The Mozilla Team has done a great job with the new Firefox 3.5 browser. FF 3.5 is twice as fast as FF 3 in terms of Javascript speed and even 10 times faster than FF 2.

Smaller Memory Footprint

One of the things I didn’t like about Firefox was the fact that having several tabs open would lead to an unbelievably high consumption of memory. These days are over. The XPCOM cycle collector continuously cleans up unused memory. Plus, hundreds of memory leaks have been remedied.

Awesome Bar

The location bar is now called the awesome bar for good reasons. Now you have Safari functionality inside Firefox. You don’t need to remember exactly the website URL anymore – just start typing some keyword and it will present you results from your browsing history. Great!

Offline Browsing

Websites that are Google Gear enabled (like GMail) you can surf offline without having to install any additional Add-ons.

Newest Web Technologies

These web technologies are now natively supported:

• CSS 2.1
• CSS 3
• HTML5
• SVG Filters
• Ogg Vorbis
• Ogg Theora
• Native JSON
• MathML
• Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG)
• Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest
• Microformats
• Web Worker Threads

Private Browsing

You can easily switch between normal and private browsing and you won’t leave a single browsing fingerprint behind for others to discover. You can even remove every trace of a specific site from your browser without loosing the history of the rest of the sites.

So don’t wait any longer and get your Firefox 3.5 upgrade here.

I can still remember the first days of the web when I we were using Mosaic and later Netscape as browsers. Although websites consisted mostly of simple  text and a sometimes even some images, the speed was terrible. Sometimes it took minutes to load entire pages. Nowadays we have tons of images on every single page plus animations, flash and other media types. The web got way faster in the last 10 years. Big companies started to invest money into infrastructure and ISPs evolved with their services.

Let’s take Google as an example. They can provide search results within a fraction of a second though there are quadrillions of data to be parsed an processed. Google can do that trick only because of their enormous server farms and highly streamlined websites. But Google wants to go to the next level: surfing the web should be as instantaneous as “flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine”.

Let’s make the Web faster

Google introduced a new Code section called Speed. You can find there many useful articles on how to optimize the performance of your website and web server. And if you have some ideas about improving the speed of the web you can post it there too. It’s definitely a good resource for beginners and professionals.

Here is a short introduction video made by some guys at Google:

I think the majority of mac users would say that spotlight is a really nice tool. But most of them don’t even know what cool tricks Spotlight can even do. In my opinion, Spotlight is one of the best productivity tools that comes for free (well, you have to buy Mac OS anyway).

Windows users can only dream of it. You would need to buy a lot of software to cover the same functionality. And performance I don’t even want to mention here.

So, what can we actually do with Spotlight?

1. Normal Search

Searching for some documents is pretty simple. Just hit cmd+Spacebar (Spotlight will open in the top right corner of you screen) and start typing the phrase. Let’s say we are looking for: script. And voila, we get a list of everything containing script.

2. Boolean Search

Now that we’ve got a nice list, we want to refine it a little bit. We don’t want to get results that contain editor. Spotlight comes with boolean search functionality. It works with the following operators: AND, OR, NOT. Now the important part here is to type these operators all in capital letters, otherwise they will be understood as search terms.

3. Type Search

When you are looking for a specific type of document, let’s say an image, you can use the kind command followed by a colon and the file type. In this case the command would be script kind:image.

Make sure that you don’t have any space before and after the colon. There is a list of types you can use with this command:

4. Calculations

There is a nice calculator in the Dashboard but you could use the space for another nice widget. Spotlight can to all basic calculations as well. It also can handle brackets withing the formulas. Furthermore it is capable to handle a few more advanced calculations too, like square root, power, PI, …

As you can see spotlight is more advanced than the regular Dashboard calculator.

5. Application Launcher

That’s my absolute favorite one. The Dock has a limited space to place icons. Of course you can extend it with a stack and put there even more icons but it’s so much simpler with Spotlight. Just start typing fire to show Firefox in the list.  Just think about how many clicks it can take you sometimes to launch a specific application.

6. Definition

Another nice feature of spotlight is that it can show you the definition of a word you type. Just hover the definition row in the result set and it will show you the definition of that word in a tooltip. Really nice.

7. Show in Finder

If you don’t want to open a document within Spotlight but show it in a Finder window you just press cmd and hold it while clicking the found document.

Spotlight is a powerful tool to speed up your work. It is included in every open/save file dialog box and helps you finding lost files in TimeMachine.