After a whole year of development Firefox 3.5 has finally been released.

The open source browser, Firefox 3.5 now features the new “TraceMonkey” JavaScript engine which has been designed to improve the browsers performance by up to 3 times. Html 5 support for video and offline storage, a new and improved Tab Browsing system and increased security are just a few of the new features you will find in this much anticipated release.

With over 270 million users, Firefox seriously packs a punch, this influential browser directly affects the internet and web technologies, how sites are designed and built and how users browse and view websites.

“We’re not just considering this to be an upgrade for users,” Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner told InternetNews.com. “We’ve also stuffed Firefox 3.5 full of free open source technology that will upgrade the Web.”

One of the most instantly recognisable upgrades is support of CSS web fonts. Developers will be able to utilise this technology and improve website design and user ability.

“When you think about it, Web designers have had to play with the same ten fonts that they could reliably ensure were on everyone’s computer,” Beltzner said.

“You can just say ‘use my handwriting font, here’s the font and it’s a 20kb file,’” Beltzner said. “So when the browser hits the page, we pull down the file and render the page in that font. When you leave the page, we dispose of the font.”

Download Firefox 3.5.

Article by Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: Firefox, firefox 3.5, mozilla, Mozilla firefox, new firefox, new Mozilla

Google Personalised search has not received much press recently but the service is very real and is still being developed and improvements are being made every week.

Personalised search results currently show and increase in search engine position based on user historical search popularity. So in other words the more a user visits a website from Google’s search results, the higher the site will rank within the search results of a future keyword search by that user. We have also noticed an increase in the ranking of pages which are on the same domain as popular search results. Personalised search also allows users to increase the rank of a page manually, to assign their own level of importance. The service can only be used while signed into a Google account. It is also interesting to note that Google is currently displaying a list of search terms which have been used by the personalised search user, to find that specific page and listing. This leads us to surmise that Google is recording this information but for what purpose?

It does seem possible that when Google has enough user data, from personalised search, it could potentially use the data to assign a level of importance and popularity to a website which could then be added into the Google Page Rank algorithm. This could potentially mean that for the first time Page Rank could be based on real time user generated popularity. But this does ask the question “Will this be the death of Page Rank as we know it?” and “Will Search Engine Results be different for each user or will Google amalgamate the data?”

Article by Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: Google, google pagerank, google personalised search, google personalized search, page rank, pagerank, personalised search, personalized search

Google UK Search seems to be undergoing a new period of testing. It has become apparent that the “pages from the UK” radio button, under the Google search bar, has been disappearing for periods of time. This has lead to wide speculation from within the Search Marketing community. Does this mean the end of UK Serps or are Google going to remove the radio button and focus on providing location based results using user IP addresses?

Earlier in the month Google were reported to have been integrating international search results into UK Serps as part of a testing process, it’s looking more and more likely that this was part of an initial test into the use of IP specific results. Although this is not new technology it does seem the most logical explanation and subsequently you can understand why the radio button would become obsolete and be removed. 

 If Google was to take this route it would still need to offer its users a way of being able to search Google internationally for products or services, unless international results were given less weight and UK results were served ahead of international on generic keywords. If this was possible it could potentially offer a much more relevant user experience while still allowing users to find international products by using country specific keywords.

We will just have to wait and see what happens, but one thing is for sure, something big is coming!

Article Writen By Creative SEO

Technorati Tags: Google, Google IP, Google IP Search, Google Local Search, Google Location Search, Google Serps, Google serps uk, google uk

In very popular move, Google have announced the launch of the Google Android Native Development Kit which will allow software developers to build applications that will run directly on the Native Android platform. Up until recently Android applications were written in Java and ran on the Google Dalvik Java virtual Machine. The native developer’s kit lets software run on Linux although Google sees this as a way of running component based Android applications and not fully fledged programs.

Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of these applications using native-code languages such as C and C++,” said Google’s David Turner in a Native Developer Kit blog post.

This move has caused Mozilla to start an investigation into building a new version of Firefox which will run exclusively on the Android platform. The Mobile version of Firefox is known as Fennec but insiders believe the Firefox will continue to use its existing brand.

“Developers are taking a look at the NDK to see if it provides the capabilities we need to bring Fennec to Android. If it’s possible, I think our community would be interested in doing it, because Android will be appearing on more smartphones with the capabilities to provide a good browsing experience,” said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of mobile.

Article by Creative  SEO

Technorati Tags: android, Android Applications, Android Apps, Android Firefox, Android Native Developer Kit, Android NDK, Firefox, Firefox Apps, Google, Google Android, NDK

Yahoo’s Site Explorer has had a makeover and is now sporting a brand new look and feel.

Site Explorer has been around for a few year and was designed to offer site owners a set of tools that would offer them better visibility into how their site was being indexed in Yahoo. Site owners can submit feeds and sitemaps, delete Urls and report Spam. Probably the most successful service is the Dynamic URL Rewriting.

Yahoo have now launched an updated version of Site Explorer which can be found on a separate Url, http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new . The New Site Explorer offers a more dynamic interface and has been designed to allow Yahoo to continue to add new functionality. It’s worth checking out the changes, let us know your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: explorer, site explorer, Yahoo, yahoo feed, yahoo site explorer, yahoo sitemap, yahoo webmaster, yahoo webmaster tools