and Windows platforms continues to shrink Internet Explorer’s market share. Even bundling IE 7 on Windows Vista, and pushing downloads of the same version to Windows XP holdouts hasn’t stopped Microsoft’s market share decline. The last figure I heard was 74%, and as the numbers go down, more and more sites will be encouraged to fix their code to allow the rest of the world to view their sites without having to use an inferior and less-secure browser.

Of course, there’s the promise that IE 8 will somehow adhere to Internet standards with far more fidelity, but the first beta is reportedly quite shaky and those absurd compatibility modes will only make it more difficult to use under normal circumstances. Microsoft has never comprehended what it means to just keep it simple — stupid!

After reading a story from a certain Mac commentator who has encountered an endless odyssey migrating to Mac OS X, I stopped and wondered. If Charles Moore reports a far more pleasant experience, I should think most everyone out there will or should have good things to say about Leopard.

However, that’s not the case. A few complainers are apparently hanging out over at MacFixIt, reporting absolutely bizarre troubles with everything Apple builds. Alas, this venerable Mac troubleshooting site, originally founded by the estimable Ted Landau years ago, is rapidly ditching responsibility, and spending more time regurgitating content rather than investigating these reports.

You see, with thousands and thousands of possible Mac configurations out there, someone, somewhere, is going to have a problem with just about anything. Some of that may indeed be blamed on Apple. There will always be Knowledge Base documents addressing known issues and workarounds — and often the promise of a future update that will fix a particular problem.

Other issues can be blamed on the third party providers who can also deliver products that have serious bugs. Moreover, whenever a major new operating system upgrade appears, there will be those inevitable incompatibilities. You see, programmers don’t always go by the book. Sometimes they have to perform a few feats of legerdemain in order to make a feature work they way they want. What they do may not be part of the official Apple lexicon of proper development practices, so it becomes a moving target. When Apple changes or removes a certain “hidden” capability, problems will arise.

Another issue is the fact that Apple is notorious for making last-minute changes to the system. In recent releases, developers didn’t get the final or Gold Master build of Mac OS X until after or at the same time it went on sale. Even though it usually takes week or two until discs are duplicated and retail boxes distributed, maybe Apple felt there was too much of a risk that the final version would be pirated. Of course, that happens anyway, so it shouldn’t be a factor.

As a result, developers may not be able to finish their compatibility testing until well after you have a copy of the upgrade in your hands. I don’t think that’s the best approach, though I appreciate the possible reason’s for Apple’s apparent paranoia.

You combine these two factors, and there’s plenty of room for things to go wrong with a new product release. Over time, you expect that most of the serious defects will be hammered out, and what’s left (and there’s always something left) will impact only a small number of people.

At the same time, there is the “x” factor, which is how you and I configure our Macs. Every change you make to the system with one of those modification utilities can come back to haunt you, even if you removed it in the approved fashion. Something within the system, one of those hundreds of thousands of files spread across your computer’s hard drive, won’t be restored, and all hell breaks loose with the next Apple upgrade.

The last factor may be why some people with what appears to be a certain configuration will encounter endless problems, while others will experience no troubles whatever.

This raises the obligation on the part of a troubleshooting site to actually do a little research, and make sure that the singular issue is repeated often enough to show a trend, and not just some anomaly that may be traced to some other highly individual cause.

Here’s where I get more and more concerned about how these matters are treated. For example, MacFixIt ran an article recently complaining of alleged serious performance shortcomings with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT graphics card that is available as a $200 option for the latest version of the Mac Pro.

The specs state that the NVIDIA card has 512MB of video memory, compared to 256MB on the standard ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card, with far more capability of handling greater chunks of data faster. In the end, it should perform a whole lot better, and benchmarks show that it does — well, mostly. But MacFixIt exaggerated the few exceptions in such a fashion as to convey the impression that there was something really wrong with the NVDIA card. Shouldn’t the improvements be across-the-board?

Well, it’s not that simple. In some cases, it may be that the card’s drivers simply need to be optimized further. This makes perfect sense, since the product has only been shipping for a very few weeks. But to claim there are serious shortcomings is not responsible journalism in my book.

No, Leopard isn’t perfect, but for me, it’s working just great, thank you. I would only hope that sites that report problems with try to show a little more journalistic integrity and check their facts first.

