Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

If you use yExplore, you may have noticed that it’s stopped working properly lately. This is due to a change made by Yahoo Site Explorer. The good news is it’s been fixed!

yExplore 1.6.1 has been updated and released!

The new version updates the domain URL structure to work correctly with the updated Yahoo Site Explorer. It also adds in support for newer versions of Flock and adds Netscape 9.0 support.

Enjoy!

The number of different applications that use Gecko are ever increasing. What’s Gecko? It’s the rendering engine that powers such programs as Firefox, Thunderbird and many more.

I guess it all starts with Netscape back in 1998 and possibly even before that when Netscape decided to make a technology to power their browser. It’s come a long way and here are a few applications taking advantage of this open source technology.

Firefox has the ability to save usernames and passwords for easy access later. It’s a handy little feature but it does pose a possible problem. If someone else were to use your computer, or steal your profile folder, they’d be able to access all your accounts. That’s a bit scary. However, you can set a master password in Firefox and protect yourself.

A master password will allow anyone to use your browser, but, if they came across a page that had a saved username/password, Firefox will ask for the master password before auto populating the username and password fields. If the user doesn’t know it, they can hit cancel and continue to use the site without access to any of your accounts.

I’ve never quite understood why people just leave a list of links to other sites, but now I do. Here is some news that I don’t have time to write about, but wanted to share.

A new preview version of Flock, based on Firefox 2, is out with many additional features. Note, it didn’t import all my previous bookmarks.

Seamonkey 1.1 is also out. It’s also based off Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 too. However, from the comments on Seamonkey 1.1, the real good stuff won’t appear until 1.5.

Flock wants to know what we, the users, think. In a post titled ‘Your Top 10 Issues/Concerns‘ they are asking people to voice their issues. Here are mine.

Blog on a stick is now 14.7% friendlier to our IE visitors. I removed a script that allowed IE to actually render transparent PNG’s with transparent backgrounds. It seemed to be slowing down the blog for those users and I didn’t like that. So it’s gone. Instead, you get to see an ugly background on all transparent PNG files. It’s not my fault, blame Bill Gates.

Of course, if you are using Firefox, Opera, Flock, SeaMonkey, Safari or basically any non-IE browser, you have no idea what I’m talking about because your browser rocks.

I can’t say I was ever a big fan of Google Reader, it was just a little to weird for me. However, the new Google Reader seems to be more advanced and much nicer. I’m actually quite digging the simple interface, nice layout and the stared or shared items.The only thing missing is browser integration. I’d love to have it work with Firefox’s sidebar. I like my browser integration to much to navigate away from Sage (or Flock’s feed reader).

Another thing I’d like to see are feed fav icons. Flock has them and it’s really nice.

I just found a sweet Feature of Flock. If you are posting to your blog via your blog’s admin or Flocks blog software, you can use Flocks built in Flickr browser, find a picture you want, and drag it to your post. Flock will write all the code for you without ever having to go to Flickr or leave your post window.

Plus, with the Flock photo bar, you can upload photos from your desktop, tag and organize them too. You never have to leave Flock or that blog post that you are in the middle of.

I’ve stumbled across exclusive pictures of Jeeves the butler back at Ask! Is his retirement over?

I guess the man has been interviewing around as I also spotted him at Yahoo!

Checking out Google, I found that they interviewed Jeeves but have gone with Mr. T. That’s right, only the best results fool!

By now, you may feel my exclusive pictures are, um, fake. Well, not everyone is happy to see Jeeves go. So, with a little bit of code, you can add Jeeves back into Ask.com. Or add Jeeves to Yahoo, Mr. T to MSN, Sponge Bob to Google or a banana to Ask. Whatever you’d like.