Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Put those thinking hats on and grab those browser based ideas you have been storing in your head, the Firefox add-on contest is open.
Firefox's annual Firefox Extension Contest, Extend Firefox, will give developers the chance to win the Ultimate Firefox Developer Kit which will include a trip to anywhere in the world, a Macbook Pro, bags and tshirts. Judges are looking for the next great web innovation that can really affect the live of many people and their online experience through a Firefox Add-on.
The contest runs up until December 31st 2007, after which a panel of judges will base their decisions on user experience, creativity, innovativeness and use of open standards to award 3 grand prizes, and 21 runner up prices. Winners will be announced on January 15th 2008. So fuel up, and get going! And don't forget to drop Download Squad some info on your Firefox Add-on creation! Check out the rules and criteria on the official website.
When we heard that AOL (this blog's parent company) was coming out with a new version of Desktop for Mac, we were pretty excited to see what they'd been up to since the last release five years ago. Now that we've had a chance to play with it, we like it but think it's still got a ways to go before there's a compelling reason to leave behind whatever browser / IM / email combo you're using now.
Though this new version of Desktop for Mac is still in beta, it seems stable. We tested Desktop on a new generation iMac and a MacBook Pro and it ran just fine on both. System requirements include a PowerPC G4 or greater, OS X 10.4 or higher, and at least 256 MB RAM. Surprisingly, Desktop only needs 60 MB of hard drive space (Firefox alone needs 52 MB).
ZoneAlarm has launched a public beta of a new security tool that basically puts your web browser into a sandbox. Visit sites you know are unsafe, check your bank statements on a computer that you know is infected with viruses and spyware.
We caught up with ZoneAlarm Director of Consumer Product Management John Gable at ShowStoppers in New York, and he told us a bit about the new product. ZoneAlarm ForceField sets up a "virtualized surfing" system, that prevents your PC from downloading malicious code from the web. It also prevents keylogging, blocks spyware, and scans downloads. There's also a private browsing feature that immediately erases all details of your browsing session once you shut down the browser.
ZoneAlarm ForceField is free while in beta, but will cost $30 when it's officially launched next year. The program works with Internet Explorer and Firefox (but not Opera), and is Windows only.
DrawAnywhere is a neat little app that lets you make flowcharts right inside your browser window, no download necessary. There's a slew of shapes, arrows, fonts, colors, and clipart to choose from to jazz up a boring organizational chart or workflow diagram. When you're done, DrawAnywhere lets you save, print or export your masterpiece as a PDF file or image.
While it may not be as full-featured as OmniGraffle or Visio, DrawAnywhere is just the ticket for anyone who needs a quick and dirty way to show someone who's boss.
In less than three years, Mozilla's Firefox has amassed 400 million downloads. The whole shift towards using the Firefox web browser was sparked in November 2004 by a Spread Firefox campaign in which tens of thousands of users spawned 25 million downloads. The buttons and banners placed on websites took only a year to grab 100 million downloads, and a year later 200 million.
Now, three years, an award for most recognized brand and 400 million downloads later, Firefox is helping people surf the web better, faster and with a friendlier experience. If you want to be part of the next 400 million users to download the virus and spyware free browser, you too can add some Firefox love to your blog or website.
Mozilla is jumping on the 'back to school' bandwagon to ensure that students get the most out of their online experience with a new "Firefox Campus Edition" download.
Announced last week, the Campus Edition of Firefox comes bundled with a few extras including:
FoxyTunes - allows you to control almost all media players, find videos, CD covers, videos, band bios all within Firefox.
StumbleUpon - browse the web and find websites, videos, images all based on your interests.
Zotero - collects, manages and cites research sources from within Firefox.
All these tools help students with productivity and mostly allow them to engage more with their favorite web browser. Check out the Firefox Campus Edition download here, and get set to get those computers ready. And hey, if you are already in school, download away and get on with the rest of your semester with Mozilla's help.
Intel is getting ready to debut a closed beta this month of their new mashup tool accessible to non programmers.
The new MashMaker was spotted at the SIGMOD conference in June in a presentation that was prepared by Intel and Yahoo Research. The gist of it was the creation of a tool that made it easy to create mashups from many different sources.
Intel's MashMaker will be a web based tool that makes it easy for normal web users to create mashups from live online data. It will be able to query and combine data that uses an interface that has been inspired by both spreadsheets and web browser. The spreadsheet side will allow for the mixing up of data and editing, while the browser side will allow for navigation to interested content, bookmarking it, and molding it into new widgets.
Just picture simply pulling in information from Google Maps, with Facebook, ebay, Digg and Twitter and creating a complex, yet easy to develop mashup, this is what MashMaker could be like. If it is as easy as Intel and Yahoo made it sound, this has the potential to be a killer application that a lot of people are going to be using to create some crazy mashups.
