When you exit Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5, you cannot pick up the trail again from where you left off — anything your browser remembered up to that point, has vanished.

Does the Incognito Window in Chrome work the same way? Surprisingly, no — and this is where one starts evaluating the browser makers’ design decisions. If you exit the Incognito Window (”Nothing, honey, wasn’t doing anything…just checking statistics”)re-enter it again, and then re-enter the page you were on, you’ll find your shopping cart is intact, right where you left it. So exiting that window did not erase your trail.

Read the full article here:

Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?

Google's new voice-recognition search tool for the iPhone has problems understanding Australian accents, leading to some bizarre answers to spoken queries. Similar problems have been reported in the U.K. with regional accents.

Users down under have noticed searches for the word "iPhone" can return pages of results for "priceline", "mustang" or simply a message saying "try again."

The number eight becomes a search for "ike", seven turns into "Clinton", and don't even try searching for the number six.

Google recommends the tool, which is available as a free download for the iPhone and iPod Touch in Apple's Application Store, works best with a North American accent.

It seems again a case that for anything outside of America, there be dragons. It is surprising that large "international" companies take this attitude. I recently complained of Goolge ignoring my browser language preferences.

Another great example is LinkedIn.com. Obviously if you want to do international business networking, you have to speak and write English. It seems all too hard for the Americans to comprehend that there is a world beyond their shores. Xing.com while developed by Germans, are very conscious of the need to speak multiple languages, hence the greater uptake and multi-lingual networking taking place there.

We may now live in the global village, but we do need to make an effort to reach out to each other and communicate in ways best understood by the people we engage with.

Google Chrome Browser

The internet is a buzz since Google's release yesterday of its browser named Chrome. There are many wild predictions about its future, what it means for Microsoft and Firefox and a share of nay sayers. I downloaded and to it for a test drive myself. But I waited a day to see what reactions would be and if more detailed information came to light before I went shooting my mouth. Overall the reaction seems to be very positive.

A number of things stand out about Chrome.

1. On the surface, its page rendering seems fast. It uses WebKit
2. Browser tabs are spawned as separate tasks. This the most talked about feature so far, because it means that if one website's scripts are running slow, the other tabs will not slow down. The problem child can then be killed off. This point gets my vote.
3. Chrome uses the V8 JavaScript engine. It means Chrome has speed advantages over many of the other browsers.

The general consensus seems to be that the new browser is clear pitched at web applications, and specifically web applications that continue to work when off line. Many see this as the way of the future, where applications are not tied to any one particular operating system, and are available anywhere, any time.

The browser then coupled with Google's Gears, a collection of web widgets, clearly puts in competition with Adobe's Air and Microsoft's Silverlight. As JavaScript engines become faster and if a standard HTML video element was adopted, the future looks dim for these two proprietary platforms. This is one point that seems to have garnered much applause from the technical community.

The next thing that seems to be rather sensational and wildly exaggerated, is that Chrome is Window's killer. As many people have pointed out, Chrome needs an operating system to support it. So Windows is not about to go away. But, where it does spell trouble for Microsoft, is when Chrome and other browsers create a fast, stable platform for web based productivity software, its Office cash cow is in serious trouble.

For me, it has been interesting to use Chrome for the past day, but four things stop me from using it more regularly.

1. No add ons – I love my Firefox ad blocker, Firebug development debugging tool, as a developer, I can't live without this one.
2. Its CSS rendering is not up to date. It fails the Acid 3 test. My WordPress admin theme does not work properly. So I'm using Firefox right now to write this.
3. There seems to be some JavaScipt incompatibility, some of the WordPress Editor Monkey features didn't work.
4. I can't install Flash. While this Chrome is meant to ultimately mean the demise of this platform, the nearly the whole internet still uses it. For instance, Google's own Analytics.

None of the other browsers are sitting still, so the competition is on. I believe we can expect to see some amazing developments from all of the browsers in the near future.

Does anyone know somebody in deep
inside Google that could point me to the right people?
I want to point something out to Google.

