This post has been corrected from the original: Mozilla has no plan to ship Firefox 4 this year; references to that effect have been removed.

After the product road map roundtable I live-blogged Wednesday, I had a talk with Chris Beard, VP of Labs for Mozilla. Beard is working on the things you won’t see in Firefox 3, but will, if he has his way, surface in Firefox 4.

Beard’s philosophy is this: The browser needs to evolve. Beard believes the browser concept hasn’t fundamentally changed in 10 years. It’s still an isolated piece of software, he says. Mozilla Lab’s push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it’s running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications.

At the moment, these are two separate projects Mozilla is running to push out the edges of the browser: Prism and Weave.

Prism

Prism is Mozilla’s shot at busting apps out of the browser. Part of the Prism project is making the browsing core available to apps developers so they can build products like Zimbra Desktop (review) that are essentially Web apps, but that don’t look like it.

The dream is to be able to take any Web site or app and turn it into an app that can run directly from the desktop. A very big part of this initiative is to make sites/apps work when they are not connected to the Internet. HTML 5 (the next version of the basic standard for the encoding of Web sites) includes explicit support for local, offline resources.

HTML 5 and Prism will, Mozilla execs say, render Google Gears obsolete. Not to mention other important, and proprietary, Web app platforms that are already in production, like Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight (What is Silverlight?).

Weave

Weave extends the browser in the other direction: Not toward the desktop, but instead into the Internet. Mozilla wants an individual’s browsing experience to stay with them no matter what machine they are on. That means synchronizing bookmarks, home pages, favorites, and passwords to an online service that the user can attach to when he or she fires up the browser. As more people move between browsing machines (their laptop and their mobile phone, for example, or between different PCs), this will become more important.

Firefox 3 is laying the groundwork for this. It has a new transactional database that stores user preferences and favorites. However, it won’t be used for cross-browser syncing in version3; Beard hopes this extension to the database is rolled out in Firefox 4.

Firefox 3 users will, though, experience some online services being fed into their browser. For example, Mozilla will update all running browsers every 30 minutes with malware signatures, to stave off drive-by downloads and phishing scams.

Beard wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the “awesome bar,” which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He’s looking to extend on this with a “linguistic user interface” that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar. Beard pointed me towards Quicksilver and Enso as products he’s cribbing from.

Beard said the Labs are playing with other “crazy ideas,” but that Prism and Weave technologies are are being targeted at the next version of Firefox.

Firefox 4 Screenshots Read the rest of this entry »

Scour is an interesting search engine that not only provides good search results but also pays it’s user for searching. Earlier known as Aftervote.com, Scour’s purpose is to bridge the gap between searchers and relevant results. So, it pulls relevant results from the three major search engine, Google, Yahoo and MSN and enables it’s members to vote and comment for the search results. These votes determines the ranking of websites in Scour’s search results page and provides the most relevant results as efficiently as possible.

Scour provides a good platform for the

users to vote and comment on relevancy of search results. This also helps

users in connecting with one another, while creating a true social search community. This will definitely help them to meet the needs of today’s internet searchers.

How it Works?

The idea is based on a simple principle: “Search socially and get the most from your favorite search engine!”

• Hit the link below to join for free and we will both get points. You get 25% of the points your friends make. Please do not misunderstand, I will be rewarded with 25% of the points you will be earning. You will not lose 25% of your points. http://scour.com/invite/matrix4495
• After you join, start searching and you will get results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN on one page. This is really cool!
• You earn the following number of points for each action: 1=Search, 2=Vote, 3=Comment
• When you have earned enough points you can redeem them for Visa gift cards sent directly to you. Excellent, right?

I know you will like it. Join my search for blogging http://scour.com/invite/matrix4495

TrafficG, Five Excellent Services, One Awesome Site!

• SuperSurf Service. (Traffic Exchange)
• SuperStart Service. (Start Page Exchange)
• Exchanger Service. (Powerful Banner Exchange)
• My Promotions Service.
• Directory and Search Engine.

