Upgrade your browser!!!

One of the applications I just delivered at work ran into a "performance issue" today, and in researching the explanation I came across this nifty little chart, courtesy of Microsoft.  High numbers are really, really bad and if you use sites like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, or pretty much any other site popular today it probably would perform much better if you used Internet Explorer 9.0, Firefox 6, Google Chrome, or Safari instead of Internet Explorer 8.0. So, as a friendly reminder to any of you non-tech readers, go upgrade your browser!

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/sunspider/Default.html

Firefox 5 - some cool new features

One of the best features in a browser I've found in a while was introduced recently in Firefox 5.  It's called "App Tabs", and it allows you to pin sites that you always use into your browser so that every time you open it the sites are automatically loaded.  It also makes the tab much smaller.  So handy for sites I always leave open like Gmail, Facebook, etc..  Read more here and then download here. I also just started to experiment with the Firefox Synch feature, which allows bookmarks and open tabs to be constantly in synch between my desktop, netbook, and my iPhone.  Seems to work pretty well so far, so long Xmarks plugin.

Firefox (and other browsers as well) are starting to ramp up their release schedule for new versions.  This is great for consumers, but man does it suck as a product manager for a web app when you have to spend half of your life regression testing if you wish to support various browsers.