We’ve been waiting for it since a while, but here it is, the new version of Firefox.

If you’re been living under a rock for the past year or so, Firefox is an OpenSoure web browser that innovates in many ways. It’s steadily gaining ground over Internet Explorer, who also launched their new version of their browser lately.

However, when I look at my statistics, most of you have not been living under a pile of rocks, as in the last month, 38% of you were using Firefox, against 40% for Internet Explorer.

You’ll then be happy to know that Firefox’s new features are

• Built-in anti-phishing protection
• A new, and good looking, theme
• Better tabbed browsing (whereas Internet Explorer 7 introduces tabbed browsing)
• Better RSS feed management
• Many extensions that were used in version 1 are now built-in Firefox 2.0
• And many more!

If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, go download it as soon as possible and start enjoying surfing on the Internet!

October 24th, 2006 | Internet, Technology | 4 comments

It’s been promised since a while, but Digg Labs has now launched.

They had connectivity issues following the launch because of the amount of traffic it generated, but they added more servers and everything seems to be running quite fine now.

So far, my favorite of their two tools is the digg Swarm.

Digg Swarm is a more lyrical view of Digg. Stories come in as circles with the title inside of them, and diggers “swarm” around these stories when they digg them. Every time a story gets dugg, it increases in size — so the bigger the story, the more active it is. As people digg more stories, they move from circle to circle, and increase in size. You might see enormous diggers moving quickly from story to story; those seem to be people digging without taking the time to read stories…

Stories start off placed randomly on the screen, but as they get dugg, their positions change depending on who’s digging them. Stories that are closer together are being dugg by the same users, and you can roll over stories to see these connections. The thicker the line, the more diggers in common that story has — which starts to suggest connections between stories over time. And selecting a story provides more detail about it.

Digg is expected to launch an API later this month, which will tremendously broaden the possibilities offered by the most lively news site around.

July 25th, 2006 | Internet | No comments