Speed

I love speed. Whether it be on road or even while browsing with a dial up connection at home.

Offline support

I love to be always online. But in India that is not possible. By offline , I mean I should be able to sync my files with my Pc with an authentication. That is, I can access my files offline in different computers and sync them all together when I am connected. PcSync provided by G.ho.st is having this facility to sync your ghost drive.

Apps offline

As a Google fan I would love to try everything came in the name if Google. So I tried Goodos. Assuming that it would be a must have for Googlers. It was quite disappointing that it doesn’t come with chrome browser, but enough to see FireFox. It comes withGoogle Docs as office application. But I am not a big fan of it because I can’t even open word prosessor when I am not connected. So I want Chrome OS to be with offline apps. Docs, Orkut etc apps should be available offline and loads and save file from yourGoogle account.

Open authentication

As the main storage will be Google drive, it will be nice to see “Everyone can log in to any system with their Google account.” then access to local drives can be restricted for such users. This enables users to take their desktop to next level. Say “Take your desktop to everywhere.” I prefer ghost as Cloud based OS because I always have my desktop with me everywhere in a browser. But the problem is, entire desktop and it’s heavy script have to be downloaded every time. As Chrome OS will be based on cloud and apps are offline, it might load faster desktop.

Security model

Cloud is insecure in real life and also In Computing. When gmail is having downtime and Twitter hosted on amazons cloud is getting hacked, security is always a question. WhenGoogle docs was introduced, Microsoft asked “Which company will allow Google to host their business secret documents”. But earlier this year Microsoft announced their Office 2010 web app. So this means people aren’t really afraid of security, but they want technology to live.

You might have seen the bottom link of Gmail which shows your last logged ips and option to log out remotely. This one should be there in Chrome OS also.

Open API

People love Google because of their open model. Support they provided for open source community is one of the key point which lead Google to success in limited time. As Google wave is announced to be open source , developers are waiting to develop apps for Chrome OS also. As android app market is growing faster and iPhone app store hit one million apps developers will try their best in chrome app development.

Apple’s new terms and conditions and rejection of long waited apps like Google voice will redirect developers to a new Market for sure.

Windows application on Chrome OS

If any Linux version can run adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I will quite windows in the same day. I’ve been thinking of dropping out windows from my office from the day first. Virus attacks are pain for media agencies like us. Because we access direct FTP of our clients and what if a mal ware is found on popular client web sites! Male wares like win 32 salute are nightmare for php developers. They inject script for iframe in your code and once the script is executed by a visitor , it spreads the virus visitor Pc and inject the iframe in other php files on server.

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The most notable addition would seem to be the ability to browse themes from within the WordPress Dashboard. With the Theme Browser, you can specify the color you want, how many columns there should be, and fixed or flexible width. You can then select and install themes that match those criteria on-the-fly, without leaving the Dashboard.WordPress 2.8 also offers a re-designed widgets interface, improved speed, and has fixed a reported 790 bugs. The download is available here, and the WordPress team demos the new features in the video below:

Put simply, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking schema on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit

See Alexa’s definition of the Alexa Traffic Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

Why would you want to

increase your Alexa rank?

Webmasters, advertisers and ad networks use your blog’s Alexa rank as a gauge to determine the worth of a link on

ReviewMe, Text Link Ads and Sponsored Reviews are just three of the networks which base your ad selling strength on Alexa Ranks.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

Alexa ranking is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because webmasters or web savvy audiences are much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. I don’t disagree.

Alexa is a silly way to measure web traffic but unfortunately, in an imperfect world Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks when measuring the value of advertising on

I understand the defects of Alexa’s ranking system and I’m not going to go into more detail about it here. What’s primarily important to me is that the Alexa Rank has become a central element in site monetization strategies.

I’m not concerned with the utility and value of Alexa but it’s perceived

The increase in Alexa Rank was also partially due to the fact that I’m active in several webmaster forums, notably Digital Point which sends me some

How do I get started with Alexa?

There are two easy ways to start using Alexa. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit this page and download the Alexa Toolbar. If you’re using Firefox, download the SearchStatus extension which displays the Alexa Rank, Google PageRank as well as other useful features.

I highly recommend that you use Firefox and SearchStatus instead of Alexa toolbar, which I find to be more bulky and less useful.

Can one actually game or manipulate the Alexa Ranking?

I believe that there are methods which will allow you to easily bring an Alexa ranking in the millions down to the 100,000 level. However, bringing it past the 10,000 or 1,000 mark is a considerably more difficult process, because of the stiff competition among websites.

Some have adamantly stated that there are no proven ways to game Alexa, while others have claimed that auto-surfs and scripts do work to some degree.

I’m not going to take any sides because I can’t guarantee that auto-surfs or other artificial methods will have similar effects for every blog.

The easiest way to know to know if any of the tips mentioned below really work is to actually try them for yourselves and monitor the results.

20 Ways to

Increase your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters I know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources, which I have duly referenced at the end of this post.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To

Great link-worthy content will leads to an natural increase in site traffic and is an excellent way to passively

increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on
   your website. I did this a few days ago and receive a fair amount of clicks every day. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.
3. Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.
4. Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension
   installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.
5. Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.
6. Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e.
   visitors with the toolbar already
   installed

   ). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.

7. Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar
   installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit
   your website

   and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.

8. Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar
   installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
9. Use Alexa redirects on
   your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.rightnreal.com .  Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.
10. Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.
11. Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.
12. Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.
13. Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.
14. Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.
15. Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.
16. Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.
17. Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.
18. Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.
19. Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.
20. Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using with caution.

Resources on Alexa Rank

Several of the tips listed above were taken from Aaron Wall’s article on Alexa Ranking. This post by Aaron will also give you some insight on Alexa’s webmaster bias.

A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic, and the traffic drops off logarithmically. You can fake a good Alexa score using various techniques, but if it shows your rankings in the millions then your site likely has next to no traffic.

Alexa by itself does not mean that much, but it simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on. It can be spammed, but if a site has a ranking in the millions then it likely has little traffic.

Peter Norvig writes about Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design. He examines some problems with Alexa as a traffic measuring tool:

But one bias they don’t really comment on is the selection bias: the data would be good if it truly represented a random sample of internet users, but in fact it only represents those who have installed the Alexa toolbar, and that sample is not random.

