A couple of months ago, I downloaded a beta version of Firefox 3 just to look at the new ideas Mozilla was working on. My intention was to try it for a couple days, then switch back to Firefox 2. I wasn't worried about stability (it's a browser after all -- what's the worst that can happen?). But the beta wasn't compatible with lots of my favorite extensions and who wants to live without them?
As it turns out, I'm still using a prerelease version of Firefox (they're at Release Candidate 1 now) and loving it, even without my beloved add-ons. The improvements Mozilla has made to the browser, while subtle, are so helpful that I didn't want to give them up. Here are five of my favorites.
1. Much better performance
If you've used previous versions of Firefox you've likely had this experience, perhaps frequently: you're working away, but gradually become aware that something is horribly wrong with your PC. It's sluggish and apps take forever to load. You open up Task Manager and find that Firefox is chewing up 95 percent of your CPU cycles. Once you kill the browser and start over, you're running fine again.
I can't remember the last time I've had that experience with the Firefox 3 betas. Mozilla developers borrowed some memory management tricks from the Free BSD operating system for the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. (They say memory management on Macs already worked pretty well.) The effect is clear. The browser is much less likely to commandeer too many system resources. And Firefox's developers worked to make sure that add-ons, notorious memory thieves, don't cause problems either. They've rolled in cycle collectors that help prevent extensions from locking up RAM and not giving it back. They're also distributing tools to third-party developers that will help them build more abstemious add-ons.
2. The "Awesome Bar"
Okay, so the official name is the Location Bar, the field where you enter URLs you want to visit. But beta testers have nicknamed it the Awesome Bar and it is, well, pretty awesome. Enter text in the Location Bar and a dropdown list appears of pages from your browsing history that include that text, not just in the URL, but in the page title or the page's tag (see #4 below). The list even includes Gmail messages that include that word in the subject line. If you've already visited a Web page, there's a good chance it's useful to you. The Location Bar lets you very quickly search that useful subset of the Web.
3. Can't miss warnings
Lots of browsers have had phishing warnings before (including Firefox), but they've been wimpy. Usually they involve some part of the address bar changing color or some icon popping up near the URL. The problem is they're too easy to miss. I'm not looking at the address bar when I'm waiting for a page to load. I'm looking at the main well of the browser where the page will display.
But there's no danger of missing one of Firefox's new warnings. When you enter the URL of a suspected attack site, Firefox brings up a full-page warning. With a click, you can see a detailed explanation of why the site was blocked. Or you can just click "Get me out of here," which takes you to Firefox's start page. If you really want to live dangerously, there's a small link that lets you ignore the warning and proceed to the suspect site.
4. Better bookmarks
If you like a page, you just click the star in the Location Bar and it's a favorite. A dropdown box lets you name it, choose a folder to put it in or add a tag to categorize it. Bookmarks (and your browsing history) are now stored in a database, which means you don't have to spend so much time organizing bookmark folders. You can perform detailed searches of your bookmarks, then save that search as a special folder. Any new bookmarked page that fits the criteria automatically goes in the folder.
5. Whole-page zooming
If your eyes aren't what they used to be, it's nice to bump up the size of text on Web pages, as Firefox 2 will do. But it only changes the text size -- the other elements remain the same size. That makes for pages that look like The Incredible Hulk, with words bursting through the boxs and tabs that are supposed to contain them.
The new Firefox magnifies everything on the page equally. Everything remains in proportion, but becomes easier to read. And the next time you visit that page, it'll display at the same level of zoom.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Retailer GameStop discontinues Zune sales
GameStop will no longer sell Microsoft's Zune digital media players in its stores once it runs out of its current inventory, the company said.
The games retailer, which started selling Zune when the player was released in November 2006, found Zune was not "working with our product mix," said GameStop Vice President of Corporate Communications Chris Olivera in an e-mail on Monday. GameStop is primarily a video game retailer.
GameStop made the decision internally to discontinue selling the product about a month ago, Olivera said. News of the decision first came out publicly on a conference call last week to discuss the company's first-quarter 2008 earnings.
In an e-mail statement from its public relations firm on Monday, Microsoft focused on other retail partnerships rather than address GameStop's decision specifically.
The company noted that Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart and other stores continue to sell Zune, and the company finds "good momentum online and at retail over the last few months, including a great response to our recent spring update."
For that spring update, Microsoft unveiled that NBC would be selling content through the Zune Marketplace, Microsoft's online store that sells content for the player. The news was significant in that it followed a spat NBC had with Apple that spurred the television network to pull its content from Apple's iTunes online music store.
Microsoft released its Zune player as a competitor to Apple's enormously popular iPod. So far, however, Microsoft has seen only marginal success with Zune, selling more than 2 million since its launch. That compares to more than 10 million iPods sold in the first three months of this year.
According to its Web site, GameStop has 5,264 stores, with 4,061 of them in the U.S. The retailer also has 287 stores in Canada, 280 in Australia and New Zealand, and 636 in Europe. The stores operate under the names GameStop and EB Games.
The games retailer, which started selling Zune when the player was released in November 2006, found Zune was not "working with our product mix," said GameStop Vice President of Corporate Communications Chris Olivera in an e-mail on Monday. GameStop is primarily a video game retailer.
GameStop made the decision internally to discontinue selling the product about a month ago, Olivera said. News of the decision first came out publicly on a conference call last week to discuss the company's first-quarter 2008 earnings.
In an e-mail statement from its public relations firm on Monday, Microsoft focused on other retail partnerships rather than address GameStop's decision specifically.
The company noted that Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart and other stores continue to sell Zune, and the company finds "good momentum online and at retail over the last few months, including a great response to our recent spring update."
