Download FireFox 3

Whilst Matt Cutts Blog is down, this is a mirror, dont get mad MATT!

A couple weeks ago, xkcd ran this funny comic: Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, suggested that if YouTube commenters had to listen to their comments read back to them aloud, it might lead to better discussion on YouTube. Some Googlers thought that was a pretty fun suggestion, so they did it. YouTube now has an audio preview so you can listen to your comment before you post it. I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature. Hat-tip to Fitz for pointing this out. Completely unrelated other than it’s a cool piece of software on the web: Yahoo is revamping their web calendar software.

Comic In question:

With the anticipation surrounding the Apple announcement today, there’s a lot of hype as to what might be released. I wanted to revisit some of the great mockups/concepts we’ve seen over the years on pending new Mac products, so what better way than to highlight a gallery of amazing pictures.

All of these designs were originally mockups created by users and some of them look very similar to the products we actually saw released, which I think is really cool. So what of the mockups we’ve seen in this runup around going to be the one?

To watch the event live, follow Engadget as they’re live-blogging the event today at 1 EST.

The EOO staff check their logs multiple times per day to see how many people are coming to the site, what they’re looking at, etc. etc. It’s amazing the depth of information that you get. One set of numbers that really sticks out is browser usage. They’ve had about 500,000 visitors over the past 3 months, of which 61% use Firefox, 23% use IE, and 11% use Safari. Opera and some browsers I haven’t heard about before make up the rest of the traffic.

In talking to other webmasters, it seems that their browser usage stats hover around 65% IE to 30 % Firefox. Those numbers mirror what is reported on the web as the national average. So what’s going on here?

Who knows, maybe this could serve as a wakeup call to Microsoft to put out a better product. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one. I am curious though, are other websites experiencing the same shift? Or is it just in the political realm – maybe just on liberal / progressive sites?

1. History, bookmarks and discovery: Nicknamed the awesome bar by readers, the address bar has turned into a 360 degree search buddy, checking your add-ons, downloads, recent sites, and bookmarks to try guess where you need to get to.
2. Speed and performance: Versions 1 and 2’s biggest flaw was that after a few hours we started to notice that the speed of our browser went down faster than a lead baloon. The Mozilla corportation offered a number of excuse for this ranging from out-dated code to users adding too many add-ons. Whatever the problem was, this has now been sorted and the browser experience is now better performance wise than what you would recieve on IE7, Opera, and other unknows.
3. Security
4. Native look and feel: For the idiots out there this means that it will be adaptable to the OS you are running, making it feel more like you are using the right browser.
5. A better fit for your workflow: You can now click on a mailto link without having to worry about outlook express being opened. You can now set it to GMail or Yahoo Mail if you prefer.

This picture has absolutley nothing to do with firefox, technology or the Internet.

But srsyly what the hell?