assume everyone knows already. over at mozilla.org.
Firefox is great… They’ve actually started budging the MS Explorer needle.
It will be interesting to see what Google’s up to with their upcoming browser! I would guess that after a few years of stagnation, we’re about to start seeing some innovation in the category again.
I started using Firefox a few weeks ago, actually. After using Explorer for the past 5 years, the additional features are quite refreshing. I’m really into the tabbed browser windows, because I usually have 4 or 5 open at a time anyway. I also LOVE the fact that you have a built in search area that you can configure to search using ANYTHING-- from Google to AllMusic guide or IMDB. Great idea. I’m also into the word search fuction that gives audible feedback-- in fact the whole concept of audible feedback in a search utility is intriguing to me. I DO miss however, how the Google toolbar for IE gave you the ability to search within a page using the same phrase you submitted in Google.
Obviously the “search” wars are pushing browsers back into development, but I’d really like to see more innovation in the bookmarking area. Even in Firefox bookmarks are about the same as they were back in the 90s-- linear and disorganized unless you spend the time to clean them up!
What if they extended the Page Rank premise to bookmarks? When you bookmark a site, it looks at what categories other Google users categorized the bookmark. As a side effect, they’d build a web catalog like Yahoo–but it would be more democratic and more up to date by design.
Ideally a bookmark manager should allow you to mine it in a lot of different ways, including chronologically or even spatially by referencing website. Wouldn’t it be neat for instance to see all of the bookmarks that you created as a result of hyperlinking to it from Core? This is closest to how our brains store memories anyway.
managing saved links is becoming an issue. i’m not too bad. but imagine there are link packrats out there. UI could use a breakthru here.
Now who do you think that would be? One of the reasons why I always used netscape/mozilla over IE was the bookmark/favorites control. Granted I have to organize it myself.
It would be great if there was a tool to help me do this. I would love something to clean up my links… autmatically remove the dead links.
I don’t tend to have the time/take the time to categorize my bookmarks, and even when I do, I tend to have a hard time finding the specific link I’m looking for within each folder. However, I ALWAYS remember what the bookmark was about, or something about it.
I’d like to see recalling bookmarks turn into more of a search-engine process-- bookmarks/favorites take on ‘metadata’ properties, so that I can treat my bookmarks more like I treat my MP3s. When I want to listen to a particular artist or album or… if I want to select from a genre… or era… etc. iTunes allows me to type in part of the keyword, and narrows down my collection accordingly. I could imagine this same process for bookmarks-- say I want to recall the sites I bookmarked on color trends, so I type “color” into the search window, and a list of my bookmarked websites that have to do with color appear. I’m guessing this would be perfect for a Google browser. Additionally I could see the browser acting more like an RSS reader-- periodically checking all of my bookmarks for dead links, changed content, etc.
As for browsing my bookmarks, I’d like to see it turn into more of a windows explorer/iTunes format, where I can click meta-data categories to order my bookmarks by various properties-- alphabetical, by date, etc.
automatic dead link removal would be a big help. some nice ideas here.
Moved over to firefox a few months ago and wouldn’t want to go back to IE at the moment. Hopefully this will shake up the broswer category enough for some true innovation to come back again.
My bookmarks have become such a mess that I wind up just using Google to find those sites again… The purple “followed links” stand out against the blue and further help me locate them (at least until I wipe my cache.)
Google just released a “desktop search” application that mines your hard-drive for files and also web history… I’m willing to be this is the start of the end of bookmarks as we know them. It looks pretty slick–even showing you thumbnails of the websites. I’ll have to try it out.
Thanks for the heads up. This might be the most convenient thing Google has done since, well, last month.
Be very careful of this tool. This basically takes a “picture” of everything. If you share a computer I would NOT recommend this. Someone could read your personal emails, etc. using this search tool. (I read an article somewhere about this but forget where. You might want to google it 
using it and liking it. but disappointed that theres no built in support for vrml/wrl. hoped that would be included.
Me too–love it so far. The Outlook indexing in particular is really helpful.
Did anyone notice that the conversion from Explorer to Firefox re-ordered your bookmarks via alphabatizing? That was a bummer, since I was very used to their previous chronological locations…
noticed that. but i was already alpha’d. havent looked for how to auto separate the folders from the regular links yet. that i didn’t like much.
cg, what’s the Outlook indexing? i dont like Outlook since it hangs sometimes, but use it since it came with the Office package. anything to make it worth more than the trouble i have with it.
It just adds all of your sent/received email into the searchable index.
If a message is shown as part of your query results, it also shows you a brief preview of the message. If you click on it it shows you the whole thing with the ability to pop it open in Outlook.
thanks, cg. that might be useful. will have to look at that. but for now, Firefox has a convert. pages load up faster. problems with some Java sites is gone. tabs are great when googling and pulling up multiple hits. layout is clean and easy to use. even loads up my business site without a hitch. not looking back. the rest are history.
Another idea for more useful bookmarking:
Your bookmarks are listed in a linear fashion, just like the current menu structures, however their locations dynamically shift based on how often you access them. For example, I’ve got a large folder of design/technology blogs, but over time I frequent some more than others. (Like, Engadget [daily] vs Josh Rubin [weekly].) I’d like to see the ones I visit more often (more useful) slide to the top of the list, and the least visited (less useful) slide to the bottom of the list. If that’s too visually confusing, maybe a set of icons that indicate the importance of the bookmark-- much like how “hot” topics in discussion forums have little fire icons to indicate that they are busy threads.
I have started recommending switching to Firefox to EVERYONE I know. If this become a grass roots phenomena then the idoits at MS will get the message they are shipping a POS and may start re-writing Explorer.
So far I haven’t found a single flaw in Firefox. And I don’t miss the pop-ups.