eJoneClicks.com

If you have been keeping tabs on the official Google Blog, you might notice that a couple of days ago they announced the Google Browser Sync extension for the Firefox web browser.

Product Manager Brian Rakowski states:

…unifies your bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and persistent cookies across all the computers where you install it. It also remembers which tabs and windows you had open when you last closed any of your browsers and gives you a chance to reopen them.

Apple Mac OS X users already have this ability on their Safari web browsers with a little help from .Mac Sync (pronounced dot-mac-sync).  This is one of the many reasons why .Mac is appealing; the ability to synchronise your bookmarks (among other things) across any Mac that you log on to. However, unlike .Mac, Google Browser Sync is free.

I got myself an Apple PowerBook G4 early last year which was my first ever Mac. Having been a Windows user almost my entire life (with a tad of Linux here and there), I never thought it would change my web-browsing experience forever. Just like Windows XP has Internet Explorer as their default web browser, Mac OS X has Safari (since v10.3). Initial impressions were fairly inconclusive, as I was so used to Internet Explorer. Over time however, I grew more and more accustomed to it, especially with the inclusion of ‘tabbed browsing’.

Mozilla released an update to its award-winning, free web browser that fixes several security issues.

The release notes on Firefox 1.5.0.4 states:

Firefox 1.5.0.4 is a security update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

• Improvements to product stability
• Several security fixes

Security is always a serious issue (if you do a lot of online banking and purchasing like me) and I always keep Firefox up-to-date, but 1.5.0.3 was crashing on me all the time. I’ve been using 1.5.0.4 non-stop for two whole days now and it seems a lot more rock-solid stable.

A few of my friends asked me what RSS was when they saw my FeedBurner chicklet at the top right-hand corner on a few of my websites. I’m sure that most of you have come across it yourself on other websites. You’ve probably even heard or seen “RSS Feeds” being mentioned a lot in the online publishing world and/or blogging community (i.e. TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.).

So what is RSS? What’s so important about it? Do you need it?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and to simply put, it’s just another way for publishers to deliver/syndicate/distribute content. An “RSS feed” refers to the content being delivered, and is not commonly viewable on web browsers as it produces different code i.e. XML instead of HTML.