Onkar Joshi's blog

A new update to Firefox has just been made available. An up-to-date version should now be at 3.0.2. Update soon if you have not been auto updated already.

Incase you are  still on the 2.x version for Firefox, you should know that the 3.x versions have greatly improved performance for JavaScript based apps (besides other things) and that means things like GMail, Yahoo Mail, Google Reader etc. that you use regularly.

It also has this great new address bar called the “Awesome bar” because it’s…awesome. It remembers the frequency with which you visit URLs and predicts the site you want to visit from just the first few characters you type in. It doesn’t even have to be characters of the URL from the begining. It can be keywords which occur in the middle of the URL as well. And it can be a word in the title of the page as well! And you have to do absolutely nothing to configure it since it is enabled by default and gets more accurate as you use it.

Awesome, isn’t it?

Yes, Google Chrome, Google’s official entry to The Browser Wars, has come along and it may have some fine features as well. But it’s just not mature enough for me yet. Most importantly, it doesn’t have all the addons that Firefox does at present. But if Google is backing it, Mozilla will sure need to work hard to keep the users that have migrated to Firefox from IE over the last few years.

What Google would now like is that Chrome improves to the point that full fledged browser based applications start replacing desktop based apps. Apps, which are not dependant on the OS or browser that they are running on. Apps, which result in revenue to Microsoft.

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