Even though Opera is the most popular mobile browser in the world, in the desktop market Opera is the most under-rated browser despite having created many innovative features. Which were later copied by other browsers.

Its hard to understand why Opera has only ~2.2% browser market share while IE6 still boasts a whopping ~14.5% market share. Maybe the Opera developers were so busy developing solid browser features that they forgot that they need to do some promotions in order for people to use it. In contrast IE developers were so busy shoving their crap browser down people’s throat they forgot to make a half decent browser. Whatever is the case, the internet is a better place today thanks to some of the innovations that started from the Opera camp.

                                                               Source (with a grain of salt)

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Today Google released Quick Search Box for Mac, which is developed by the same person who wrote Quicksilver (Nicholas Jitkoff works for Google now). As expected it works more or less the same way quicksilver does. According to Google, QSB is an evolution of Google Desktop for Mac. If you are a long time Quicksilver user you will fit right at home with QSB, minus the large number of plugins and configuration options with Quicksilver.

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When we reviewed Tweetie few weeks ago, we mentioned how it can be difficult to come up with unique ways to interact with twitter given that the same limited API options are available to all client developers. Boy were we wrong. When we tried out Mixero, not only did we get a unique twitter experience we actually enjoyed it very much.

Mixero is still in beta and you will need to ask for an invite in order to use it. You will get a unique Code which can be used for one account only. We asked one of developers if Mixero will be a free client or a commercial. He told us that the current version (which is a private beta) with all its features will be available as free for everyone. No words on future plans.

From my limited experience with Mixero I got the impression that this is a suitable client for either very active twitter user or someone who follows a lot of user. The main idea behind Mixero seems to be to streamline massive amount of twitter feed update in the most organized way possible without overwhelming the user.
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I am still juggling between Chrome and Firefox because I have come to depend on a large number of Firefox plug-ins over the years. The day Google Chrome supports all the extensions I use with Firefox I can see myself switch to Chrome completely. Chrome still doesn’t “officially” support extensions. Userscripts and greasemonkey scripts are used to support custom options for the time being. However recent developers builds have alpha extension support built-in to the browser. You will have to download developers builds in order to install these extensions.

-> To Enable extensions on developers build right click chrome shortcut > properties and on the “target” field add “- -enable-extensions” after “chrome.exe”. There should be a space in between. You will need to restart Chrome.

-> To Install extensions go to the extension developer website and click on the download link and it will prompt you to install extension.

-> To Uninstall extensions, on your chrome browser visit this link: “chrome://extensions/” and it will list all the extensions currently installed and you can choose to uninstall from there.

1) Cleeki: An extension that mimics the way Accelerators work with IE8. Basically once you highlight a text it prompts a small hovering button and from there you can choose to execute actions like “searches”, “Google maps”, “translations” etc. Perhaps important for IE8 users, Cleeki can import IE8 accelerators to Google Chrome.

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There are a number of great iphone applications available for sysadmins who doesn’t always enjoy carrying a laptop with them everywhere they do. I wish we had iphones when I used to be a sysadmin 5 years ago, it would have made a lot of simple tasks like rebooting server or checking up on system usage or just monitoring systems in general a lot more convenient without having to sit in front of the computer all the time. Webmasters, sysadmin or even hobbyist server owners will hopefully find these iphone applications very useful just as I did.

1) Network Ping: A nice little application to maintain or debug network problem on Local Area Network with the ability to access router by Telnet console.

Website: http://mochasoft.dk/iphone_ping.htm 
Price: Free (lite) $3.99 (Pro)

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