Surfing and buying online just got a little better with Mozilla and eBay. The two companies have just released a special eBay targeted version of the Firefox browser with the little help of an Addon.
The new Mozilla Firefox eBay edition has a few add-ons that make this browser unique:
Real time updates on bidding with a sidebar
Status alerts
eBay specific search
eBay account guard support
eBays goal with this partnership is to ensure bidders are always securely signed in, so users can stay on top of bids and actions with little effort. They also want users to always have eBay activities available on screen within a quick glance for notifications of immediate updates.
The new version is ready to download, and available here.
Could developers be moving towards Linux and handhelds? A new study says they are! Evans Data has published a study that found that Windows developers are dropping slowly, with 65% of software being written for Windows this year compared with 75% last year. The shift began two years ago, and seems to be drastically increasing.
Why this change? Web browsers are becoming capable of running advanced applications both on and offline, making desktop operating systems seem less important.
What are your thoughts, should developers keep their focus on browser/web based applications like Apollo, and forget about developing for multi operating systems?
Getting around Wikipedia could take shorter than you have been previously use to. For instance, do you know about the keyboard shortcuts?
Keyboard shortcuts aren't a well known feature for users of the popular online encyclopedia, but they do exist. I recently came across a post by Steve Rubel reminding me of this fact.
These keyboard shortcuts work with any browser, and on both PC and Mac platforms, and don't need to install any special Greasemonkey script, and will surely speed up your time when searching for useful content.
Depending on which browser you are in you will have to use hold down this combination of keys, then hit your access key:
Mozilla Firefox 1.5: hold Alt, press access key
Mozilla Firefox 2: hold Alt-Shift, press access key
Internet Explorer: hold Alt, press access key, and then press Enter
Opera: press Shift-Esc, then press access key
Mac OS: Control and a key
Check out a cheat sheet for the key shortcuts after the jump:
Understanding where your traffic is coming from is one of the major components to being able to optimize content for a better experience for users. Having a good analytics package is key, whether its Google's free Analytics or a visually stimulating package like CrazyEgg. Throw some confetti on it, and what do you get?
CrazyEgg is well known for their visual approach to analytics. Their free offering makes its easy for website owners to get a quick look at where visitors are clicking and how they are navigating through a website with the use of heatmaps, overlays, and now with some confetti. With the analytical Confetti view, users get a better understanding how visitors interact with their website. Visitor interaction can be sorted based on referrers, search terms, operating systems, browser, time before clicks and window size in a colorful easy to understand view.
Crazy Egg is a free analytics service, with an upgrade package available. Installation is through a simple javascript line added to webpages that you want to track.
Its official, Apple will be boosting its browser market share by releasing Safari for Windows. Apple announced this at the WWDC event in San Francisco this afternoon. It was speculated upon back in January, and is now a reality.
Currently Safari accounts for about 5% of users, all Mac. It is reportedly twice as fast as IE7, and 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. If the speed alone hasn't hooked PC users to test the Beta out, think about the user interface, easy bookmarking features, and private browsing abilities.
But most of all, you want to bring some friendly Mac attitude to your PC, check out the Beta version of Safari for PC now. Its available now for Windows Vista, and XP users. What will Bill Gates think about this?
LeapTag is a new way to discover all of the content you are interested in. Its way to read RSS feeds that enables users to locate news, blogs, books and other sources of material that match personal interests. However, it is not an RSS feed reader.
Users can sign up and download a browser toolbar. Through this toolbar you subscribe to tags and topics. LeapTag then scowers the web and finds links that you might like. The system learns by how much you like the items, and improves the results it lays out.
The download for this application is quite heavy, and it is still in beta form so things could change. Not only does LeapTag require a browser based toolbar with a new sidebar, but it also requires a Windows or Mac application to keep things running. For an alternative check out StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us.
How do you keep up to date with information from your favorite news sources when on the go? You can't exactly stop at every wireless signal to power your laptop on and connect; it just isn't all that productive. Maybe that's why Mobispine started up.
Mobispine is a feed browser that helps you stay on top of your feeds directly from your phone. To get started, users register and will get a link via SMS for the download. The browser is a pretty quick install. Unfortunately Mobispine does not have a list of compatible mobile devices, but does say that your device must support Java/MIDP2.0. Mobispine also provides some interesting stats as to the latest, most popular and highest rated visited feeds. Would you believe that PerezHilton.com was the most popular? People just can't get enough gossip, especially on the go!
Put those thinking hats on and grab those browser based ideas you have been storing in your head, the Firefox add-on contest is open. 
Could developers be moving towards Linux and handhelds? A 
