News archive (6 / 2022)

Japanese electronics behemoth, Sony, has announced a new gaming brand under their computer hardware and peripheral department. The company calls the new gaming gear Inzone – or INZONE, as they'd like them to be stylized.

Sony's obvious plan is to challenge the Asian electronics competitors that have already created their own gaming brands, and in many cases sold branded gear for years, even decades.

These companies include the likes of Asus with their Republic of Gamers that was brought about as early as in 2006. The brand has become one of the company's most valued possessions, and spans across computer hardware like motherboards all the way up to more mainstream gaming gear like headsets and even gaming-focused smartphones.

Others, like Lenovo with their Legion line of devices and Acer with Predator offer similar lineup of products, including but not limited to laptop and desktop computers, monitors, gaming mice and keyboards, and headsets.

While the range of devices in the gaming gear market is expansive, Sony has decided to enter it in a careful manner with just a few products that are to be released this summer.

Very rarely any piece of computer software is so loved and hated as Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer has been throughout its lifespan. But finally, after 27 years, IE is being killed off.

Microsoft released the first version of IE back in 1995. But it wasn't until the turn of the millennium when the browser finally managed to become the most popular web browser in the world.

Partially that success was because of Microsoft's shady tactics, like bundling IE tightly with its Windows operating system. But partially, the reason was also due the fact that back then, IE was simply a faster and more nimble browser than the previous #1, Netscape Navigator.

IE quickly solidified its top position, despite the arrival of open source contender, Firefox. Firefox never manager to get past IE in terms of global popularity and IE became quickly de facto browser during the first years of 2000s.

Microsoft was so certain of its pole position that the company didn't even bother to do any major updates to its browser: Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001, but it took over five years for IE7 to arrive.

That era when IE dominated is remembered with horror by many old-time web developers, as IE was notoriously bad at supporting any web standards, whatsoever. Basically during those years, web developers had to create two separate versions of their websites: one for everything else and one for IE only.

Damn. Time flies. Our news output has temporarily slowed down quite dramatically during the past year or so, but we're still here, after all these years.

Yes, 23 years ago today, our site officially launched, back in 1999. Since those days, lots of things have changed - in technology, culture, our personal lives and Internet. But our site is still here, having survived all these years - good times and the bad ones.

I wont go over our history and our roller-coaster years now, as I've done so three years ago, extensively when our site turned 20 years old.

Again, I'd like to thank all of you who have supported our site over all these years. Thank you, everybody!

-Petteri Pyyny, CEO
AfterDawn Oy

P.S. Now, AfterDawn has existed over half of my life, which is kinda weird thing to think about..