Although most of the comments about Apple’s plans for enterprise support and third-party development for the iPhone and iPod touch strike me as essentially positive, there are certainly serious questions as to how it’ll all play out.

Obviously, we won’t know all the answers until the iPhone 2.0 firmware is available in June (assuming it ships on time), and software becomes available via the Apps Store. But I think I can make a few credible guesses right now, and the news looks really good for everyone, including the small and large developers who are even now working on iPhone software.

After paying $99 per year for admission into the developer program, or $299 for the enterprise program, Apple will exact a 30% take on every sale of an iPhone application. If your application is free, no problem. Apple will distribute it free of charge.

However, whether or not shareware will be allowed isn’t exactly clear, since payment often isn’t made until you’ve had a chance to give the software a try. Even then, you may decide not to pay and stop using it.

Now on the surface, it would seem that a 30% commission might be a tad expensive, but it’s actually an outstanding bargain, and I don’t think Apple’s going to profit very much as a result. Consider that the average retailer will grab 50% from a software company for selling their product, and the company will still have to pay for distribution and promotion. With the Apps Store, Apple will take care of anything, and then send you a check for the balance. That means they’ll host your content, run the promotional blurbs, pictures, everything. I also suspect they’ll feature hot-selling or specially selected products at the top of the list, if iTunes is an example.

Now when you add up the cost of doing all this yourself, particularly if you are a one-person company, you can see where just building and supporting your product and collecting payments for sales is a far more economical proposition. To be sure, I can’t see where Apple would stop you from promoting your killer iPhone application independently with banner ads, print ads, radio spots, whatever. You’d simply point to Apple as the distributor of your stuff. Makes sense to me.

However, the second part of the equation might not seem so compelling. You see, Apple isn’t just going to sell whatever you give them, contrary to the way things work with the entertainment companies on iTunes. They will reserve the right to reject your product for whatever reasons suit them. In practice, this will mean that dancing nudes might not see the light of day, nor would software that appears to encourage illegal activity. This might mean that you won’t get, say, a Bit Torrent sort of program, because that could be used to promote digital piracy.

There may, of course, be gray areas where a product would seem to be essentially legal in scope, but might be readily abused, but I can see where you can do that with most anything, so that would mean Apple The Gatekeeper wouldn’t approve anything, which is simply absurd.

Again, Apple’s level of censorship won’t be known until the products are available, and those who found their products on the reject list have a chance to complain publicly.

On another front, I can see where Apple might do one good thing, which is that they will, at the very least, certify that a product functions as advertised and doesn’t present a serious compatibility and/or security problem. Right now, there are thousands and thousands of applications available for your Mac. But, aside from user ratings, which may not come for a while with a newly-released program, you really have no way of knowing in advance whether it’ll perform properly, or will just send your Mac crashing away.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the folks who run the existing download sites should be more focused on certifying products before they are posted. On the other hand, assuming that such things aren’t done in an arbitrary fashion, or because a developer handed them a check for special display in big, bold type, it might be a good idea. Of course an active user community that reports frequently on how products work in the real world might just be enough.

When it comes to Apple, however, they will be putting their good name on the line in distributing iPhone and iPod touch software. They are going to be extremely careful, especially at the beginning as the roll-out progresses. This also means that not everyone who applies will be automatically approved for admission to the developer or enterprise programs.

However, it would be nice if the folks who were able to jailbreak iPhones in a friendly fashion, which means to run useful utility software and not unlock the things, get early opportunities to develop street legal applications. I expect they can leverage their experience with the platform to create great products that will greatly enhance your enjoyment of your iPhone and iPod touch.

But as I said, this is all preliminary. Ask me again in June.

The conventional wisdom has it that Apple doesn’t really care so much about the enterprise. They have made tons of money from consumers, educational users and small businesses, and the sacrifices required to go to big companies hasn’t appealed to Apple.

At least so far.

It’s not that Apple hasn’t been interested in business users. Quite often, though, they enter a company via the back door, through a company executive who tries a Mac or an iPhone and just loves it. Then the IT people are exhorted to add Apple support to the mix.

The other route is a company’s art department, where the majority of content creators still want their Macs, even though most of the software they will ever use comes in a Windows version.

If things had continued in this fashion, I don’t think Apple would have reason to complain. Their sales and profits would continue to rise. However, when it comes to Apple, never say never. Things may be about to change big time.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.