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.

Are you constantly checking or updating your Facebook profile? Do you like to be up to date on all your friends? Are you having difficulty finding a nice Facebook Dashboard widget? Stop looking and create one now!

It’s really simple. All you need is Safari 3 and a Mac. Here’s how to do it.

Ever since I upgraded to Leopard, my Safari has had an odd font issue. I ignored it for a while and even once thought it was coded that way on websites. Now I’m just getting more annoyed.

Check out the screen shot I took from wordpress.org. >

See how bold words are showing up in a weird font? I checked my appearance settings in Safari’s preferences and that looks OK. I’ve also used OnyX to run all maintenance scripts and that didn’t help either.

If you’ve ever wanted a good Firefox theme to match the look of your Mac a bit more, there are lots of developers out there trying to make this happen.

The best one, if you are actually on a Mac, is probably GrApple by Aronnax. His attention to detail is amazing. Other good choices are Pinstripe (again Mac only), iSafari and iAqua, my own creation.

However, there are many many more choices out there. Mozilla Taiwan has a forum thread going with screen shots and download links for many other alternatives. Some look pretty good and some are, oddly enough, not very Mac friendly.

With the release of the iPhone, many software companies are releasing iPhone versions of their applications. Even though you might not have an iPhone, there is still a chance that you can use them with Firefox’s sidebar.

Firefox’s sidebar is and odd place to load a web page, however if you manage your bookmarks, there will be an option to load any bookmark in your sidebar. The good news is that some iPhone applications can load and work in Firefox’s sidebar!

Apple’s Webkit is being built into all sort of Mac applications, however they all seem to share data and I don’t feel they should.

As an example, if you log into your Google account in Safari, Shiira is also logged in. And it doesn’t stop there. GCal, CSSEdit and Journler all use webkit too so you are automatically logged into your Google account.

This isn’t just a Google thing either. Works with Yahoo mail, Wordpress blogs and any site that has a checkbox for “remember me.”

I’m a pretty big Firefox user and I do love the browser, but there are a few things I don’t like. Basically the time it takes to launch or open a new window. It just seems to get bogged down every now and then. Safari on the other hand just pops right up. So, I’m going to try and switch to Safari and see how it goes. So far, I’m not to sure.

This week not one, but two big browsers made major upgrades. I’ve gotten a change to play with both and I think everyone is on the right track, some just a wee bit behind.

IE7 has been a long time coming. I think they said IE6 was released 5 years ago or so? Anyways, the new IE seems to be better. I’ve been running it on my Mac (via Parallels) and it seems to be on the right track. It’s got transparent PNG support (finally), RSS support, tabs and I think it seems to work with the CSS :hover property too! All steps in the right direction but it seems like it could make things worse before it makes them better.

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.

AllTheWeb, a Yahoo search engine, is now testing live search. Take a little of Google Suggest, some Ajax and of course good search results, mix them together and get LiveSearch. It gives you suggestions and results as you type. Pretty cool and fun to play with.

On the down side, no Safari or Opera support yet.