The samplees must be sophisticated enough to know how to install the toolbar, and they must have some reason to want it. It turns out that the toolbar tells you things about web sites, so it is useful to people in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry, so it overrepresents those people.

Google’s Matt Cutts compares his website against Ask.com and explains why his website enjoys such an impressive Alexa ranking:

One possible source of skewing in Alexa data is a bias toward webmaster-y sites. Alexa shows how popular web sites are, so its natural that webmasters install the Alexa toolbar.

Some do it just so that their normal day-to-day visits around the web (including their own site) are added to Alexas stats. The net effect is that webmaster-related sites are going to look more important to Alexa

Marketing Scoop has some tips on improving the Alexa Rank. (Thanks Beth!)

A very long thread on Digital Point which sees webmasters having a discussion on how Alexa Ranks can be gamed or manipulated through scripts and auto-surfs. Worth a read.

There you have it… twenty ways to boost your Alexa Rank and increase your site’s monetization potential.

What do you think of Alexa? Have you tried increasing your Alexa Rank by any of these methods?

When you think of Web apps and services, Microsoft doesn’t immediately come to mind. Lately, though, the company has been rolling out a slew of them, including several that match or beat competing offerings from Google, Yahoo, and any number of startups you’ve never heard of.

Which of those Microsoft services are the best? We’ve tried them all, and we’ve selected five free hidden gems.You’ll notice that most of these services carry Microsoft’s “Live” brand. If you’re like most people, you’re probably thoroughly confused by the Live lineup, and by what Live actually means–especially since Microsoft has muddied the waters with the newer “Live Essentials” moniker. For the record, Windows Live is a central online location for accessing the Live services and applications. Windows Live Essentials is a subset of the Windows Live brand that houses downloadable applications, including Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Messenger, and others.

Windows Live SkyDrive

How’s this for a deal: Get 25GB of online storage, at no cost, with no strings attached. That’s what Windows Live SkyDrive offers. Just create folders on the site and upload files to it. You can share any of your folders with colleagues, as well. The site’s design is simple and straightforward.

That isn’t to say SkyDrive is flawless. You can’t use it as a virtual drive–it won’t appear on your PC as a drive, so you can’t save files directly to it within a program like Microsoft Word. That’s a minor point, though. You can’t argue with 25GB of free storage, especially considering that neither Google nor Yahoo currently has this kind of service. While Google is rumored to be working on a similar service called GDrive, Yahoo’s Briefcase provides only 25MB of space, and is shutting down at the end of March anyway. So right now Windows Live SkyDrive is as good as online storage gets.

Windows Live Sync

If you have more than one PC and you want to keep files and folders on them synchronized, you need this service. After you download and run a small piece of software on each PC, head to the Windows Live Sync Web site and tell it which folders on which PCs should stay in sync.

You can synchronize your personal folders as well as your shared ones. Whenever any of your PCs are connected to the Internet, they will automatically sync the specified folders with one another. In addition, you can connect to any synced computer from any other computer to browse through the remote system’s entire hard disk and to download files.

Note that unlike some of the fee-based sync services we looked at last year, Live Sync does not keep copies of your files in the cloud: It merely serves as a conduit between PCs. Since it involves no online storage, however, it puts no iimit on the amount of data you can sync. And, of course, it’s free.

Live Mesh

Here’s a free Microsoft service for people who do want to keep their files in the cloud. Though Live Mesh is more powerful than Windows Live Sync, it’s also a bit more complicated.

Rather than synchronize files and folders from PC to PC, you create folders in Live Mesh and then have all of your PCs synchronize with those folders. With this arrangement, you can access the files and folders from any Internet-connected computer. You have an exceptional amount of control over the synchronization, too–for example, you can choose to synchronize only the files modified in the last 30 days, or those under 500MB. Live Mesh supports remote control of any PC in your mesh, as well. So far, Microsoft has announced no plans to charge for storage–or to limit the amount of data you can store.

Microsoft researchers are working on a new browser called Gazelle which it promises will have some impressive new features and capabilities.  The firm released a research paper (PDF) late last week, saying that the new browser would offer significant security improvements compared to other browsers, including Internet Explorer. “No existing browsers, including new architectures like Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based operating system the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals,” Microsoft said in the report.The browser will change this tradition by being built on its own kernel, in effect allowing it to operate as an operating system. This means that Gazelle could intelligently identify traffic, and react to anything malicious.

“Our prototype implementation and evaluation experience indicates that it is realistic to turn an existing browser into a multi-principal operating system that yields significantly stronger security and robustness with acceptable performance and backward compatibility,” the researchers wrote.

The browser is only open for discussion at this stage, and there are no current plans for a release in any form.

“The implementation and evaluation of our IE-based prototype shows promise of a practical multi-principal operating system-based browser in the real world,” the researchers concluded.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 adds a revamped interface, improved component integration and advanced 3-D tools to the dominant graphics suite. And while some users will probably be able to get by just fine with the older versions, serious Web and rich media developers will find Creative Suite 4 to be a very worthwhile upgrade.If the main thrust of Creative Suite 3 was the integration of the former Macromedia products into the Adobe suite, Creative Suite achieves their complete assimilation. Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Contribute are now completely Adobe applications, and this is a good thing as they now integrate very well throughout almost all of the products in the Adobe suite.

And just what products make up the Adobe Creative Suite? Well, that depends on which of the six versions of the suite one chooses, ranging from the comparatively minimalist Design Standard version (which includes InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat) to the all-encompassing Master Collection. Any of the versions would be a good value. Even the $2,499 Master Collection costs less than half of what it would cost to buy all of the components individually. Most of the other suite versions represent the cost of just two components bought separately.

I won’t list all of the different permutations of Creative Suite 4 in this review, but readers can go here to see a grid of all the different versions and their prices. Users of previous versions will find that there are new components in several of the suite packages.

For purposes of this review, I went for the whole enchilada and installed Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection, which includes InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, After Effects, Premiere, Soundbooth, OnLocation, Encore and several suite integration components, such as the Adobe Bridge.

