Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 Released
Mozilla Firefox 3.0 was a major hit but because of the lack of time some features that were originally planned to be added in Firefox 3.0 were held and now are going to be added to the next major release of Firefox browser that is Firefox 3.1 code named “shiretoko”, these features include Support for the <video> tag as defined in the HTML 5 specification,Support for cross-site XMLHttpRequests (XHR) which would allow more powerful web applications,Native JSON DOM binding a powerful feature for web developers, full CSS 3 selector support, bookmark tag autocomplete, bulk tagging support, private browsing mode for corporate users,advanced search UI, a lightweight tagging user interface, integration of a browser’s download history and last but not the least Visual Tab switching which adds Thumbnail previews for tab switching (alt+tab). The final release of Firefox 3.1 is expected to be released in the last quarter of this year or first quarter of 2009 and will run on Gecko 1.9.1 Engine.
The most exciting feature of Firefox 3.1 is the Visual Tab switching feature which has been inspired by Ctrl-Tab Firefox extension, when you press alt+tab on your keyboard you are shown thumbnails along with the titles of the pages which allows you to recognise the tab you want to open quickly just like the Windows Vista Aero’s Alt+Tab Feature, to revert back to the old tab switching you need to use keys Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down, To know more about this feature read this.
If you want to try out the new features you can download Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 from the Official Firefox FTP site.
Wow! Google now indexing One Trillion Web pages
The Internet is getting bigger and bigger and so is Google’s Index, According to the Official Google Blog Post Google is now indexing a mammoth 1 Trillion web pages, Yeah! even the people at Google got surprised, the Google bot has indexed 1,000,000,000,000 Unique URLs so far and this number is growing at a huge pace, The number would have been even huge if Google would have indexed the duplicate Content.
here is the exact excerpt from the Google blog post on how the indexing works:
How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
Google is the most used search engine on the web and I sometimes wonder how are their servers able to survive so much load whereas ordinary websites cant even survive the “digg effect” but now I get my answer that is distributed infrastructure, Google has many server farms all over the world and all the servers process the data and then interact with each other making the process faster.
So head on to Google.com and start searching from those One trillion web pages if you don’t already do!
Customize Compiz Fusion effects In Ubuntu
Ubuntu 8.04(Hardy Heron) comes with a full featured version of Compiz Fusion, but the main problem is that there is no way to configure these effects. To configure the different options we will use a tool called Compiz Config. To install it open up synaptic manager and search for Compiz Config
Once Compiz Config is installed, open it and you will get an interface similar to this:
The interface is pretty simple a checked option means the effect is enabled and an unchecked option means the effect is disabled, to configure individual effects like key bindings click on the image of the effect. Now I am going to show you some of my favourite effects and their output:
1) Fire on the screen: You can use it to paint text with fire on your screen, to use it press the key combo Shift+ windows key and left click and fire will be painted on the screen.
While the fire text is on your screen your normal desktop works and you can do all tasks such as browsing the web. To clear the text press the key combo Shift+Windows Key+C and the fire text will be cleared
2) Expo: Gives you a preview of your desktops that are enabled, to use it press the key combo Windows key+e
3)Wobbly Windows: a favourite for many people who use Compiz Fusion. It basically makes your windows wobble like water
4) Water Effect: Makes it rain on your desktop extremely good for killing productivity. To activate it press Ctrl+Windows key
5) Shift Switcher: Goes through your windows in a way similar to cover flow in iTunes. To use it press Windows key+Tab
6) Ring Switcher: Makes your windows form in a ring to use it simply use the Alt+tab because this plugin disables the default view of alt+tab
So start customizing Compiz fusion to your liking! 
Gmail Now allows you to read your mails securely over SSL
Do you use a shared Internet connection to access your mail? if yes you must be worried about your privacy because anyone can read your mail, but now Gmail team has added a new feature to Gmail that is now you can enable SSL encryption, yeah it was available earlier but it only used to be encrypted until you log in so that your password is safe but after being successfully logged-in it would become un-encrypted until and unless you put HTTPS manually to the URL (https://mail.google.com), now you can set Gmail to always use SSL encryption and don’t have to type HTTPS every time you open Gmail, but there is a disadvantage of SSL encryption that your Gmail inbox will load slower than usual because of the encryption as your browser has to decrypt the data hence slowing down the process but many people can live with it if their accounts are secure
To enable encryption just goto Gmail settings by clicking the link at top right corner of the screen, this feature is in the process of being rolled out so you wont see it just yet but don’t worry you will soon be able to use this feature
More here
See your Gmail Unread Mail Count on the favicon
Yesterday I found a cool new extension named “Badges On Favicon”, basically what is does is that it shows a image on on the favicon with the use of java scripts called “badgets” which can show any kind of number like the Gmail unread mail count on the favicon, it isn’t limited to Gmail only there are few more badgets available that can show Yahoo Finance Quotes, unread messages from Apple’s Mobile Me Mail, number of unread items from Netvibes, number of new results since the start of the Twitter search,new items iGoogle Reader Gadget and unread mails from Zenbe, you can also create your own badgets if you cant find anything interesting in the current badgets.
when you install this extension 4 badgets are installed by default that are Gmail Unread count, Google Reader iGoogle Gadget, Yahoo finance and Zenbe mail count, you can install other badgets from the developer’s site, once you install the extension it will start showing the badge on the favicon, this thing works great with Faviconized tabs extension which minimizes the tab to the extent that it only shows the favicon so that it doesn’t uses much space on the tab bar
Badge on Gmail Favicon
Gmail with badge Faviconized!