SuperSurf Service

The SuperSurf Traffic Exchange Service allows you to visit members sites, and in return other members visit your site, each site you visit gains you one visitor back to your site. Yes 1:1 Exchange rate…. This allows you to earn a visitor to your site every 30 seconds…

SuperStart Service

So how about driving traffic to your site by opening your browser, something you may do 100’s of times a day? It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what the SuperStart does for you totally FREE! We give you a unique URL to set as your browsers startpage. When you open your browser, we direct you to other members websites, which in turn gives you visitors back to yours!
You will also get 10% of all the traffic generated by 5 referral levels. Each time your referrals open a new browser window your account will be credited.

The following table shows you how the hit’s can soon add up to really big numbers..

SuperStart Service Example
Referral Level	Your Referrals	Credit Rate	Browser Starts	Your Daily Visitors
You	1	50%	20	10
One	20	10%	400	40
Two	80	10%	1600	160
Three	320	10%	6400	640
Four	1280	10%	25600	2560
Five	5120	10%	102400	10240
Total visitors to your web site each day :				13650

Exchanger Service

The Banner Exchanger and Banner Exchange, are the ultimate tools on the net to gain your site awesome banner impressions! For every two banners you view (2:1), you earn one exchange credit. So your thinking “I can get a 2:1 banner exchange for my website anywhere!”. True but can you get a 2:1 banner exchange that offers you constant credit from THREE levels of referrals!? Can you get a 2:1 banner exchange that allows you to earn 1 banner impression per minute!? Can you get a 2:1 banner exchange that allows you to earn 1 banner impression every 4 minutes from your direct referrals usage!? Can you get a 2:1 banner exchange that allows you to earn banner impressions even if you don’t have a web site?

My Promotions Service

Imagine getting your sites listed on thousands of promotional pages! Do you want to increase the number of reciprocal links to your site? Generate free banner impressions? Want a free promotional page that lists all your sites, all in one place? Well this is just what this service does, need I say more…

Directory and Search Engine

A Free listing in the TrafficG directory and search engine is an excellent way to increase your sites internet exposure.

And the cost of all these excellent services?

Nothing, yes nothing, all our services are absolutely 100% FREE and just to top it off we also give you extra visitors for referring other members to TrafficG. When you refer a person to TrafficG, we add 50 to your account. When that person refers someone to us, we give you 10 more credits. When they refer someone to us, we add another 5 credits to your account!

There are no limits to the amount of people you can refer, so no limits on how many bonus hits you can earn!

If you’ve run your own web site or blog for any time at all then you’ve undoubtedly gone to your site at one point or another only to find it’s not online! Like most of us you probably called your web hosting company (you did get one with a technical support phone number didn’t you?) and they started working on the problem.

The only trouble is how long was your site down? How many visitors did you loose? How many sales were lost? The questions are endless.

But even if your site is online it may be too slow for people to use at times throughout the day. How would you know this? Well truthfully you wouldn’t but what you would see is a decrease in traffic. You might think you’re loosing visitors when really it’s just that your web site is too slow.

These questions plagued me for some time about my site. The good news is there are services that will send you an email (or text message to your cell phone) the minute your web site goes down. They will also measure how fast your site is throughout the day and give you nice graphical reports of how your site is performing hour-by-hour and day-by-day.

I recently came across such a service called InternetUptimeMonitor.com. They do all of the above and I’ve been pretty pleased with their service on my site. It gives me a lot of piece of mind knowing that throughout the day if my site goes down I’ll get an email.

If I have a day with low traffic do you know the first place I check? You got it—InternetUptimeMonitor.com. Why? Because maybe my site was really slow and that’s why my traffic was down!

InternetUptimeMonitor.com offers two flavors of their service Free and Paid (for Businesses). The differences between the two accounts are how often they check your site, if they watch it from around the world or just the USA, and if you get cell-phone text messages alerts or just email alerts.

If you’re a business that’s making any money at all online I’d recommend their business (Gold membership) because it costs you too much money to have your site down. If you’ve got a blog and use it for fun or aren’t making much money yet use the free membership.

Use this link below you’ll get 65% off their premium package when you’re ready to order. This is a special link I’ve been given for readers of my site and it’s not available to the general public:

Start Monitoring Your Website Now

Everyone should monitor his or her web site because you never know the next time your site will go down.