Often with updates of this type, there are few compelling reasons for users to upgrade. However, I was impressed after long use how many of the new features and capabilities in Creative Suite 4 proved to be very useful. Probably the biggest negative is the massive installation hassle and bloat of even the smaller suite packages. Plus, the hardware requirements have gone up and systems that ran Creative Suite 3 with no problem may have a tougher time with Version 4.

I’ve been a regular user of Creative Suite 3 for the last couple of years, and when I fired up Creative Suite 4, I was surprised by the major changes in the interface. For the first few days, I relied heavily on menus as many of the panels and tools I used had changed and new ones had been introduced. However, once I became familiar with the new interface, I found it to be intuitive and improved.

Integration across the many applications proved to be very good. In general, wherever it made sense for applications to integrate, they did. Whether it was saving components for use in Flash, exporting stylesheets for use in Dreamweaver or saving content in PDF form, Creative Suite 4 made it easy to move content around the different applications of the suite.

Rather than look at every application in the entire Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, I’ve decided to focus on the key features in applications that are of most use within the enterprise, specifically Flash, Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional

The product with the most changes in Creative Suite 4 is easily Flash CS4 Professional. In recent years, both Macromedia and Adobe Systems had been emphasizing the application development aspects of Flash.

However, with this release, Flash goes back to its roots with some very good tools for those who use Flash for animation and graphics.

By far the coolest new feature is object animation through motion tweens. Using this tool, I could create an animation by applying a motion tween to an object and then defining an animation path on the stage.

Also useful was the 2-D to 3-D transformation tool, which made it possible to take two-dimensional objects and rotate them along the x, y and z axes. All of these features were tied together with the new motion editor, which provided a richer, more capable animation edition tool than a traditional timeline.

With Flash CS4 Professional, it is now also possible to publish Flash projects as Adobe AIR applications, extending the point of entry for developers interested in the AIR Rich Internet Application platform.

Dreamweaver CS4

The product that is most affected by the new interface changes is Dreamweaver. The new Dreamweaver has more of a Photoshop-style interface with a lot of panels, and will probably represent the biggest learning curve for upgrading users.

But Dreamweaver CS4 also has a lot of new capabilities that make it a worthwhile upgrade for Web developers, especially those concerned about standards-based code and data integration.

The most interesting new feature in Dreamweaver CS4 is the Live View capability. While Dreamweaver has long had a WYSIWYG design view, it hasn’t really looked like what a browser would show.

The Live View mode is much more accurate way of creating pages and seeing just how they would look in a browser, complete with scripts and other dynamic components. The Live View is based on the WebKit browser engine, one of the most standards-compliant out there, and the engine used in the Apple Safari and Google Chrome browsers.

Another nice new feature in Dreamweaver CS4 is HTML datasets. Using this feature, users can build data-aware applications without using full databases. Based on the Adobe Spry framework, this makes it possible to use table-based data for interactive Web applications.

Dreamweaver CS4 also has good integration with Photoshop and can output content in the Adobe AIR format.

Photoshop CS4 Extended

If you’re someone who uses Photoshop for standard images and photos and doesn’t do anything too tricky, then you can probably get by without upgrading to Photoshop CS4. However, if you have any interest in working with 3-D images, you’ll want to upgrade to Photoshop CS4.

Nearly all of the most significant new features in Photoshop CS4 are in the area of creating, editing and enhancing 3-D images. There are some nice features outside this area, but none of them are in the “must have” category.

All of these features work well for direct editing and control of images, whether rotating and controlling 3-D images or directly painting textures on images.

However, this does come at a price in hardware. The new features make use of OpenGL and the hardware support appears to be limited. On one test system with a relatively hefty graphics card, I still couldn’t get many of the 3-D features to work.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 includes several smaller components that aid in the integration of the applications and group management of content. By far the most useful of these components is the Adobe Bridge, which works as a kind of digital asset management system for all rich media and content usable in the Creative Suite. The Bridge in Creative Suite 4 has seen some small enhancements, including a nice carousel-style review mode for browsing through media.

Also useful is Device Central, which lets developers working with any of the suite applications test their content and applications for use on mobile devices. The new version includes improved support for testing out mobile video and rich media.

And despite the global economic downturn, Flash Lite adoption among handset vendors is expected to grow strongly throughout 2009, Strategy Analytics said. The total number of shipments almost doubled in 2008. Shipments are currently running at over 40 million units per month and show no signs of slowing, proving that the right “carrot,” in the shape of the added functionality provided by newer versions of Flash Lite, can still attract attention, the market research company said.

“Version 3 and subsequent versions are setting the standard for high-performance Flash Lite applications, although there is continuing high demand for Flash Lite v2.0 and 2.1 in Asia,” said the report’s author, Stuart Robinson, director of the Strategy Analytics Handset Component Technologies Practice.

Stephen Entwistle, vice president for the Strategic Technologies Practice at Strategy Analytics, said, “High-end, high-fashion handsets like the LG Prada and Viewty, although supporting Flash Lite, are not ‘addressable,’ and thus do not support the highest and most desirable functionality of the technology, i.e., the ability to support third-party applications or Web browsers.”

Meanwhile, Murarka said Adobe would be showing an early preview of Flash Player 10 for smartphones and demonstrating it on Nokia Series 60, Android and Windows Mobile platforms at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, held Feb. 16 to 19. He said the company is working to get it ready for delivery by the end of 2009.

Also at the Mobile World Congress, Adobe announced the availability of the Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player, “a new, over-the-air mobile run-time.” Adobe said in a news release:

The new player enables developers and content providers to create Flash technology-based applications that target the latest version of the runtime, and directly distribute their applications with the runtime installer to millions of devices for a better on-device user experience.

The Distributable Player is available immediately as a public beta, and initially supports Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile devices, Adobe said.

WordPress.tv is also now the place to find all that awesome WordCamp footage that was floating around the web without a home. See the presentations you missed and get a peek at behind-the-scenes action. We call it WordCampTV.

You’ll also find slideshows of presentations made by Automattic employees and other WordPress gurus, plus interviews I’ve done with the media and fellow bloggers.

I hope you’ll consider WordPress.tv not just a support resource, but also a place to hang out and keep up with all the geeky goodness going on in the WordPress community. Tune in regularly for fresh content and updates to the WordPress.tv blog. Lots more is on the way.