For that spring update, Microsoft unveiled that NBC would be selling content through the Zune Marketplace, Microsoft's online store that sells content for the player. The news was significant in that it followed a spat NBC had with Apple that spurred the television network to pull its content from Apple's iTunes online music store.
Microsoft released its Zune player as a competitor to Apple's enormously popular iPod. So far, however, Microsoft has seen only marginal success with Zune, selling more than 2 million since its launch. That compares to more than 10 million iPods sold in the first three months of this year.
According to its Web site, GameStop has 5,264 stores, with 4,061 of them in the U.S. The retailer also has 287 stores in Canada, 280 in Australia and New Zealand, and 636 in Europe. The stores operate under the names GameStop and EB Games.
Google beefs up Mini search appliance for SMBs
Google's Mini search appliance for small and midsize businesses has grown a new set of capabilities for crawling and categorizing documents, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday.
"Almost all employees store files on shared servers so other employees can access them. The Mini is now able to securely crawl and serve these file shares," says the post by Cyrus Mistry, enterprise product manager.
The revision also introduces document "biasing," the practice of ranking the importance of related or similar pieces of information.
"Many customers have told us that they want to tell us which documents are more valuable within their own companies -- for instance, published marketing collateral is more authoritative than the first draft," Mistry wrote. "Source biasing enables users to give us URL patterns and tell us if they should be weighted higher or lower."
The Mini now also enables users to rank documents based on their age.
Finally, Google has boosted the Mini's international reach, adding support for Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish in its help files and administrative interfaces, according to the blog post.
However, the posting does not list any increase in the product's scalability. It can index up to 300,000 documents, compared to its stablemate, the Google Search Appliance, which is geared for larger enterprises and can handle up to 30 million documents.
The announcement of new features stands in contrast to a recent rumor, reported by TechCrunch, that the company planned to stop selling the product and launch a new hosted search site.
Both IBM and Microsoft offer free, entry-level search products that compete with the Mini. Pricing for the Mini begins at about US$3,000, including two years of support and the necessary hardware.
A Google spokesperson did not respond directly to a query about the TechCrunch rumor, but said the company's "commitment to the Google Mini as the search solution for small to medium-sized businesses and smaller departments of large corporations is evidenced by this announcement."
The new features were prompted by customer requests and market demand, the spokesperson said.
While the capabilities are "not groundbreaking," and high-end systems have had them for years, they "do increase the functionality of base levels of search," said Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, via e-mail.
Customers wouldn't have revolted if Google hadn't added the features, according to Creese. "However, I do think it points to Google viewing the way to win in this market as giving good value for the money," he said. "While competitors are probably grinding their teeth, this is good news for the entire search market, as competing solutions will have to [improve] their feature sets as well."
The move falls in line with past practices, he added: "This is similar to what Google has done with Web analytics. In the past, free or inexpensive Web analytics [were] pretty bare-bones. However, Google Analytics has consistently added features that mean the entry-level solution is now quite full-featured."
Stephen Arnold, a search analyst who tracks Google closely, said the move shows the company has "confidence that sophisticated features are solid enough for toaster customers."
However, it is unlikely that Google plans to boost the Mini's scalability, because it wouldn't make business sense, according to Arnold.
"They never will," he said. "The logic of every box is that it has a hard limit."
"Almost all employees store files on shared servers so other employees can access them. The Mini is now able to securely crawl and serve these file shares," says the post by Cyrus Mistry, enterprise product manager.
The revision also introduces document "biasing," the practice of ranking the importance of related or similar pieces of information.
"Many customers have told us that they want to tell us which documents are more valuable within their own companies -- for instance, published marketing collateral is more authoritative than the first draft," Mistry wrote. "Source biasing enables users to give us URL patterns and tell us if they should be weighted higher or lower."
The Mini now also enables users to rank documents based on their age.
Finally, Google has boosted the Mini's international reach, adding support for Basque, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, and Polish in its help files and administrative interfaces, according to the blog post.
However, the posting does not list any increase in the product's scalability. It can index up to 300,000 documents, compared to its stablemate, the Google Search Appliance, which is geared for larger enterprises and can handle up to 30 million documents.
The announcement of new features stands in contrast to a recent rumor, reported by TechCrunch, that the company planned to stop selling the product and launch a new hosted search site.
Both IBM and Microsoft offer free, entry-level search products that compete with the Mini. Pricing for the Mini begins at about US$3,000, including two years of support and the necessary hardware.
A Google spokesperson did not respond directly to a query about the TechCrunch rumor, but said the company's "commitment to the Google Mini as the search solution for small to medium-sized businesses and smaller departments of large corporations is evidenced by this announcement."
The new features were prompted by customer requests and market demand, the spokesperson said.
While the capabilities are "not groundbreaking," and high-end systems have had them for years, they "do increase the functionality of base levels of search," said Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, via e-mail.
Customers wouldn't have revolted if Google hadn't added the features, according to Creese. "However, I do think it points to Google viewing the way to win in this market as giving good value for the money," he said. "While competitors are probably grinding their teeth, this is good news for the entire search market, as competing solutions will have to [improve] their feature sets as well."
The move falls in line with past practices, he added: "This is similar to what Google has done with Web analytics. In the past, free or inexpensive Web analytics [were] pretty bare-bones. However, Google Analytics has consistently added features that mean the entry-level solution is now quite full-featured."
Stephen Arnold, a search analyst who tracks Google closely, said the move shows the company has "confidence that sophisticated features are solid enough for toaster customers."
However, it is unlikely that Google plans to boost the Mini's scalability, because it wouldn't make business sense, according to Arnold.
"They never will," he said. "The logic of every box is that it has a hard limit."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)