Google Preference Screen Shot

Google has not taken into account that in this mobile age, people are
travelling the world with their laptops or other portable devices and
surfing the net. This means that people are often browsing the internet in a country where they are not a speaker of the native language. Then why does Google assume that people will want to view their website in that language?

Google Account Screen Shot

For example, I am frequently in Germany and using Google. I am constantly faced
with this very annoying feature of Google. Google assumes, that because I am in Germany, that I therefore want Google
in German, rather than looking at my browser language preferences,
which gives a list of preferred languages. For a company that prides themselves on delivering what the user wants,
how can they possibly get this so wrong? Even if I manually change the
language setting to what it should be (English), Google still serves up the wrong
language as shown in the accompanying image.

Hey, even I can program a bit of simple code to look a browser language
preferences and choose the right language that user wants. On the following website that I built, galerie10.at, the website detects the visitor's language preference from the browser. It then compares this against a list of languages available on the website. It will cycle through the list of the visitor's preferred languages until it finds a match. If it does not, then presents the visitor with the default.

Maybe Google can do what I did, and use their own search engine and research the following term "detect browser language preference".

The hype machine has busy again. The new kid on the block of search engines, cuil.com has not delivered what it promised. Granted it is early days for the search engine, the disappointing results it provides from its searches will probably mean that it is quietly forgotten.

The following article goes into more depth on the failings. 

Cuil Search Engine: After Hype Wears Off, Nothing Remains

A very interesting article about how our technologies change our ways of thinking and attention span. Can you complete the article without clicking or looking off elsewhere?

What is the internet doing to our brains? by Nicholas Carr.

We are more frequently questioning how much information should
organizations, especially commercial ones keep on us, and what should
they be allowed to do with it. Adam Ostrow's recent posting "My Soul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns" on Mashable.com shows just how far Google has you wrapped up in its tentacles.

• Feedburner
• Gmail
• Gchat
• Adsence
• Google Calendar
• Google Checkout
• You Tube and Google Video
• Blogger
• Google Maps
• Gooble Apps

With all of these, Google can cross reference your activities, contacts, purchases and interests. Do we know what Google does with all of this information? No. Can we be assured that our private information won't become exposed, through accident, court order or secret government spying? No.

The likes of Google are banks, banks for information. Just like financial banking institutions it's easy to deposit, harder still to withdraw or gain co-operation.

Want to find out the latest secret nuclear submarine technology? Then just pop along to Google Maps or Microsoft's Virtual Earth and seek your nearest top secret naval base.

A man looking for a new home on an online mapping service has stumbled across an aerial image of a US nuclear-powered submarine in dry dock showing a part of the vessel that wasn't meant to be seen.

The image which appears on Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping service – is of the seven-bladed propeller used on an Ohio class ballistic missile submarine.

A similar incident occurred recently when Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, spotted an aerial image of China's new Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine on Google Earth.

One has to really wonder about military and security establishments don't you. They really don't have any grounds for demanding that internet be sanitized for the sake of national security do they. So much security, and secrecy yet a commercial satellite snaps sensitive information, so who knows what the spy satellites have got.

Maybe nations could seriously reduce their (excessive) military spending and just use the internet to find the latest "secrets". It seems to work for everybody else.

Increasingly, Google Inc's impartiality is being called into question, especially when it comes to living up to their motto, "do no evil". From complying to requests from the Chinese government to censor search results, to allowing the American military to post video clips of Iraq operations on it's newly acquired YouTube, to the recent doctoring of Google Maps satellite imagery. Up until this week, Google Maps displayed the damage to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Google Maps now displays pre-Katrina imagery of the city. One is left questioning why.

Google Maps returns to pre-Katrina status, leaving some wondering why

One is also left to remember that we are dealing with a corporate giant, and it of course has vested interests. We tend to forgo the thought of any bias, and look to Google as our trusted source of answers and information. How much of our online business is being shaped by the designs of one company? The term "google" even has a place in dictionaries now, a clear mark of the impression Google has on our minds. Is Google really that a good of a search engine, providing us the results we want, or have we now been trained to provide Google with the information it wants? 

When we talk in terms of SEO, it is almost always in terms of what Google wants.