According to Darwin, everything that evolves, survives. This can be aptly applied to computer science and modern information technology. When i was i grad school, there was no firefox, iphone, android, twitter, gmail, reader, facebook, google IPO, and lot of other things that you see around today. Following used to be the tools we used then.

1. Browser – Mozilla used to be a big favourite. Firebird appeared on scene (it is known as firefox now).
2. Email – Yahoo mail used to be de-facto mail. Although, not many used it actively. We used to rely on IIT mailserver.
3. Blogging – Pretty initial versions of wordpress, and sometimes blogger.
4. Photosharing – Flickr was there. But we still used open source photo albums like JAlbum to host it on our respective websites.
5. Camera – I purchased a 2 Megapixel Canon powershot A60 for 17k bucks then! Now i am sure kaddy can be laughing reading this. NagP got an A70 a few months later, and Kalam got an A80 from Singapore few months further.
6. Phones – I would not even mention this. These were either b/w phones or 8 bit candybars.
7. Online videos – NA (Youtube was launched in feb 2005)
8. Social networking – Orkut (was not completely “owned” by google then).
9. Laptops – Used a Dell inspiron 8000 which costed me 1Lakh ($2000).
10. Office tools – openoffice/staroffice
11. Other mentions – Digg and stumbleupon.

Now in 2010 following is the configuration

1. Browser – Chrome and Firefox(occasionally)
2. Email – Gmail(and google apps)
3. Blogging – I still use hosted wordpress and twitter.
4. Photosharing – Picasa and facebook.
5. Camera – Sony SR7 FullHD and Canon powershot 12 MP
6. Phones – Blackberry, Android
7. Online videos – Youtube.
8. Social networking – Facebook
9. Laptops – Macbook and Dell vostro (costing 30k INR)
10. Office tools – Google docs.
11. Other mentions – Google maps, iphone

Disclaimer – Please read these in my personal context. This is not the general consumer usage trend.

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Image via Wikipedia

In case you do not have a zott idea about the headline, let me assist you with what wikipedia says about fennec.

The Fennec Fox (Vulpes zerda) is a small nocturnal fox found in the Sahara Desert of North Africa which has distinctive very large ears.

Firefox for mobile phones has been named Fennec. A very very early alpha release has been pushed on the web for users to try out. It can be installed on Nokia N810 tablet. Unfortunately, i am not rich enough to get my hands on one . There are a couple of videos floating around to give you a feel of how it looks like on the tablet.

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

It has some major UI changes over existing browsers on windows mobile, symbain, and other handheld devices. The tabs are on left side, and other back, forward buttons are on right side, and search is at bottom. Nokia N810 is a bit different from other handhelds, as it is supposed to be operated from both hands. The buttons are justified, as user would use her thumbs to browse. However, this should not be a standard, as and when ported to a different formfactor handhelds (my Motorola E8). Designing a UI for handhelds is a very big challenge, as there is an explosion of form factors as compared to Laptops/PCs (reminds me of automobiles ). It would be interesting to see how mozilla solves this problem.

The browser supports plugins, so youtube will be available as long as our Adobe friends are in line with our interests. Renedering seems good, and some sites report the jvascript engine to be 600% faster than existing mobile browsers.

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• Download First Firefox Mobile Alpha Release [Firefox Mobile]
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• Mozilla Gets Touchy and Feely With Firefox ‘Fennec’ Mobile

Google announced Chrome, last night, and promised to deliver tonight IST. In case you still are unaware read the official google blog. In case you have any questions about the motive for this game, they have tried to cool the hot heads and foxes through a comic book strip. Its a a couple of pages of scriptures, and will take some time to go through. I liked the idea of marketing their initiative though a comic strip. It answers and lot of questions you might have, and is like FAQ 2.0. It focuses around Why, How and What. A new browser on the block was bound to get some curved eyebrows. After all, google has widely endorsed firefox (and continues to do so).

Following is the summary :-

1. It is grandchild of webkit.

2. It has tabs.

3. Each tab runs in separate process, which means, firefox’s memory leak problems might go away. In case of a crash, only one tab dies.

4. Javascript also gets a virtual machine model, no more asynchronous stuff.

5. Homepage has been improved a lot.

6. Gears supported.

7. Multithreaded.

8. Detachable tabs.

9.  Mozilla prism like functionality.

10. Tab bound sandboxes.

11. Plugin support (pligins not sandboxed)

12. Open source.

Looks like an impressive list to me. Combines the experience of desktop apps and power of web apps. They have used the word process so many times, that i am a bit curious about what happens when i open standard 35 tabs like firefox. Our friendly fox is single threaded, which means that all tabs share same memory space. I suspect that initial memory footprint is a bit high in case of chrome, which can lead to a bit of problems in case of memory starved PCs. I see a lot of context switiching between processes.

The more active apps you use, the more is the active work done by each process. For example, i use youtube to listen to music instead of watching the videos. i build a playlist for this. Thus, one tab is reserved for youtube. In case you use many bandwidth consuming, rendering heavy apps, this might slow down chrome a bit, but it would scale well when majority of your tabs are mere text based static web pages.

The good side is that if one rouge javascript is not sticking to its business, the whole browser might not come down (and you will not loose your tabs and your research on fixing the latest bug).

The sandboxing is still not very clear, thus, it will be interesting to see how cookies and all work (I see people using cookies for interprocess communication more and more).

Gears, though has been around since some time, but is still to take off. So i do not see that as a killer feature.

More juice after some chroming!!