WP Cache

To save your SQL server resources, WP Cache works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. It is a very useful plugin if you have a high traffic site or low performance server.

WP eCommerce

Want to sell stuffs on your blog? You must check out this WP eCommerce plugin by Instinct. It is an Ajax powered shopping cart, very easy to use. You can setup your shop in minutes through the Admin panels.

Intouch Ajax contact form

I’ve been using this contact form for over a year. It works very good and filters all the spams. Seriously, NO SPAM at all. It also allows you to customize the email subject, thank you messages, and adds addition form fields.

Secure and Accessible Contact Form

Another contact form by Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley. Although, I have never used this contact form before, but I’ve been hearing good rating on them. So, give it a shoot.

Sideblog

One of the popular WordPress plugins, Sideblog is the best way to post short notes on the sidebar. I use it for Best Web Gallery. It gives you options to define the sideblog category, how many entries to display, and whether to exclude from RSS feeds.

WP PageNavi

WP PageNavi adds a better paging navigation to your WordPress site. It is nice if you have a lot of posts because it allows your visitors to skip from page to page. I use it on N.Design Studio and Best Web Gallery.

Sociable

Sociable appends a list of the social bookmarking sites (ie. Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit) at the end of your posts and allows your visitors to bookmark. I used this plugin before and it worked very well.

Ajax Post Rating

WP Post Ratings adds a 5-star Ajax rating system to your posts/pages. It works like a charm. Hint: most CSS gallery sites use this plugin.

Ajax Comment

A very simple yet effect Ajax comment plugin, it checks if all fields filled correctly (so your visitors will never see the default error messages), and also makes sure to avoid comment duplication, and has flood protection capabilities as well.

Ajax Inline Comment

This plugin gives your visitors an Ajax live comment preview. It is great if they need to enter HTML tags in your comments. So, no more syntax errors in your comments.

Ajax Polls

As seen on Web Designer Wall, it adds a Ajax poll system to your site. It is very flexible with a lot of features. Layout is completely customizable via Admin panels. It also allows you to archive the polls. Highly recommended!

Gravatar 2 Plugin

It basically display a Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) of your commenters. In case you don’t know yet, Automattic (WordPress creator) just acquired Gravatar and the future Gravatar services will run faster and bigger sizes (up to 128px).

Digg This

Digg this is a WordPress plugin that detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story. When a digg is first recognized, it will send an email to the site’s admin.

Subscribe to comment

Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. You probably seen it already, it adds a checkbox “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” in the comment form.

Admin Drop Down Menu

I’ve been this plugin since my first WordPress site, it is a must have for every WordPress site. It saves me so much time and clicks. It basically makes your secondary menu activate on mouseover. For example, instead of click Write, then click Page; you can mouseover Write and click Page (this will save one click and one pageload). Big time saver!

Adsense Deluxe

Adsense Deluxe is probably the best Adsense plugin available on the web. Very easy to use: first you define your ad code through the Admin options, then insert a HTML snippet (“<!–adsense–>”) into anywhere of your post content, and it will automatically repace it with your ad code.

Search Everything

Default WordPress search engine doesn’t search metadatas, static Pages, etc. This plugin allows you to search everything in the database. Of course, it comes with options, so you can set what to search.

Ajax Calendar

If you use calendar in your sidebar, consider this Ajax Calendar. Your visitor can browse through the calendar without refreshing the page.

Breadcrumb Navigation XT

Although not many sites use breadcrumb navigation now, but if you want, here is one: Breadcrumb Navigation XT. It basically lets you add a breabcrumb navigation to your site.

Google Sitemap Generator

If you need to generate a XML compliant sitemap for search engines, Google Sitemap Generator is the best choice (supported by most popular search engines: Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and MSN).

Simple Recent Comments

Another must have plugin. In fact, it is in all my WordPress sites. It outputs a list of recent comment excerpt. You can install as WordPress plugin or simply include in your theme folder (no activation required). Simple!

Simple Tags

As of version 2.3, WordPress has a built-in tagging system, however with very limited features. Simple Tags gives you more features: type-ahead / auto suggestion tags, manage tags (rename, delete, add..), edit mass tags, dynamic tag cloud colors, and more!

WP Mailing List

Not sure if anyone would still signup newsletter since we have RSS now. But newsletter is the best way to inform your subscribers with new products and updates. I find this plugin will be useful if you run a WP eCommerce shop. It is not free (cost $14.99), but totally worth it (check out their features).

Category Tag Cloud

If you want to fake your categories into a tag cloud like what I did at Best Web Gallery, here is the plugin Category Tag Cloud. It is very easy to install and customize.

Paged Comments

This plugin is useful if you get a lot of comments on your blog. It breaks your comments into a number of pages. Imagine if your blog gets over a thousand of comments? You definitely need this plugin.

flickrRSS

This plugin allows you to easily display Flickr photos on your weblog. It supports user, public and group photostreams. The plugin is relatively easy to setup and configure via an options panel. It also has support for an image cache located on your server.

Theme Switcher

Theme Switcher allows your readers to switch among installed themes. This plugin is useful if you offer WordPress theme and you want to let your users to preview the themes. I use it to showcase my free WordPress themes (demo here).

Not enough?

If you still think these are not enough, you can digg more at:

• Official WordPress Plugins
• Plugin Database
• Bloggingpro plugin list
• Weblogtoolscollection plugin list

Researchers determined Firefox users are by far the safest Web surfers on the Web during an 18-month study. The study based its conclusions of safety on how often users of different browsers updated to the most recent version of browser software. Much of the credit to Firefox’s safety ranking stems from its ease of self updating by the software. Unlike IE which has to update via Windows Update, Firefox has a self-contained updating mechanism which translates into Mozilla users being far more likely to have the most up-to-date (and safest) version of their browser.

According to the study titled “Understanding the Web browser threat: Examination of vulnerable online Web browser populations and the ‘insecurity iceberg,’” 83 percent of Firefox users had the most recent version. Next, Safari users (65 percent) were likely to use the latest version of the browser. The study concluded that only 48 percent of IE users were surfing the Internet with the most recent version of IE.

Of course Firefox has not been immune to security flaws. Just hours after the most recent Firefox release last month, researchers discovered an undisclosed security flaw. Despite this difficulty, however, Mozilla’s browser has been increasing in popularity with a current market share hovering around 19 percent.

