The Official Atomic Medium Blog

Well, I have finally made the jump to the new Firefox 3 browser. After using Firefox 2.0.0.8 for such a long time, I felt it was time to get the new one to see what all the hype was about.

It looks like Windows Vista a little bit, I still do not know whether this is good or bad, but I do not have a problem with it thus far. Although some add-ons have yet to be updated to work, most of the popular ones are now 100% compatible.

First off, the characteristic memory leak in FF2 is not altogether gone, but its impact on system performance is markedly lower now than it has ever been, even without tweaking the values found in about:config. I had roughly 12 tabs open in one window and Firefox 3 managed to stay under 100k physical and under 70k virtual memory, running on Windows XP Pro w/ SP2. Results may vary, but if you are a tab-junkie like me, and you constant keep FF running with 12 or so tabs for days on end, you will probably see it bloat to over 100K in both physical and virtual memory, but it takes much longer now – and if you minimize Firefox it will actually release more memory now, provided you do not have a bunch of active java or flash gumming up the works.

Ok, now on to a web developer point-of-view. With a few add-ons (Rankquest SEO toolbar, SEOQuake, Web Dev Tools, user agent switcher, colorzilla, measureit, firebug, google pagerank, IE Tab, linkchecker, and ShowIP) you can easily do 90% of your web debugging and testing in this browser. I have not seen a change in the way Firefox renders CSS or javascript in this new iteration, although I may not be looking hard enough yet.

A simple weblog (shortened to Blog nowadays) is one of the easiest ways to both drive traffic to your website, and generate some dynamic content for your website. Both of these things are great for Search Engine Optimization. Anyone can post on a blog, its a fairly simple task. The key is remembering to blog regularly (at least once a week for the best results.) Most blogging systems out on the internet are both free and easy-to-use. Blogger, WordPress, and Serendipity all use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors that look very similar to Microsoft Word, so many users can easily format blog posts. With functions such as bold, italic, underline, font, size, format, paragraph, strikethrough, and many others, blogging software is not just for power-users or internet geniuses anymore.

With so many free and easy solutions out there, blogging is just a few mouse-clicks away.

When you search on Google or Yahoo, did you ever wonder why some sites show up at the top, and other ones are buried pages deep?  Search sites like Google, Yahoo, msn.com, ask.com are called "Search Engines."  These Search Engines have automatic programs that electronically surf the web and look at web sites to decide the rank based on their secret formula for relevance.  Then they store the information in gigantic databases.  The rankings from this data are called "Natural" listings.  This is in contrast to "sponsored" listings which are paid ads that place your link in special areas on the search results page.  Usually these ads are labeled "Sponsored Links" or are on a blue background.  There are also ad programs such as the "Ads by Google" boxes that you see on many web sites.  Research shows that users are far more likely to click on a natural listing before a paid listing when both are showing.

"Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) service will create or modify a web site to make it naturally relevant to the search engines…thus increasing the natural visibilty for the site on the web, without having to purchases expensive paid listings.

Go to the Atomic Medium Web site for more information on SEO.