When I read news, I’m a compulsive ctrl-clicker on links that look interesting and that I want to read and write about later.  By the the time I’m finished, I have a very full window of tabs.  In Firefox I would choose to “Bookmark All Tabs”. To save the tabs, my only choice in native Chrome is to bookmark each tab separately.   That still won’t make them available to other browsers or other computers.

Evernote, the very powerful multi-platform free information storage and retrieval app comes to the rescue.  I just open a new note in Evernote and drag the contents of the URL bar from Chrome into the Evernote note.  It becomes a clickable link in Evernote.  When I’m finished, I can reorganize the links and annotate as to why they’re interesting and what I plan to do with them.  When I’m finished I have a  workplan for the day that can be synced via Evernote to other computers or used with any browser.

If would be nice if this also worked for creating links with Firefox, unfortunately when the contents of the URL bar from Firefox is dragged into Evernote, it’s not clickable.

We started writing Enquiring Mimes just over a year ago and one of our first entries was intended to convince you to start using the Firefox browser. Mozilla had, amidst great hoopla,  just released Firefox 3.

We gave you a number of reasons to switch if you were still using MS Internet Explorer — they’re probably still true today, but the landscape changed.  There are now two other competitive web browsers, Google Chrome and Apple Safari, both very fast and by comparison their speed made Firefox 3 seem very slow.

Our story has a happy ending. Firefox 3.5, a major release, has been sent out into the world and once again, Firefox is great.  They replaced the Java engine and it’s now as fast as the other guys and there’s a lot to like.  It’s nice to come home to Firefox without sacrificing speed and there are more great plug-ins than ever.

Here’s the top five best features of Firefox 3.5

• Fast – according to betanews.com, Firefox 3,5 is 251% faster than Firefox 3.
• Location-aware browsing – if you let it, Firefox can figure out where you are and give location information to sites you’ve approved providing you a more local experience.
• Support for new web technology -  This will be a benefit in the future as sites begin to use the new features like downloadable fonts
• Better handling of tabs and windows – easier recovery of mistakenly closed tabs and windows.
• Private browsing – Firefox will keep no records of your browsing if you head for the wrong side of the tubes.

Here was our list from last year for Firefox 3: (all still true, “great performance” has been regained)

• Secure
• Great performance
• Smart URL bar learns how you browse
• Smart bookmarks
• Smarter “Remembered Password” handling
• Good security and malware protection
• Use it on Windows, Mac and Linux

Download Firefox 3.5.

Related articles

• Top 5 Killer Features in Firefox 3.5 (mashable.com)

The reason I ask, is Google sent a team into Times Square in NYC to ask about browsers and found that only 8% of the folks interviewed actually knew what was a browser. Most seemed to confuse browsers and search engines.

Now this was probably a pretty unscientific sample but also probably fairly typical. I’m not sure Google’s point in this exercise but it comes off a bit like a sequence of Jay Leno’s “Jay Walking”.

Related articles

• Google Asks Common Man “What is a Browser?” Common Man Has No Clue [Video] (mashable.com)

Mosaic Browser Logo credit: CSA/University of Illinois

The Browser wars are heating up again after years of only minor scrimmages and few battles.

The original browser wars of the 90′s was between the giant Netscape and the well-funded challenger Microsoft Internet Explorer. The questions asked then was had Microsoft lost the Internet or would they be able to come from behind and create a credible challenge against Netscape’s market dominance.

When the dust from that battle cleared, Netscape was gone, having been acquired by AOL and Microsoft Internet Explorer has remained the leading browser for a decade. Microsoft IE, as it’s often called, reached it’s highest strength in the middle of this decade. It has steadily lost some of its domination to Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser, owing some of it’s past support, if not code, to Netscape. By May 2009, Firefox had gained 22.5% of the browser market after IE.

Recent years have seen gains by Apple’s Safari browser, originally on Macs and then last fall, another open source browser, this time in conjunction with Google.  An always credible, but lightly used on desktops entry has been the Opera browser which is used more widely on mobile devices.

Each browser has it’s own niche, Firefox makes effective use of “plug-ins” to add functionality, Internet Explorer works best on certain websites that employed Microsoft web software for building pages and since it’s bundled with Windows it is the default choice for Windows user, as Safari is on the Mac — Opera is more of a suite of Internet products including browser, email and newsreaders in the old style of Netscape,

Over the last 15 years of the Internet, the job of the browser has changed dramatically from being like a slide projector that retrieves and displays static images to today, when many applications that are used on computers are really services (read programs) that run in a browser.  These services tend to be written in a scripting language called Javascript, so the faster your browser can run Javascript, the faster is your browser.

With the release of Google Chrome, the battleground for browsers became speed, since Chrome was indeed very very speedy and Internet Explorer, by comparison, was very very slow.  Chrome achieves it’s speed by using a very fast processing engine for running its Javascript.

Firefox has spent a year readying a new update to its Version 3 browser that promises a new Java engine speedier than its current. Apple Safari has recently released Version 4 which they call, though can’t necessarily prove (or to be more accurate, since browsers do so many different functions, any browser-make can find something to measure in their product which is the fastest), “The World’s Fastest Browser.”

I wanted to take a look at what kind of user was tending to use which browser and how the browsers were doing at competing, so I looked at the current month statistics for three sites to which I have access, this one, Enquiring Mimes, Sansanpups.com, a dog/pet blog written by Sandra and Win4Lin, a Linux software product site owned by Virtual Bridges.   All sites do fairly well as far as hits and page views and have similar levels of traffic.

What immediately seems interesting is that while the competition for browsers is considered to be overall a race between IE and Firefox, when you look at specific user profiles, the results vary.