The study comes out on the heels of a warning from US-CERT that Internet Explorer, the most widely used browser, has some serious security flaws that can leave you vulnerable to malicious browser attacks. The security hole found by researchers report the IE flaw affects three versions of Internet Explorer: IE6, IE7 and IE8, beta 1.

Microsoft is still at a loss to fix the problem, because unlike most malicious software the zero-day flaw allows code to be embedded into the user’s operating system and shows no signs of any unusual activity, at least by current modes of malware detection.

Last week, Microsoft unveiled a part of its new security apparatus which could help combat the new threat, but it’s only available for IE8, beta 2 which comes out in August. The new IE8 will cross reference Web sites with a ‘blacklist’ on Microsoft’s servers and will prevent a user from visiting any unauthorized sites. However, unlike Firefox which updates its ‘blacklist’ several times a day and keeps a list of potential threats on the user’s computer, IE8 beta 2 will check with Microsoft’s servers every time it opens up a new page.

We will have to wait and see if Microsoft’s plan to deliver real-time threat information to IE8 will make the browser safer or just slower.

asked Valenin: “why did you create XHTML Challenge”?

I started this project because I wanted to have a place to check up sites quickly markup-wise. There’s a lot of CSS galleries out there, but not many look under the hood at the code and check them out. I plan to add a few other facts regarding the code of the sites challenged.

The site is created using a homemade PHP framework. The facts about the sites challenged are analyzed in the background after submission, and periodically after that. The thumbnails of the sites are taken from a 3rd party provider.

Valentin Agachi, XHTML Challenge

Thoughts…

The concept is fun and creative, however, there are areas that I think it could improve:

• The voting system could be enchanced by Ajax. It is very annoying because the page reload every time make a vote.
• The site is missing a commenting system. People like to comment, who doesn’t?
• The vote count should be based on user’s login, not cookie (and IP address I believe). This will prevent the same user from voting on the same challenge under different network or when the cookie is expired.

Check out some of the interesting challenges:

Mac OS X Leopard vs Window Vista

Del.icio.us vs. Digg

Facebook vs. Hi5

Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton

Firefox vs. Windows IE

Freelance Switch vs. Freelance Folder

Performancing vs. Problogger

With Reader 9, one click would play a Flash movie embedded in the PDF shown here.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The update is supposed to load more quickly than version 8, addressing the gripes of many users who felt that Reader slowed down Web surfing.

Adobe has described this release as potentially leading to a one-size-fits-all media player. Acrobat 9, released in June at between $299 to $699, will embed video and animation within PDFs.

Acrobat 9 document-creation software can embed videos and animation as well as custom-developed applications alongside maps that preserve geospatial data, 3D models, images, word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in common formats. The priciest, Pro Extended flavor of Acrobat can convert multiple video formats into Flash.

Security enhancements to the refresh of Acrobat and Reader include support for digital signatures and 256-bit AES encryption.

Adobe’s launch of an online word processor and conferencing tool via Acrobat.com in June enables users to comment and collaborate simultaneously on documents, and to convert documents to PDFs.

The Adobe Reader 9 download for Windows and Macs requires at least 128MB of RAM on either a Windows 2000 SP4 or newer system, or an Apple Mac G4 or newer running OS 10.4.11 or higher, respectively.

A: Adobe is providing Google and Yahoo with optimized Adobe Flash Player technology so that their search engine spiders will be able to find and index SWF content, including Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus and self-contained Flash Web sites.

Q: How does this work?

A: When a search engine spider hits a normal HTML page and encounters Flash content it will load it in an optimized Flash player on the search engine server. Google has developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way a person would, such as by clicking on buttons and entering input. The algorithm then indexes all the text it encounters through the navigation.

Q: How will the search experience change as a result?

A: The text that people see when they interact with Flash files, such as captions and introductions, will now be used when Google generates a snippet that appears below the URL on the search results page. The words that appear in the Flash files can now be used to match query terms in Google searches. In addition, the URLs that appear in Flash files will be fed into Google’s crawling system and be indexed.

Overall, more content will be indexed and search engine result rankings will change to reflect the additional content and its relevance. The snippets will give better information about the page on the search results. You can also expect search engine optimizers to figure out ways to improve rankings of Flash-based Web sites just like they do with HTML-based sites.

Q: Why is this necessary?

A: More than 98 percent of the Internet-connected desktops have Flash Player installed and Flash is hugely popular. Until now, the search engines were able to index some static text and links within SWF files, but much of the content was not getting indexed because of the dynamic aspect of the rich media files. Currently, all that content that was essentially invisible to the search engines will appear in the search results and the small amount of content that gets indexed appears on the search results page in jumbled words and code that are of no use to the Web searcher.

“Now, you are losing all the context of what content was near each other and running at the same time,” says Justin Everett-Church, a senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player. He likened the impact to the difference between reading the index of a book and reading the contents of the book.

This screen shot shows what results look like on Google for Flash content that is indexed without optimization with the new Adobe Flash Player Technology.

(Credit: Google)

Q: Do Flash developers or Web masters have to do anything differently?

A: No. However, blog site Search Engine Land suggested that Flash developers should still spend time on search engine optimization and create distinct URLs for each piece of content.

Q: Will searchers be able to see more Flash-based content composed only of images and video as a result of this optimization?

A: Not at this time. Only text and hyperlinks will be indexed. However, Everett-Church said “there is no reason why images and video can’t be supported in the future. It’s up to our search partners if and when they choose to do that, but it is a possibility.” A Google representative declined to comment on any future plans.

Q: Any other limitations?

A: Yes. Google doesn’t crawl all types of JavaScript, which is used to execute most of the Flash content on the Internet. Google won’t specify which types of JavaScript are executed, but said the company was working on executing all types. Adobe’s Everett-Church says: “This is our initial implementation… I think there will be some areas to expand on there, as well.”

In addition, text in all languages is supported with the Flash optimization, except for bi-directional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.

Q: When will Web searchers see the impact of these changes?

A: Google has already started rolling out the changes. Yahoo expects to offer improved Web search capabilities for SWF content in a future Yahoo Search update, but could not specify when that might come.

