Well I know it is quiet silly, but you you bet it is a nice marketing stunt that works. Urging people to download Firefox 3 and be part in breaking a new Guinness World Record. But to do that you need to download Firefox now, or basically until 5pm UTC/GMT time.
Earlier they were taking pledges from people that they will be downloading on download day which was decided few days ago. Heck even I got into it and added a button in my blog to encourage people to do so.
Ofcourse Firefox 3 has a huge number of improvements, they claim its around 15 thousand improvements, watch the Firefox 3 features tour, which just gives you a quick look into the new Firefox. I was following beta after beta and I can confidently tell you that Firefox 3 is so much better than Firefox 2 but more importantly it is really better than any other browser out there, the only other browser that I can think that would be as good as Firefox is Opera which had their version 9.5 released few days ago. Sadly their release did not go with a bang like Firefox, only the very loyal Opera fans knew about it.
I can easily say that Firefox is the favorable browser by those new to Computers and Internet equally as to those who are power users and if you wish “techies” or maybe “geeks”. I am not writing a love poem about Firefox, every application has its problems, but judging with what is available now, Firefox is the best.
I will be writing few posts during the following few days about Firefox and its new features. So if you wanna be part of the Official Guinness World Record go and download Firefox 3 now
Just around a month after releasing Firefox 3 Beta 1, here comes Beta 2. Just like the first time, this is just beta, so only use if you don’t mind unstable browser and incompatible extensions.
One major improvement every Firefox user was looking for in this release is a solution for memory leaks and the huge memory footprint, and guess what, at last more than 300 memory leaks has been fixed, 11 improvements of the memory footprint and a new XPCOM cycle collector which should eliminate many more memory leaks.
Other new features include new download manager which allows you to easily locate the downloaded file and display where the file came from. A new autocomplete function in the location bar allows you to just type part of the title or tag or the address of a page to see matches from your history or your bookmarks. A new Smart Bookmarks folder allows you to have a look at the most pages you visited or the latest bookmarked pages or latest tagged.
In general Firefox 3 is just looking better and better with every beta release, to have a look on all the latest changes in Beta 2, you can read the Release Notes.
Google Docs, Zoho Writer and now Adobe Buzzword. Since the start of the rise of online document editors, I always asked myself, why those websites do not use flash instead of Ajax and I still don’t really get it. I always thought "FLASH" would be better and faster. I know that "Live Documents" will also use the FLASH technology.
Adobe Buzzword although came a bit late to the game, but there are couple or more things that makes it better than the others. Obviously being in FLASH is the first that comes to mind, it really makes it super fast. Buzzword is far more simpler and easy on the eye’s too. It works on any operating system, your computer just needs to have Adobe Flash installed, which is available in most computers by default anyway.
To read a full review click More…
As soon as you finish your registration you are quickly switched to the main page. In the main page you can basically either create a new document, open a saved document in Buzzword or open a document from your harddisk.
The beauty of Buzzword, being in flash, the menus are smooth and fast. And nicely organized, and on your first look you would get the wrong impression that BUZZWORD lacks features and options.
But you will be very mistaken to think so, just click on any of the icons and it will slide revealing various features. The picture below shows some of them.
We shouldn’t forget the pull down menus too, which also hold a number of different kind of options.
The "History" feature keeps track of different changes that you make on a document so you can switch between them easily.
In Buzzword you can also insert Pictures and Comments.
Document sharing, you can make a document private or share it with others in a very simple way, setting a role for the person you are sharing the document with. There are three roles. Co-Author where he can do anything with the document, Reviewer where he can read and comment on the document, and Reader where he is only allowed to read the document.
There are other great features also, such as Zooming, using a slidebar you can zoom the document in and out which automatically resize everything in it. You can also insert special characters, and Offcourse, the automatic word count is useful when you are limited to number of words.
Now that is all great stuff in BUZZWORD, but there are couple of things that I found negative in it, nothing is perfect in this world. Anyway, the first thing that bothered me is the limited number of fonts available, which are only seven fonts.
The second thing is what happens sometimes when you upload a picture, it took me three tries to upload an image, a message keeps coming up stating that "Buzzword could not contact the server to complete our action". I tried doing this using IE, Firefox, FLOCK which is Firefox anyway, and I tried it from my Toshiba G30 Notebook and My Desktop PC. Sometimes the image is uploaded from the first time, but the error window do appear quite often.
In the end I would like to say that Adobe Buzzword is a good, easy and fast Word Processor. Couple of enhancements here and there and it will defiantly become THE web REAL Word Processor.
Don’t even think of replacing your current Firfox with this, no, just give it time this is still Beta. I downloaded it yesterday and I didn’t want to quickly write any post just saying its out, i wanted to have a look at it first. Make sure its a real Beta. This is a real Beta release. Thank God.
Although you will hear praises all over the net of how great this version is, but still some things don’t change, yes you guessed it, MEMORY usage. Its still not fully dealt with, of-course I already told you before of an add-on for Firefox 3 that helps with this problem, but i was wishing that maybe the issue would be resolved directly by Mozilla. After using this beta for couple of hours Firefox ended up eating 825,636k of my memory (as shown in the pic below) . So the issue is still there. Am not saying that there was no improvements at all, of-course there are several enhancements. (Continue reading after the jump)
Firefox now uses the Gecko rendering engine, which makes things smoother, but not as smooth as we want yet!. In addition of security features that alerts you while visiting insecure websites and allows you to automatically virus scan your downloads with your Anti-Virus scanner (as shown in the pic below).
I am sure tho, the most beloved new feature by web surfers would be the “PLACES” feature, where it makes it easier to find websites you have visited recently or more often or even starred them for later browsing.
Just around a month after releasing 
Other new features include new download manager which allows you to easily locate the downloaded file and display where the file came from. A new autocomplete function in the location bar allows you to just type part of the title or tag or the address of a page to see matches from your history or your bookmarks. A new Smart Bookmarks folder allows you to have a look at the most pages you visited or the latest bookmarked pages or latest tagged.
Don’t even think of replacing your current Firfox with this, no, just give it time this is still Beta. I 