Sansanpups, the most general purpose of our websites with maybe the least techie users, does indeed use Internet Explorer over any other browser, but these are people who read blogs, that’s makes them a little more advanced as useres right there, so Firefox runs a good race with a 25% share. Chrome and Safari are neck and neck with around 10% each.

For the Linux software site, probably being open source and available on Linux, Firefox has more than 50% share, but with still a sizable share is IE at 30%. The Linux-crowd has little interest in Safari (not available on Linux or Chrome, not yet available on Linux), but really not that much more interest in Konqueror, a Linux-only browser.

Now you, dear readers, and I’m proud of you, for it, are the most adventuresome, putting the leading browsers behind you and mostly using using Chrome and Safari, the two fastest browser almost tied around 25% apiece. Also, admitting my own prejudice as I have in the past, these are my two favorite browsers because of their speed.

Future of the Browser War? Expect to continue to see much emphasis on browsers as a means of dominating the conversation between the big-software-three Microsoft, Google, Apple and the open source Firefox, with continued innovations by Opera.

While to call me a developer would be a gross misuse of the term, I’ve been using the browser ever since it was released last week.  It is so cool.  Well actually so fast!

The team admits it’s far from finished.  Among other things, it doesn’t print, it doesn’t display YouTube-like videos and there seems to be not much in the way of bookmark management.  So let’s give it a number and say it’s 75% done. What it does well is render a web page really fast and when I’m digging around the web that’s what’s most important to me.

The Chronium Blog warns you not to download this version unless “take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

It hasn’t crashed for me in about 20 hours of use.  The only gotcha for me was when checking a blog post and panicking when I couldn’t see the YouTube video, but I had been warned.

Anway, if you live life on the bleeding edge and are so Type A that anything faster is better, download the browser and give it a try on Mac or Linux.

As for me?  I’ll probably use it for most of my work on my slight aging Macbook because it just makes the experience so darn fast!

Anyway, it’s probably pretty lame but I like the product well enough to enjoy the commercials in their recent ad campaign.

If you share my appreciation for the commercials’ creativity, there is an entire series on YouTube made by independent studios.

Inbox Zero being a discipline  to process email as you go along and not keep tons of unread mail that will hold you a guilty hostage to not Getting Things Done.

Anyway, my heart was in the right place, I was about halfway through the message and then zap.  My Gmail web interface goes away and I get this message:

It’s all telling me that they’re locking down my Gmail account for up to 24 hours because of “suspicious” activity.  Now maybe they consider my cleaning up my inbox “suspicious activity”.  They give this list of items that might have caused the lockdown, 4 out of 5 I know I haven’t done.

#5 says your browser can be doing it to you.  Well that would be fine and dandy except I’m using Google’s own browser, Chrome.

They let me back into my email after about 6 hours and I get through another hundred or so.  Today the quest starts again and just as I was down to about 100 messages, zap.  I’m being unusual again.

I’m now waiting them out, again.

What have I learned?

The cursed lockdown only seems to affect the Gmail web interface.  If you already have an email client configured for IMAP you can continue to use your account.

As much as I have bored everyone by tireless pushing Gmail as the only true path for email, Google’s lockdown ability proves that Gmail has a troubling hold over your email that always hangs over your head like a pile of excrement.

As far as Merlin Mann?  I guess it wasn’t really his fault, except Inbox Zero does inject a level of guilt in your dealings with email that’s a pretty strong motivator for a Jewish-guy like me.

George Washington's Teeth

Even in our excremental economy, PCs are cheap.  Microsoft wants to run their entire advertising campaign on that basis, but whatever.  I often use a well-loved MacBook, but in the last year have had occasion to buy two PCs.  Bought a Desktop PC for about $400 and a netbook, mini-laptop for about $300.

After the immediate glow of geek happiness wears off (new PCs always seem fast), the question becomes how to become productive fast.  (I actually had to buy the netbook because we went away for the weekend and I forgot my laptop and needed to do some work).

What I do is connect to Internet and download these 11 apps, and I’m ready to go in about 20 minutes in a productive work environment.

Let me explain.

• AVG Antivirus – Sure you need anti-virus, the world is weird, but AVG Free does a great job and it’s, well, free.
• Google Chrome – Sorry, Microsoft Internet Exporer doesn’t work for me.  I can’t be productive with such a slow browser.  I install the new-ish Google Chrome, which isn’t yet full-featured but is extremely fast.
• Firefox – I also install Firefox, the major open source competitor to IE.  Firefox becomes very full-featured by use of plug-in technology.
• FreeCommander – You owe yourself something better than Windows Explorer.  FreeCommander has plenty of features for making your file and PC management easier.   The dual-interface alone is worth the download.
• Evernote – I store all my information in Evernote (and so should you).  Download the PC desktop version to sync to your web based data.
• Picasa - The best way of managing and editing digital images and videos.
• Skype – For free phone calls to other PCs, conference calls and video calls to other team members.  I also use it for video calling my family.
• Foxit Reader – A lightweight PDF reader, to replace the slow and heavy Adobe Reader
• notepad++ – A hardy open source replacement for Notepad.  Use it for any text editing work that you can get by doing without a word processor.
• Videolan – An open source video player that plays just about any videos you’ve got.
• Revo Unistaller – Finally install this utility to uninstall some of the crap that is often pre-installed on new consumer PC’s.  What comes quickly to mind is the trial version of Symantec Internet Security which is probably already installed on your new PC.  If you activate it, you’ll get it free for a couple of months and then will be nagged to death by the program trying to get you to buy the full version — just saying.

The rest of the apps I use:

• Gmail - Web-based email
• Office Suite – Either Google Docs or Zoho Office, both free and web-based.

Okay, you’re ready to work.