Q: Will this optimization mean Web surfers will see more Flash pages?

A: “This will change the way sites are designed,” Everett-Church says. “It will allow more creative ways of interacting with the browser…and sites won’t have to sacrifice searchability.”

Q: Can Google users disable the optimization if they don’t want to see more Flash results?

A: Sort of. Google users can go into Advanced Search Features and put a minus sign for “filetype:swf.” But this will only eliminate pages that are SWF extensions and not necessarily all pages with Flash embedded in them.

Q: Will Adobe be providing the technology to Microsoft for use on Live Search?

A: An Adobe spokesman said the company couldn’t comment on its work with other vendors, but said it is exploring ways to make the technology more broadly available. Microsoft has a competing technology to Flash, called Silverlight. A Microsoft spokesman was attempting to get comment about the company’s plans on Tuesday.

More information about the effort is available on Adobe’s Web site and through Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9982137-7.html?tag=bl

In the letter, Veghte wrote: “Our plan is to deliver Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista.

“You’ve also let us know you don’t want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista.

“Our goal is to ensure that the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward.”

Well, if Intel is anything to go by, it won’t be the migration from Vista to Windows 7 that will be the problem, it will be the migration from XP to Windows 7 that most computer users will be worried about.

Source: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/windows-7-date-is-confirmed-410016

1. Conform to better web standards

Internet Explorer (IE) is anything but a fully compliant web standard browser. Every other browser, including Opera and Safari is standards compliant. What this means is that IE users can’t “see” the page exactly how the web designer wanted it to be viewed. But due to the widespread, albeit declining, popularity of IE, more sites are designed for IE users which means that the site appears broken in other browsers. A newer version of IE, with stricter regard to web standards will save viewers, as well as web developers, countless headaches. Nowadays, a website appears broken in Firefox once in a blue moon, ie. never.

Nowadays, more and more websites are being developed within the guidelines of web standards, so IE users risk having a “broken browser” while other users are happily browsing. Microsoft should concentrate on adhering to stricter web guidelines. Their IE 8 Beta is a step in the right direction.

2. Let’s see some innovation in Internet Explorer

Graphical updates aren’t innovative, Microsoft. Let’s be honest. What new features have we seen lately and those that are actually useful? While Microsoft is scratching their heads, Mozilla has come up with the “awesome bar” in Firefox 3. You can search your entire browsing history just by typing a word in the address bar, and Firefox displays the most relevant results. It has saved me the trouble of having to type in common web addresses that I regularly visit.

Then there is the crash recovery feature in Firefox, which automatically restores your previous browsing session in case of a power out or if Windows crashes(which it does often). And the best thing that Microsoft has come up with in IE 8, is Activities and Safari-like Webslices.

3. Build a robust and more secure browser

Face it. If the underlying code is flawed, hackers will continually find ways to exploit holes, no matter how many patches you push out to frustrated customers. Although noting is perfect and even though a security hole surfaced in Firefox 3, but having a robust and reliable base from the ground up will go a long way in terms of security and reliability, and less development time spent on fixing and patches.

But is Microsoft alone to blame? It appears that hackers deliberately target IE because of it’s widespread popularity. That way, if they can successfully exploit a hole, they have greater chances of infecting a wide array of PCs. But that trend is soon to change, with Firefox’s increasing popularity.

4. Open source and a plethora of plug-ins

While IE may never go open source, but Microsoft can at least work to have a wide range of plug-ins for their users. Another reason for Firefox’s growing market share is that is is highly customizable with the tons of plug-ins available. With a simple download, Firefox can be anything you want it to be. A full-fledged and much better RSS feed reader or even a blog editor, which I use . And even the look of Firefox can be changed with themes.

It is impossible for a single company to meet the needs of millions of users and that’s where open source comes in. With the combined resources of hundreds of developers, Microsoft can ensure that its browser will appeal to everyone’s needs.

5. Have a faster and more efficient rendering engine

According to a PCWorld.com test report in May 2008, Firefox took a mere 3.61 seconds to load a page from the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark site. IE 8 (Beta) isn’t much far behind, at 10.2 seconds, compared to the dismal 50 seconds it took IE 7 to complete the benchmark. Even I feel a new sense of speed after switching to Firefox 3. Pages load much faster on my turtle-speed net connection than IE 7. Kudos to Mozilla for building a great and free browser.

I use Firefox 3, do you?

The best thing I did was moving to Firefox 3. To read a complete review of Firefox 3, I recommend heading to the Winsupersite. And if you’ve made up your mind, you can Get Firefox with Google Toolbar. Yes, I get a commission every time someone downloads.

Gates left Harvard after two years to found the firm that became global powerhouse Microsoft. He later received honorary degrees from Harvard and other universities.

After retiring, Gates will remain chairman of the Microsoft board of directors and its largest shareholder.

“I don’t think anything is going to drastically change the day he leaves,” said Matt Rosoff of the private analyst firm Directions On Microsoft.

“If he thinks something is important and tells Steve Ballmer, Ballmer will listen to him.”

Still, Gates’ bespectacled nerdish visage is an integral part of Microsoft’s image and his departure is symbolic, according to analysts.

“The challenge Microsoft has when the founder departs is remembering its heart,” said analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.

“At some point the firm has to take the essence of what made Bill Gates successful and make sure that is preserved. Whether it is a company or a person, once you’ve lost your heart there isn’t much left but a shell.”

Analysts say there are signs Microsoft has been struggling since Gates stepped away from managing operations several years ago.

The Windows and Office software on which its fortune is built have stumbled.

Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system released in January of 2007 has flopped with customers, many of whom are clinging to its predecessor Windows XP.

“They are in trouble on the desktop (computer software),” Enderle said. “Microsoft started as a desktop vendor and suddenly it is its weakness.”

Meanwhile, Apple’s Macintosh computers have been gaining popularity.

While Windows is still used on 90 per cent of the world’s computers, Macintosh computers using Apple operating systems have grown rapidly.

The software giant also sees its bottom line threatened by Google, which offers free online programs that compete with Office and other packaged software sold by Microsoft.

Microsoft failed in a recent bid to buy Yahoo for nearly US$50 billion in order to combine online resources to better battle Google in the internet search and advertising market.

