Firefox 4 Is Certainly Zippy, But Is That Enough To Switch Back From Chrome?

If you,ve already downloaded the new Firefox 4 today, the first you probably noticed is how much zippier it is. I pretty much had stopped using Firefox altogether because of the creekiness of its previous versions compared to Chrome, Safari, and IE9. But the new Firefox 4, which Mozilla claims is 6 times as fast as before, puts it back in the same pack at least as the rest. It's been downloaded nearly 2 million times as of this writing (check the counter for more up-to-the-second numbers).

I,m sure there are plenty of benchmark tests that show one browser is faster than the other, and vice versa, but my initial reactions after playing around with Firefox 4 today and comparing it side by side with Chrome is that it is just as fast if not faster. It depends on which website I visit. TechCrunch, for instance, loads a second or two faster by my stopwatch. Without the stopwatch, I can't tell the difference. And that's a good thing for Firefox, because speed is my No. 1 requirement for a Web browser. Nothing else is nearly as important. Sluggishness pushes users away. So that,s fixed.

Firefox also supports all sorts of HTML5 and other modern Web apps. If you want to check some out, go to its Web O' Wonder page where you can test 360-degree videos, animations, in-browser games and other highly graphic apps. You can se emost of them on Chrome as well, but these are tuned especially for Firefox 4. The360-degree video, for instance, looks much better in Firefox and the panning around is much smoother. But there are plenty of HTML5 apps that, so don't let canned demos sway you.

The new Firefox also has some new security features like a Do Not Track option for online ads, lets you sync tabs and browsers across to mobile browsers, and makes it easier to group tabs and see all open tabs in a thumbnail view. I don,t know if the speed and other features are enough to make me want to come back. I've got everything set up on Chrome so nicely and I am a creature of habit. But if Chrome starts acting up or crashing my browsers, it's nice to know I,ve got plenty of other options—and Firefox is once again on that list.

Reddit, Social News Frontrunner, Is Down To One Developer

Two out of the three remaining Reddit programmers quietly left the social news community last week, Mike Schiraldi going to Google and David King going to Hipmunk where he joins Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. This means that the over one billion page view a month site is currently running with only one developer (Neil Williams, hired in November) and two sysadmins until it can hire new engineering staff.

Reddit, which experiences about 75 million monthly visits and is one of the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet, had six hours worth of downtime yesterday which it chalked up to an Amazon Web Services failure.

This fact that this all rests on poor Neil Williams, shoulders right now might seem shocking, as Reddit is doing better than ever traffic-wise  hitting 14 million unique visits a month according to Google Analytics. To put this into perspective, competitor Digg (which has 42 employees and has raised over $40M in funding) now has around 9 million unique visitors down from about 16 million in August, according to Quantcast.

In a sense Reddit is the unlikely winner of a the voting-on-news race, a competition that has been somewhat forgotten in the wake of Twitter. But the company is absolutely not shutting down, despite it currently operating on a skeleton staff of six people, in addition to a part time designer and a part time customer service person.

Sysadmin jedberg holds that company is doing extremely well despite recent departures in a Reddit thread:

"In fact, we just had a meeting with the President of Conde Nast, who told us that they are extremely pleased with reddit and the community, and want to give us more resources and more funding. They just approved us to hire even more people than we had originally planned. To further reinforce the point above, our financials are looking quite good for the year.
Raldi will be sorely missed. He was the face of our company, and our most prolific blogger. Hopefully some of the new folks that come on after this round of hiring will want to write blog posts, or perhaps I,ll pick up that job again.
The one silver lining to this is that raldi,s departure really opened up Conde's eyes to what our needs are as a site that is different from all the other properties at Conde Nast. I'm just sad that he couldn,t stick around to benefit from these changes. :("

Community manager Erik Martin also tells me that the company plans on hiring four more engineers as fast as it can, but doesn't know where it is in the hiring process. He wants to get the new staff on board as soon as possible, obviously, "Traffic keeps growing. We're having infrastructure growing pains, but traffic is still growing."; And then, "It,s a crazy lean skeleton crew, but we'll get through it.";

Btw. Reddit is hiring.

iPad 2 Now Available in Apple Online Store

iPad 2 is now available in Apple’s online store.

Everything is just as announced: the 16 GB, Wi-Fi-only iPad 2 starts at $499, and the price climbs to $829 if you want the 64 GB, 3G+Wi-Fi version. The device is available in two colors (black and white), and customers can choose to have a sign engraved on it for free.

LinkedIn launched new social news

LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Today, a new social news product for business professionals.

LinkedIn Today is a professional news product that aggregates and delivers a personalized news experience to each user. Product manager Liz Walker says that it chooses stories based on what stories a user's network is sharing.

It's similar to apps like Paper.li in terms of design and functionality. Today provides different lenses for checking out top news in not just a user's network, but in entire industries. For example, users can check out the hot stories in marketing and advertising, private equity or politics. The company says it's a quick way for busy business users to get the top stories of the day.

LinkedIn also released a mobile version of LinkedIn Today that gives users the ability to check top stories within their network on the fly.

Cameroon Bans Twitter

the government of the West African state of Cameroon has banned mobile Twitter.

The opposition had planned protests against the country's longtime president, Paul Biya, last month. But those were put down by security forces. Clearly, President Biya believes he can cut off future protests by eliminating one of the tools those protesters might use.