Firefox 3 – The awesome bar

A new update to Firefox has just been made available. An up-to-date version should now be at 3.0.2. Update soon if you have not been auto updated already.

Incase you are  still on the 2.x version for Firefox, you should know that the 3.x versions have greatly improved performance for JavaScript based apps (besides other things) and that means things like GMail, Yahoo Mail, Google Reader etc. that you use regularly.

It also has this great new address bar called the “Awesome bar” because it’s…awesome. It remembers the frequency with which you visit URLs and predicts the site you want to visit from just the first few characters you type in. It doesn’t even have to be characters of the URL from the begining. It can be keywords which occur in the middle of the URL as well. And it can be a word in the title of the page as well! And you have to do absolutely nothing to configure it since it is enabled by default and gets more accurate as you use it.

Awesome, isn’t it?

Yes, Google Chrome, Google’s official entry to The Browser Wars, has come along and it may have some fine features as well. But it’s just not mature enough for me yet. Most importantly, it doesn’t have all the addons that Firefox does at present. But if Google is backing it, Mozilla will sure need to work hard to keep the users that have migrated to Firefox from IE over the last few years.

What Google would now like is that Chrome improves to the point that full fledged browser based applications start replacing desktop based apps. Apps, which are not dependant on the OS or browser that they are running on. Apps, which result in revenue to Microsoft.

New feature suggestion for Picasa and GMail for easier exports

Got hundreds of photos from parties, birthdays, marriages and outings strewn around on your hard disk? You’re probably missing something if you’re not using Google Picasa to touch up and organize them. It has some very cool features and a really slick UI.

Well, here’s something I miss in it. Picasa 3 Beta is out but they still don’t have a feature which would allow exporting images in GMail attachments into Picasa web albums directly.

Picasa’s suggested way to get images from GMail is to download the pics to the hard drive, have Picasa scan them into an album and then upload them to Picasa (the tool for this feature is very well done!).

But I don’t see what could be keeping them from implementing a page in GMail that would show thumbnails of images grouped by email alongside a button to export selected images to Picasa with an album title. A little bit of intelligence can be added by providing a filter that searches for images that can be identified to be from a Digital Camera by looking at the EXIF header or whatever kind of metadata the image file has.

Why would this be a great feature? Because everyone I know seems to have many photos “somewhere” in their GMail account that were emailed either to or by them. Only a few of them use Picasa. If they see the easy-to-use feature suggested above, not only will GMail help them organize things better, it will also push adoption of Picasa with people.

I suppose this feature needs to be implemented (mostly) by the GMail team rather than the Picasa team.  I sure hope somebody is at least thinking about implementing this already. I, for one, would find it useful.

Don’t post onto your blog too fast to avoid losing traffic!

So I had this bunch of posts that I had written on Orkut about my training at TechM that I recently decided to post to this blog too. I broke up the entire content into several posts and made 14 posts in quick succession (in about an hour which involved formatting, tagging, posting). My advice, don’t do that!

I noticed that since the posts were made so quickly, RSS Feed readers like Google Reader, Technorati etc. seemed to have missed receiving several of the early posts I made in the bunch. From what I can tell, WordPress only seems to offer the last 10 posts to the Feed readers when their bot decides to drop by asking for new posts, if any.

Seems like Technorati didn’t even accept the last 10 posts! I see that they took in only the last 5 posts offered by the WordPress RSS news feed. So that’ll probably hurt me in terms of traffic sent to my blog (which isn’t much to speak of anyway…for now). This would be particularly bad for a blog which has a lot of people subscribing to its RSS feed to stay in the loop.

This could of course be an issue with A-list bloggers like Scoble who make many posts daily….but probably not as quickly as I did for that brief period. But then anyway, the feed readers configure themselves to visit popular blogs more often and, I guess, accept more of their new posts if offered by their RSS feed.

I suppose later someday in a week or two, Google will send its spider/bot to read all of the latest content and then, hopefully, discover the “missed” posts and maybe send some traffic my way. I’ll probably make a new post to index links to all the recent posts to help the spider do so.

I did think about deleting all the posts and then reposting them one by one in a less bursty fashion. But since some of the posts had already been received by feed readers, I decided to spare unsuspecting surfers the possibility of landing up at a page that is no longer around.

So if you ever need to make a bunch of posts to your blog, making 5 posts a day until you run out may be a better idea than making 25 posts in half an hour.