My Life

So today I decided to install the new Beta of Firefox 3.5, Beta 99.

The new Firefox 3.5 Beta 99 has dramatic speed improvements of around 250% according to Betanews. For me in the first couple of minutes I noticed the speed increase in loading Facebook. Facebook is a very JavaScript intensive website and with the new Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has upgraded Firefox’s TraceMonkey engine which is Firefox’s JavaScript engine.

More and more websites are utilising JavaScript to create a better user experience especially Web 2.0 websites like Facebook, MySpace and pretty much all Google products

This is why it has become critically important for browsers to create/tweak their JavaScript rendering engines to load these scripts as fast as possible.

In the current browser war, Google Chrome 3.* and Safari 4 are the leaders of speed as can be seen in the diagram below.

Courtesy Betanews.com

For me personally there’s no going past Firefox. There’s just no competition. Yes it’s a bit slower than Chrome and Safari but the add-ons that Firefox provides makes life that much easier. I mean really any feature you can find on any browser will be made into an add-on for Firefox in a couple of days to a week max. You just can’t beat that.

The add-ons help make everyday tasks that much easier to manager and make Firefox that much better.

I’ll be running the new Beta at work to see how the new Firefox is coming along. If you’re a fan of Firefox and don’t mind running a Beta I suggest you try out the new Beta here.

Thanks,

Marat

Related articles by Zemanta

• Mozilla Releases Beta 4 of Firefox 3.5: Faster JavaScript, Built-In Geolocation, and More (readwriteweb.com)
• New Firefox hangs in limbo between beta and RC (thaibrother.com)

Image via Wikipedia

As the new Facebook has been launched (not pushed out to everyone yet) only a couple of weeks ago, many suggestions are hitting Facebook and many things are getting added and updated daily.

Today I have found two new features that have been implented. The first is the addition of the Current City information for your profile. Facebook has always had Hometown, which I think confused people because people didn’t know if that was where you were born or where you live now. So now we have Current City and Hometown as can be seen in the screenshot below.

New addition, Current City

The second addition to the Facebook’s profile page has been the Settings link which now sits beside the All Posts, Posts by <your name> and Posts by Others links. This new Settings link has the same features as the old Import link (which allows you to import things like your shared Google Reader posts, YouTube videos and Flickr photos) which use be on the old Facebook but now has some extra added features like allowing you to chose whether you want friends to comment on your stories and friends to post on your wall.

New settings link

Check out the new Facebook if you haven’t already and keep an eye out for the new features being added daily.

Thanks,

Marat

Image via Wikipedia

On Facebook each profile has a Mini-Feed which displays usefull information about that particular person, including their latests wall posts, added applications, shared blog posts from Google Reader and favourite YouTube videos.

You can view the entire Mini-Feed by clicking the See All link in the top right hand corner of the Mini-Feed, but from there you cannot filter the Mini-Feed by Google Reader, YouTube or WordPress from the right hand View menu.

However a simple way to do this is to click the the icons for each Mini-Feed post (the highlighted icons in the picture on the right). Clicking these icons will take you to the same page as clicking the See All link but this time will filter the Mini-Feed posts by that particular post category, whether that may be WordPress blogs, Google Reader’s shared blog posts or even favourite YouTube videos.

This allows anyone visiting your Facebook profile page to view all Mini-Feed posts related to that category.

Thanks,

Marat

Last week I got fed up of Twitter being constantly down so I decided to seek alternative services. I knew of Pownce when I just started using Twitter but I thought I’d stick with Twitter just for the sake of using the pioneer of micro-blogging.

I would notice Twitter would be down around once a week and that wouldn’t really bother me, but it had started getting worse, plus the one big problem I’ve always had with Twitter was the lack of an official Twitter desktop application. Yes you could download a 3rd party program to use with Twitter but they would never be as good as an application Twitter themselves could make.

Pownce on the other hand has it’s own desktop application made using Adobe AIR and it’s absolutely beautiful. I also like a few features that Pownce has introduced to differentiate them from other micro-blogging websites, these include link sharing, file sharing (files up to 100MB) and events.

I’ve switched to Pownce and haven’t looked back thus far. If you wish you can check out my Pownce or even add me as a friend.

Thanks,

Marat

P.S. If you use Pownce or Twitter and at the same time have a Facebook account you can use applications like rePownce or TwitterSync to synchronise your Pownce/Twitter messages with your Facebook status.

Recently a new feature was discovered on Facebook. It hasn’t been publicised by Facebook itself as far as I know but it seems to be a very interesting and exciting new feature.

The feature People You May Know may be found by clicking the arrow near Friends > Find Friends > People You May Know. Friends are displayed for you whom are “Found based on your existing connections”. Facebook will look at how many of your friends are friends with someone who you don’t have as a friend, if there’s a considerable amount of people then it will list them as a potential friend.

[Image by DownloadSquad.com]

Thanks,

Marat

This is the second time this has happened to me and I don’t really know what it is. Powering on the computer this morning I noticed neither Gmail Notifier nor Snitter (my twitter application) could connect to the Internet. Actually they still can’t.

gmail.com doesn’t seem to want to load which would explain Gmail Notifier and twitter.com doesn’t either which would then explain Snitter. But the weird thing is, Facebook doesn’t load either, and WordPress took one minute to load my Dashboard and another minute to load this “write post” page. Yet at the same time Google Reader is up and running while Google Calendar is down.

Like I mentioned above this has happened to me before, whenever Gmail didn’t work so didn’t Facebook and other large social/popular websites.

I’m finding this very frustrating and annoying actually. Half the websites I would normally visit in the morning are all down for unknown reasons.

If somebody knows the reason(s) behind all this I would love to hear it. Now I just hope I can post this blog

Thanks,

Marat

Today sitting here bored and trying to find things to do I decided to see if there was a way I could use my Facebook’s contacts birthdays in my personal calendar (on this occasion my Google Calendar).

A simple search on Google linked me to a website fbCal.com. fbCal is a Facebook application which generates and hosts an iCal Calendar for you on their servers. From there all you have to do is copy the link to your newly generated calendar and add it to your favourite calendar application.

Two seconds later you have a complete calendar with all your Facebook’s contacts birthdays. It’s as simple as that.

Thanks,

Marat

Yeah life is like that. I tried to come back to blogging but just didn’t have the will or determination for it.

Now sitting here looking at my blog I feel like I must persevere and start blogging again. Maybe not as often as I use to (once per day) but at least a couple of times per week. Lately I have been caught up in the micro-blogging community/craze, mainly Twitter. I have found it to be quite interesting. Twitter is mainly used to let others know “what are you doing?”. You’ll have people following your updates and you’ll follow others so that everyone will know what everyone is getting up to and vice versa.
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Well since I’ve been gone for such a long time I thought I’d make a new post and include a few new little scripts/extensions/tweaks I’ve found and started using for some time now.

First off I must note that in order to utilise any of the following scripts/extensions/tweaks you must use Mozilla Firefox. I haven’t said this enough but please by god don’t use Internet Explorer and just switch for Firefox already

Ok now that we’ve got that out of the way lets begin.

Greasemonkey (Wikipedia)

Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. As the Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script. ~ Wikipedia

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