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Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 this week, and the Web browser has numerous improvements over its previous version. For those Microsoft Explorer holdouts, it’s worth taking a look at. As of this writing, Mozilla reported approximately 4 million downloads. Here’s five reasons Firefox 3.5 is a hit.

1. Speed:The number one criterion for a browser is fast speed. The 3.5 version of Mozilla Firefox is markedly faster than its predecessor. According to Mozilla, it ran the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, which measures how fast browsers render JavaScript, on versions 2, 3 and 3.5 of Firefox. The company claims the newest version performed with at least double the speed of Firefox 3 and is more than 10 times as fast as Firefox 2.

2. Privacy:Just as Explorer offers InPrivate Browsing, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 has Private Browsing. Once a Private Browsing session is activated, computer users can surf any site at all with no trace remaining when they are finished: no cookies, no temp files, no forms information and no search information.

Further, if a user isn’t in Private Browsing mode, but still wants to eliminate traces of where he or she has been, there’s the “Forget About This Site” feature. That erases the site from the History list, as well as all traces of the browsing session on your computer, including cookies and temp files, search history, forms and more.

3. Music and Video Support:Because Firefox 3.5 supports HTML 5 audio and video elements, users can watch video and listen to music directly in a Web page, without launching any plug-ins. The video or audio can be saved by right-clicking and saving it. That’s a big improvement with the torrent of video viewing taking place on the internet.

4. “Awesome Bar:”The location bar -dubbed the “Awesome Bar” by some perhaps overly enthusiastic developers - has been made even more, well, awesome in Mozilla Firefox 3.5. Previosuly, you could simply type the name of what you were searching into that field, foregoing the search box altogether, and a Google search page would show results. Mozilla has tweaked the search functionality in the browser so surfers can show only bookmarks by using an asterisk after a query such as “Channelweb *”, or show only tags by using a plus “Channelweb +”.

5. Session Control:If Mozilla Firefox crashes, users can choose which tabs to resuscitate, a feature previously available through the Session Manager add-on. That’s handy particularly if a Flash-based or heavy JavaScript site was the cause of the crash, so users aren’t caught in a perpetual, and irritating, crash-and-restart cycle in their browser.<

Popularity: 3% [?]

In an age of ever-faster communications, fewer people have time for voice mail
Taylor Davis, 20, a college student waiting tables in Wellesley for the summer, waits days to listen to her voice mail messages and, even then, checks her inbox only when she’s bored.
“Usually it’s from my boss or people wanting me to pick up shifts,’’ she said, shrugging off missed opportunities, “or from my mom or my aunts. They like to talk a lot.’’

Ja-Nae Duane, 32, CEO of Wild Women Entrepreneurs and Ja-Nae Duane Ventures, in Woburn, deletes many of her voice mails without even listening. “What I really hate are the soliloquies,’’ she said. “I spend more time listening to your message than I do responding to it.’’

Brian Walshe, 32, a Boston-based international art dealer, keeps his phone’s mailbox full to ward off new messages. The maneuver annoys those who want to reach him, but he estimates it saves him 30 minutes a day. “People complain,’’ he said. “Everyone likes to leave a message.’’

The problem is, these days, not many people like to listen to them.
In an age of ever-speedier communications, a growing number of people are unwilling to endure voice mail’s shortcomings. Some can’t stand the endless prompts just to hear a longwinded - and often pointless - message. (Hi, it’s me. Why aren’t you picking up? I’ll call you later.) Others dislike voice mails that can’t be searched, easily forwarded, or surreptitiously played during a meeting or lecture. And on the off chance a message does contain key information, it’s often left at the end of a ramble and spoken rapidly, forcing the recipient to listen all over again. And then write it down, of course.

For those who can’t be bothered to listen to messages at all, even those they care about, a number of companies now offer voice-to-text transcription. The best known is Google, which at the end of June began a rollout of Google Voice, a service that offers - among other things - voice mail transcriptions free of charge.

Craig Walker, a coproduct manager for Google Voice, described the transcription service as a “game changer’’ that turns voice mail from a “temporary audio recording trapped inside your phone’’ into information that’s “usable and storable and searchable.’’ Without transcription, he added, “the value of voice mail is lost. A few days later you’re looking for that matchbook cover you wrote the person’s phone number on.’’

James Siminoff, founder and CEO of PhoneTag, another company that transcribes voice mails and sends the text to users, agrees.

“Voice mail is a dead service as it stands today,Siminoff said. His company estimates that it takes 6 seconds to read a voice mail that would take 79 seconds to hear. Fees for PhoneTag’s services range from 35 cents to transcribe a single message to $29.95 for unlimited monthly transcriptions.

Initially, Siminoff said, some people are hesitant to lose the “sweet nothingof loved ones’ voices: “We’ve had people who said ‘I’d never use [a transcription service] - I want to hear how my wife sounds on every message.’ But people don’t check them quickly. Siminoff said the average person checks the voice mail six to eight hours after it was left.

“Your wife might have been happy when she left you the message asking you to pick up milk,but when you return home without milk because you didn’t listen, “it’s a different story.’’

After a month of using the transcription service, he added, only 1 percent of customers listen to the voice file that’s sent along with the transcription. “What does that tell you?’’

Still, some people can’t bring themselves to hit delete without listening. “It would seem rude not to listen to a message, and you might miss something important,said Lorrey Bianchi, 63, a Back Bay retiree, as he strolled through the Shops at Prudential Center with his wife. “Presumably if someone is calling you they have something to say.’’