Enderle said he didn’t see Gates’ fingers in the attempted takeover, and Gates was likely to have been among board members who backed pulling the plug on acquisition talks.

Microsoft’s server and tools division is its most profitable unit. It’s entertainment unit, which sells Xbox video game consoles and gaming software, has yet to make a profit.

“You could see Microsoft struggling after Bill Gates steps out of day-to-day roles,” Enderle said.

“A founder takes such a larger-than-life role and directs a company in very subtle ways that are often forgotten when a founder leaves. That gap, for a lot of companies, has been almost terminal.”

Battery life isn’t getting put out to pasture though, with 300 hours of standby, 8-10 hours of 2G talk, 5 hours of 3G talk, 7 hours of video and 24 hours of audio. GPS is also a go. Apple is using A-GPS, which supplements regular satellite GPS data with info from cellular towers for faster location. (WiFi data is also worked into the mix, which should give users a pretty solid lock on where the heck they are on this planet.) Unfortunately, as expected there’s no front-facing cam, and while its edges are thinner than before it’s still about a millimeter thicker at the center (12.3mm over 11.6mm before). Apple hopes to launch in 70 countries this year, with the black 8GB going for $199 and 16GB for $299 in black or white. (Both price points require a contract, of course.) Apple will be hitting the 22 biggest markets, including the US, on July 11th. More info after the break.

Update: Just bought an iPhone? Listen up: “Customers who purchased a 2.5G iPhone on or after May 27 and want to swap it out for a new iPhone will be able to do so without incurring an additional handset charge for the new device. They will of course need to turn in their 2.5G iPhone.” And for the rest of you, AT&T says there’s no way to buy it without agreeing to a contract. So sorry. More details here.

We’ve got our hands-on impressions right here.

Get the full roundup of iPhone 3G coverage here!

Other tidbits:

• It’s a teensy bit thicker. 4.5 by 2.4 by 0.48 inches (115.5 by 62.1 by 12.3 mm), and weighs 4.7 ounces (133 grams).
• Radios galore: Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), UMTS / HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100MHz), GSM / EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900MHz), Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
• A SIM ejector comes in the box, at last. That would be a paper clip.
• There’s no dock included, just a USB power adapter and dock connector.
• On AT&T unlimited iPhone 3G data plans for consumers will be available for $30 a month, on top of voice plans starting at $39.99 a month. Unlimited 3G data for business users will be $45 a month, on top of voice. There’s a minimum two-year agreement, but we’re not positive what that’ll look like for those currently enslaved to an AT&T contract — you could be looking at a solid four years of time if you just took the plunge.
• Apple’s new MobileMe service will be coming with the iPhone 2.0 software, bringing push email and contacts for all.
• Apple’s official page is here, and you can watch the new ad here.
• Available on July 11th in: Australia, Austria, Belgium (French), Belgium (Dutch), Canada (English), Canada (French), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland (French), Switzerland (German), UK, USA
• The rest of these are slated to get the phone this year: Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, C. African Republic, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Estonia, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Greece, Honduras, Hungary, India, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Macau, Madagascar, Mali, Malta, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Niger, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Senegal, Singapore, Qatar, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey, Uruguay.
• On the chatting front, developers will be able to ping a centralized push server with their apps, to keep down battery usage and app overload on phones.
• No mention has been made of MMS, video recording or built-in iChat. What gives, Apple?
• Yes, it’s in the FCC.

Unlike the massive price reductions we’ve seen in previous months, the May market was relatively stable when it comes to graphics cards. Some prices shifted slightly, but the biggest mover was, strangely enough, the Geforce 8600 GTS with a 20% price hike to the same price point as the vastly superior 9600 GSO. Needless to say, the 8600 GTS has been removed from the recommended list!

Speaking of the 9600 GSO, it has arrived in force. The interesting thing is that these cards are basically rebranded 8800 GS cards, so they don’t really bring anything new to the market, although they seem to be a little cheaper than their 8800 GSO brothers. Why, we can’t say.

These 9600 GSO cards are held back a bit because most of them have 384 MB of RAM; there are some 768 MB versions of the card out there, but they are harder to find, and their price is too close to the better-performing 9600 GT.

The really big news for June is the anticipated arrival of the next generation graphics cards, rumored to arrive in the next couple months: ATI’s R700 series and Nvidia’s G200 series. With no concrete evidence of anything yet, we can only report the rumors: the R700 series is supposed to be cheap and powerful, while the G200 is rumored to be even more powerful but very expensive. None of that means anything until we have benchmarks to see, but when these cards arrive, it will undoubtedly change the graphic card landscape really quickly.

Some notes about our recommendations

A few simple guidelines to keep in mind when reading this list include:

- This list is for gamers who want to get the most for their money. If you don’t play games, the cards in this list are more expensive than you need.
- Prices and availability change on a daily basis. We can’t offer up-to-the-minute accurate pricing info, but we can list some good cards that you probably won’t regret buying at the price ranges we suggest.
- The list is based on some of the best U.S. prices from online retailers. In other countries or at retail, your mileage will most certainly vary.
- These are new card prices. No used or open box cards are in the list—you might get a good deal on these, but they are outside the scope of what we’re trying to do.

Given that there’s no established Guinness World Record for software downloads, Mozilla is destined for the record book no matter what happens. A Mozilla spokesperson said the company is working with the Guinness Book Of World Records to verify the record attempt and will be furnishing 10% of the company’s download logs for an extrapolated final download count.

Justin Fitzhugh, director of IT for Mozilla, is confident that Mozilla will be able to handle the bandwidth surge, which he said is likely to be a fraction of the load Mozilla bears when it releases automated browser updates to its installed base of users. “We’ve scaled for this already,” he said, noting that in addition to the servers in its own data center, Mozilla relies on donated server capacity around the world.

Mozilla claims that it has 175 million users in more than 230 countries. The United Nations recognizes 192 member states. Presumably, Mozilla is counting perhaps a dozen countries with limited or substantial international recognition (Taiwan), several would-be countries not recognized by other nations (Abkhazia), and a variety of territories (Norfolk Island).

