Below are some useful links relating to the new Firefox 3 browser that I found interesting, and I think Firefox users should go through, non-Firefox users may want to take a look at, and see what they’ve been missing of their web life.

• Top 10 Features of Firefox 3
• Power User Guide to Firefox 3: Trust me, there is something useful to learn from here about how to make your experience better. If you don’t like something, Firefox is flexible. Don’t complain, fix it.
• Firefox History in Pictures
• Web Browser Speed Testing: Firefox according to this article is the best in memory usage, and not bad in speed as well.
• Tweak Firefox 3 AwesomeBar: The new Firefox smart bar is pretty amazing, and one of the best things in the new release. It searches your site history, bookmarks, and bookmark tags as well.  But it doesn’t stop there. Through customization and plugins, you can actually do more. I will have to give it a better look after I familiarize more with current status of the setup.

Hope you find them useful. Share any others you have here.

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The following is an interesting article from LifeHacker speed testing all major latest browsers, namely Firefox 3 RC 3(Releasse candidate 3), Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1.1 (win), and IE 7.0.6.  All tests have been carried out on Windows Vista OS. So it’s not Safari’s best place, and it definitely is what IE7 can best hope for, unless they admit Win XP is better ;).

What’s interesting is how Opera was the fastest in startup, followed by Firefox 3 and Safari was the last. A batch of 8 tabs opening at same time put Safari in the lead however, neck to neck with Opera, Firefox 2 seconds slower, and IE7 falling behind.  So Safari is best with concurrent tasking, however not very often you would want to do this in real life. Personally, I do it when opening multiple search results at once, but do you?

In terms of Javascript & CSS (important for AJAX), Safari was the best, Opera 2nd, Firefox 3rd and IE7 as always the last. (I didn’t do those test I swear!).

Memory use, what’s all Firefox fans been calling for. Firefox was #1 overall, IE7 only best at startup, when there is nothing more than MSN page probably.

A point to make however is that, Firefox was tested with their latest and greatest so far, while IE8 is still coming back and the older version was put under the test instead.

My opinion:  I am pretty much loving the Firefox 3 speed so far, no issues at all. It does fall behind Safari and Opera, OK! But doesn’t fall that bad to make me switch. Memory use as the benchmarks show are great, actually the best. The security of Firefox compared to Safari, which lacks anti-phishing is so much higher, and it has the richest plugins library amongs all. Firefox 3 has made it for me, more than Firefox 2 did to it’s successor. In the words of today’s generation I tell you “MAHALO!”

Please visit the original link for graphs and more details regarding the test.

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I had 3 downloads so far (Windows @ Home, MacBook Pro, and Linux @ work). Windows went perfect, Linux needed a bit of a small hack to get it replacing the old installation, Mac download broke first time and then went on.

I was thinking of crashing over parents house and doing a by-force upgrade to all their browsers. Unfortunately, things got in the way.

How much did you get? And what’s the favorite feature you found in Firefox 3 so far. I so much like the search of bookmarks and history all together, despite how it could crash on your privacy to some extent by chance. Also, the Firefox remember password now is a bar at the top that doesn’t hold back page loading. MUCH BETTER!

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”

Don’t forget to be part of Firefox’s Download Day!

Mark your calendar, wrap a ribbon around your finger or write a little sticky yellow note. Download Day will start on June 17, 2008.

If you prefer to no longer receive emails from Mozilla concerning Download Day, you may unsubscribe here

The sender of this email is Mozilla Corporation, 1981 Landings Drive, Bldg. K, Mountain View, CA 94043-0801.”

Mark you calendar, iPhone, HTC, sticky notes, or any other way. Just don’t miss it :). Next Tuesday

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I left the soccer pitch yesterday 11 PM to see an SMS forward from a friend about TechCrunch Twitter alert, Yahoo-Google announcement 1:30 PM today. This is gotta be about the advertising partnership.

And indeed, I woke up today to read about the Google & Yahoo public joint announcement declaring they are going into an advertisement partnership in which Google Ads will be served on Yahoo search results for the queries Yahoo! see as rewarding for them. So Yahoo! is not giving up completely on their advertising program, but if the estimates of $800 million revenue increase in one year turns out to be true, and my senses tell it’s going to be more, I guess they could change their mind about the partial partnership.

The Justice Department ofcourse is still unhappy and are investigating a possible AntiTrust. However, since Yahoo played it smart, and made a non-exclusive advertisement partnership agreement, which means any other bidders may get theirs ads on Yahoo pages as well, then I guess there is no reason for the partnership to be stopped.

How this will affect advertisers is what makes me wonder however. Yahoo! can select the queries it want to have Google Ads for, and stick to their program for others. So how will this happen, for keyword “shopping” for example. There are two sides here:

- I am a Google Advertiser: Will I have the option to show my ads on Yahoo! search results. This could make sense to avoid possible lawsuits, or it could under the Content Network. If it’s an opt-in, the adaptation rate might be a bit slower. Not everyone is always up to date on those changes. Otherwise, it may be an opt-out option, and I doubt people want to do this really.

- I am a Yahoo! Advertiser: I am bidding for the word shopping. Does Yahoo! tell me “Sorry, go join Google and bid for Shopping word”? What if I don’t want to place my ads on Google because of say, click-fraud cases I’ve heard of. And what if not all my words are powered by Google Ads. It means I have to literally manage two advertising programs, who are mutually exclusive in the budget and tracking, to bid for the keywords I want.

I just hope there will be a bit more easier way to do it, and a sort of integration between the two.

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With the release of popular open source Firefox 3 approaching, Firefox have launched a huge ambitious campaign to make it to the Guinness World Record of software downloads in one day, the release day. Join the campaign, and help Firefox make history if you like here. See how the current map overlay is. Kuwait so far has 152 pledges. Yeah that’s right. 152 is my number, which means there are 151 geeks in Kuwait who have beat me to it. Thanks to being so lazy and busy to check the news last week. Our number though is not bad, compared 8442 in China!, 6889 in India. The majority in 80,000+ comes from the US, and surprisingly to me, Brazil has 36,000+!

With no such previous Guinness World record already registered, Firefox would make it into the world record anyway. It’s just a matter of by how much, and Firefox is aiming to beat it’s own 1.6 million downloads for Firefox 2. Pretty smart move I say, Good luck. I’m for it. FTW!

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For Firefox users, this is a small hack that I think might come in handy sometimes. Firefox Search Engines support on-the-fly auto-complete, which IE7 as I know doesn’t. This feature however is rarely utilized, but the default Google search engine luckily does use it. It comes pretty useful sometimes, especially when you want to search for something that you don’t know how to spell. Now suppose you want this auto-completion to search for specific product on Amazon rather than Google. You could do that easily without moving your hands off the keyboard as follows:

1. Start with Google as the default search plugin, press Ctrl+K (Move cursor to Search Engine box)
2. Start typing what you are looking for, say “HTC…”. Stop right there and you will see list of suggestions, one of which happens to be what I’m looking for. The “HTC Tytn ii”

   

3. Move with the Down key to the desired result, say “HTC Tytn ii” in our case.

   

4. Click Ctrl+Right key (Select current option). Cursor will move back to search engine box
5. Click Ctrl+Down key (Browse installed search engines) until you reach Amazon Search Engine.
   
6. Enter

That’s it. You can apply this to any other search or search engine you want, without moving your hands off the keyboard.

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