Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »May 28, 2008 — PC World —
A couple of months ago, I downloaded a beta version of Firefox 3 just to look at the new ideas Mozilla was working on. My intention was to try it for a couple days, then switch back to Firefox 2. I wasn't worried about stability (it's a browser after all—what's the worst that can happen?). But the beta wasn't compatible with lots of my favorite extensions and who wants to live without them?
As it turns out, I'm still using a prerelease version of Firefox (they're at Release Candidate 1 now) and loving it, even without my beloved add-ons. The improvements Mozilla has made to the browser, while subtle, are so helpful that I didn't want to give them up. Here are five of my favorites.
If you've used previous versions of Firefox you've likely had this experience, perhaps frequently: you're working away, but gradually become aware that something is horribly wrong with your PC. It's sluggish and apps take forever to load. You open up Task Manager and find that Firefox is chewing up 95 percent of your CPU cycles. Once you kill the browser and start over, you're running fine again.
I can't remember the last time I've had that experience with the Firefox 3 betas. Mozilla developers borrowed some memory management tricks from the Free BSD operating system for the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. (They say memory management on Macs already worked pretty well.) The effect is clear. The browser is much less likely to commandeer too many system resources. And Firefox's developers worked to make sure that add-ons, notorious memory thieves, don't cause problems either. They've rolled in cycle collectors that help prevent extensions from locking up RAM and not giving it back. They're also distributing tools to third-party developers that will help them build more abstemious add-ons.
Okay, so the official name is the Location Bar, the field where you enter URLs you want to visit. But beta testers have nicknamed it the Awesome Bar and it is, well, pretty awesome. Enter text in the Location Bar and a dropdown list appears of pages from your browsing history that include that text, not just in the URL, but in the page title or the page's tag (see #4 below). The list even includes Gmail messages that include that word in the subject line. If you've already visited a Web page, there's a good chance it's useful to you. The Location Bar lets you very quickly search that useful subset of the Web.