Over at SpreadFirefox.com, there’s an interactive map that lists by country those who have pledged to download Firefox 3.0 on the designated day. At the time this article was filed, the United States had the lead, with almost 38,000 promising to participate in the download event. In Turkmenistan, only six people have committed. Enthusiasm for the download record attempt is clearly higher in neighboring Uzbekistan, where 50 people have pledged to participate.

About two weeks ago, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 RC1, a version of the new browser deemed stable enough for public testing. Mozilla says the official 3.0 release will occur in June.

Firefox 3.0 RC1 is noticeably faster than version 2.0. It also handles memory better.

As of May 29, Firefox has 17.76% of the global browser market share, according to Net Applications. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer accounts for 74.83%, and Apple’s Safari accounts for 5.81%.

Exhibit A: The “Multi-Touch” technology that Microsoft plans to offer in Windows 7. As my colleague J. Nicholas Hoover reports, the technology is designed to allow users to open and close windows, launch applications, and perform other functions by touching the screen and using an assortment of hand gestures.

That’s uh, interesting, if it works; the history of failed direct input technologies is long and inglorious.

But, like Vista’s seldom used Flip 3-D interface, it’s nothing more than a resource-hungry novelty that will be used infrequently by people who spend most of their day on a PC. It’s simpler, faster, and ergonomically better to use a mouse for most functions.

Microsoft also previewed another gimmicky new function in Windows 7 called Concierge, which is basically a circular pop-up menu. Whoa, that’s worth buying another 2 GB of RAM!

So what’s the harm? Users not drawn to such bells and whistles can just turn them off, right? That’s only partly true. Vista requires considerably more processing power and memory than Windows XP, whether or not you use all its features.

And most users don’t want or all these googahs, especially if they require hundreds of dollars worth of additional hardware. In fact, computer users — in business or at home — in general want a machine that can handle word processing, e-mail, and the Internet, and that’s about it.

That’s why Wal-Mart’s $199 Linux PC sold out within days of its appearance on the retailer’s Web site. That’s why a story I wrote about a software tool that lets users strip all the gunk from Vista proved to be one of our most popular articles of the year.

Microsoft appears to be in denial about all of this, if early glimpses of Windows 7 are any indication. The company once again has adopted the kitchen sink approach to OS design. MinWin, apparently, was nothing more than a science fair project.

Microsoft’s problem is that its business model has come to rely on selling operating systems that cost more than the hardware on which they reside. It knows this can’t be sustained indefinitely, there’s too many new options in the marketplace. Apple is resurgent, Google’s eyeing the desktop, and there’s those Wal-Mart Linux PCs.

But Ballmer and company have apparently decided that they can sell a few more big fat operating systems until they get this whole Internet thing figured out (or buy their way into it).

It’s a risky strategy. (Otellini to Ballmer, circa late 2009: “Steve, the users are revolting!” Ballmer to Otellini: “Tell them to bathe!”)

The interface of Fireworks, originally from Macromedia, finally resembles those of other applications in the Creative Suite. Fireworks features compatibility with Adobe’s AIR, Flash, and Flex Builder as well as HTML. And users can export design mockups as high fidelity, interactive, and secure Adobe PDF files.

Soundbooth adds support for multiple track editing as well as volume matching across audio files. Users can preview the compression settings before saving MP3s. Speech recognition is supposed to enable quick, searchable transcripts of dialog content.

There’s no word yet on whether the next rough draft of Photoshop will be available for a free trial. However, Photoshop’s next iteration may become available in widgets, enabling users to mix and mash up some features with third-party content, according to a blog post last week by Photoshop product manager John Nash. We suspect that there will be more opportunities to blur the lines between the desktop, the Web, and mobile platforms within the next Creative Suite.

System requirements for the Windows trials demand a machine running XP or Vista with at least 512MB of RAM, 1 gigabyte of disk space, and a Pentium 4 processor. Mac users must have OS X version 10.4.11 or later on a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based system. Soundbooth, however, won’t run on a PowerPC Mac.

1: Hyperwords – All in the Right Click!

This is undoubtedly one of the best Firefox extensions available and my favourite too. It adds a huge number of options to the mouse right click, thereby saving you a lot of time.

For example you want to look up the meaning of a word, translate it to a different language, check it in Wikipedia, find the Whois or Google links info about a page, you get all that in the right click. You don’t need to open a separate tab and go to another web page. These were just a few examples and once you install this and explore it, you will be amazed to find the number of options there. See screenshots below.

2: Paste Email – No more repetitive typing!

The Paste Email extension helps you to paste repetitive texts in forms or emails with one or two clicks through the context menu / right-click. It is very helpful if you deal with a lot of emails everyday and have to type words like ” See ya ” or ” Thanks buddy ” again and again. This extension will help you to insert these repetitive words easily and save your time there.

3: Read it Later – Just a click to Save!

There may have been times when you are in a hurry and you want to save a webpage for reading later. Now adding it to the Bookmarks could be a little tedious and you just hope if you could have done it with a single click. Thats when Read it Later comes into play. Mark has already described it in great detail here.

4: Shareaholic – The easiest way to share!

If you are active in multiple social networks like Facebook, Stumbleupon etc and you want to share a link with your friends then going to each of the sites separately and submitting the links there could be quite time taking. Here the Shareaholic Firefox add-on comes into the picture. It creates a small button just beside the browser address bar from where you can easily share the link in multiple networks. You can customize it and it also supports Twitter and Friendfeed. It also helps you to email a page if you have a Bzzster email account.

5: Next Tab – Open links in the next tab

If you are a heavy tab user like me, then you will find this extension to be very useful.

Lets say if you have 10 tabs open and you click on a link in the first tab. You will find that the link opens at the end and you need to go to the end of the list to check the page. Next Tab firefox add-on solves this everyday problem and helps you to open the link just beside that tab. Simple and effective solution.

6: TinyUrl Creator – Easy Tiny Url Creation

If we want to shorten a long link to a short one we know we can go to tinyurl.com and do it from there. This add-on creates an option in the tools menu to easily create a tiny url from a web page. Now I know that you can use the tiny url bookmarklet too, but this is better. Thats because it also saves you from the hassle of copying the tiny url. It saves it directly to the clipboard. See screenshots below.

I hope you like these extensions and they help you become more productive with Firefox.