And after all, we do ask people to leave a message - even if we have no intention of checking it.

Consider the case of Duane, the CEO who deletes some messages without listening. The outgoing message on her work line practically begs callers to leave a message. “Unfortunately I am unable to come to the phone now,her voice says sweetly. “But if you leave your name, your number, and a brief message, I promise I will get back to you as soon as possible.’’

A bait and switch? No, Duane insisted. She recorded the outgoing message years ago, in an era before e-mail and texting. “But,she said, “I’m going to change it now.’’

Popularity: 3% [?]

Despite iPhone 3.0’s push notifications and previously mentioned Google Sync’s contacts and calendars syncing chops, push Gmail still hasn’t come to the iPhone. But with theProwl iPhone application, you can now push Gmail notifications—and then some—to your iPhone.

What Prowl Does

The $3 Prowl iPhone application [iTunes App Store Link] works in conjunction with Growl, the universal notification application for Macs, to push desktop notifications to your iPhone. (The current release of Growl for Windows doesn’t yet work with Prowl, but the latest unreleased version supposedly already does—meaning Windows users should be able to do this once Growl for Windows updates.)

How It Works

Whenever an application sends a notification to Growl, Growl sends that notification to Prowl’s servers, which in turn sends a push notification to your iPhone. So, for example, if you’ve got Growl set up to display new Gmail notifications (details below), Prowl can push those same notifications to your iPhone. The cool part about Prowl is that it doesn’t just work with Gmail—it works with anything that Growl does.

NOTE: What you’ll get after following these instructions isn’t true push email, but it’s a pretty solid approximation. In fact, in order for it to work consistently, you’ll need to have an always-on computer to push your Growl notifications to your iPhone. But until something better comes along, it’s a pretty strong alternative.

Set Up Prowl with Growl

If you haven’t already, go download and install Growl (it will install as a new preference pane in the System Preferences of your Mac).

Next, head over to the Prowl web site and register for an account (Prowl doesn’t even require an email address). Once registered, download the Prowl plug-in for Growl, unzip it, and double-click the Prowl.growlView file to install the Prowl plug-in to Growl.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to set up Prowl on your computer. Fire up the Growl preference pane (System Preference -> Growl), then click on the Display Options tab. Select Prowl in the Display Styles list on the left, then enter the Prowl username and password you registered with and click Verify to make sure Growl can properly talk to Prowl’s servers. (If everything’s copacetic, you’ll see a green checkmark next to the Password field.) If you want to use Prowl as the default for Growl (meaning you want the majority of your Growl notifications pushed to your iPhone), you can also set Prowl as the default from the Default Style drop-down.

When you set Prowl as your display notification type, you still get to choose what your Growl notifications will look like—you just do so through this Prowl display options menu. Make sure you’ve ticked the checkbox labeled Display notifications using style, then select the style you prefer (I’m a smoke person). You can also adjust what kind of Growl notifications Prowl will forward and when—for example, I’ve set Growl to only send notifications to Prowl when the priority is at least High, and I only send notifications when my computer has been idle for more than 5 minutes (presumably you don’t need push notifications if you’re already sitting at your computer).
If you’ve alreadydownloaded Prowl to your iPhone (and choked on the $3 price tag—yeah, we’re cheap) and logged into your Prowl account from your device, any new Growl notifications with Prowl set as the display type will push those notifications to your iPhone. Pretty cool, huh? That can potentially include anything from your IM client to your iTunes notifier and, yes, Gmail. Of course, Gmail requires a little more set up.

Set Up Gmail Notifier with Growl and Prowl

In order to get Gmail playing nice with Growl, you’ve got a few more steps to go. First, you need to download and install the Google Notifier for Mac—the official Gmail and Google Calendar notifier from Google. Next, download theGoogle+Growl plug-in for Google Notifier, unzip it, and install the Google+Growl Utility to your Applications folder. When you run it, this little utility keeps its eye on the Google Notifier and pushes any new email updates (and event alerts, if you wish) to Growl… which, if set up with Prowl, pushes the alert to your iPhone.

To make sure Google+Growl is set to work with Prowl, open up Growl one more time, click the Applications tab, and double-click on Google+Growl. Make sure Prowl is set as the default display style, then click the Notifications tab. On this tab, you’ll see a notifications drop-down with New Event and New Gmail selections. Make sure that both are set with Prowl as the display style. (If, like me, you’re setting Prowl only to push high priority Growl notifications, make sure you set the priority to High as well.

Keep in mind that you need to keep Google+Growl running in the background for the whole system to work, too. It all sounds fairly convoluted for something that should be so simple, but once you’ve got it set up, you shouldn’t have to do any fiddling after that

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A year or so ago I was using a third-party background app (required jailbreak) called iMapIDLE that simulated push for Gmail, and while it looks like something similar is undergoing review for the App Store, the Prowl approach seems like another very solid one. It doesn’t require you to hand over any usernames or passwords to a third party, since the notifications are all coming from your computer, and it can work with all sorts of notifications that Growl already supports (imagine getting a notification that your BitTorrent client just finished downloading that movie while you’re picking up dinner, for example).

As I said above, Windows support for using Prowl in conjunction with Growl for Windows isn’t quite there, but it should be very soon, making this a pretty solid solution for rolling notifications for just about anything from your desktop—and that, we like very much.

Got something clever you’d like to use Prowl for aside from Gmail push notifications? Have another, better method you’re already using? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Popularity: 12% [?]