Compelled by an office friend, Mac user, who boats about the speed of his Internet browser almost every other day, I finally did a short research on browser performance. And I have to admit it was quite shocking find out, even for a heavy Internet user like me, that the speed difference between the fastest (Safari) and the most commonly used browser (Firefox) may be as high as 4x.

According to CNET UK, this is the performance comparison of the most common browsers:

The test doesn’t include FX 3.5 which was just released and is noticably faster than its precedessor, but I wouldn’t expect any change in the Top 3.

It’s also good to realize, that while an average web server hardly ever crunches the average, dynamic web site in more than 1-2 seconds, it may still take over 3 times this much to display that web page on your computer. Even with so much computing power on the client end these days!

One thing is sure - the majority of the web relies on JavaScript, and this doesn’t seem to change. So those browser makers who have re-engineered their JS engines will get the edge. Times when we had to wait half a minute to load up a page have passed years ago, but the funny part is, that it’s often not the Internet being the bottleneck now, it’s our own personal computer…

Some time ago I discovered Enso Launcher, the tool I now can’t live without. It serves one purpose - lets you use your keyboard more effectively. You start by pressing a hotkey to initiate it and then type in commands like “open” followed by the name of the program you wish to open; or “calculate” to resolve a previously-marked mathematic equation (extremely helpful when you do some basic calculations in Notepad).  There is a series of different commands you can use, you even define your own ones. I highly recommend this tool, especially if you’re an XP user.

What bothers me though, is that such an innovative, professionally made app does not seem to have any business model behind it. OK, maybe it was in a way made obsolete by Vista with their new Start Menu, but hey, most people still are and will be using XP. I also think the command line interfaces will be coming back especially with the development of semantic web (Web 3.0).

The finalists of this year’s crunchies have been announced. Over 110 thousand internauts voted in 20 categories.

I’ve taken a quick peek at the list and the first impression is that a) it is questionable whether companies like Digg or Facebook should be considered - they’ve been on the market for a long time and are already widely recognizable, b) there are obviously lots of innovative concepts, e.g.:

23andMe
Service that will read & interpret your DNA. All that’s required is sending them a saliva sample and… covering the cost of research. Seems like a bargain: $999 + shipping. Company was funded by Google a while ago with Sergey Brin’s wife being involved since its inception.

WeatherBill
Their tag line says it all: “Get Paid for Bad Weather”. Innovative risk management service allowing to purchase customized contracts to protect businesses against weather changes. Hopefully, they’ll soon expand their offering and allow for online weather change orders.

Attributor
Service that will crawl the web to check whether your copyrighted content might be used by somebody else without permission. Less innovative, but practical!