Attention all webmasters and web developers! Google wants to help you improve the performance of your web pages. This week, Google released a tool called Page Speed which is capable of identifying different ways to make your site or web pages run faster.

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug add-on that Google has been using internally to improve the performance of their web pages. It supports Windows (XP and up), Mac OSX (x86 and PPC) and Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) operating systems. You must have Mozilla Firefox (3.0.4 or higher) and Firebug Firefox Add-on (1.3.3 or higher) installed on your computer before installation of Page Speed.

Once installed, this tool performs several tests to determine site’s web server configuration and front-end code. After the tests Page Speed offers suggestions on how to change your web pages in order to improve their performance. For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.

So, Page Speed will not only help you make your site run faster but will also keep visitors engaged with your site. By improving page load it can also reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs. In my view this tool is a must for all webmasters and web developers.

Page Speed evaluates performance of a web page, from the client point of view, which is typically measured as the page load time. In my view page load time is most crucial and as a webmaster or blogger, you must take it seriously. After all, who wants to visit web pages that takes forever to load? So, think from client point of view and use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of your site or blog.

Page Speed tests are based on a set of known best practices that enhances web page performance. After evaluation of your pages, Page Speed will give your specific tips and suggestions on how you can implement the front-end best practices to improve overall performance. The web performance best practices are also available in written form, which you can refer anytime during development of tweaking of your web pages. For further help regarding installation and use of Page Speed, the Webmaster Help Forum is always there to help you.

More info: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Mozilla on Friday released a security and stability update for it’s Firefox web browser. This update fixes two critical security issues present in Firefox 3.0.7 and Mozilla recommends all Firefox users to upgrade to this latest release, that is Firefox 3.0.8.

Firefox 3.0.8

The first security fix is related to arbitrary code execution through XUL tree element. This vulnerability could lead to browser crash when attempting to access a previously destroyed object, which ultimately could be used by an attacker to run arbitrary code on the victim’s computer. Note that this vulnerability only affects Firefox 3.X and does not affect Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2, or released versions of SeaMonkey.

The second security fix addresses the XSL transformation vulnerability, in which a XSL stylesheet could be used to crash the browser during a XSL transformation. The crash could potentially be used by an attacker to run arbitrary code on the victim’s computer.

You may wonder why I am posting this news on a Make Money Online blog? Well, I am posting this in order to inform those users who are not aware of the severity of security issues that exists on various software. Are you using Firefox 2? Get Firefox 3 as soon as possible, as Mozilla no longer provides support for Firefox 2, which contains many security vulnerabilities. Don’t risk your computer and your valuable information by using a vulnerable software. Update your Firefox installation today.

More information about the release and download link available here.

Link building is an important aspect of blogging, specially when you want to make money online with your blogs. Link building is not a tough job. You just need some patience and some hard work. You can get some good links to your blog by using various white hat SEO methods such as blog commenting, forum promotion, article marketing and link exchange. I know most of you are aware about all these stuffs and I am not going to bore you with a long article about all these things. Rather I would like to tell you about a simple Firefox add-on that will help in link building and SEO.

The add-on that I am talking about is SearchStatus. What actually it do? It displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete Rank of any domain name right within your browser. So, what’s the big deal? This add-on comes with some powerful features that you can use to spy your competitors and to improve your own blog. For example keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and many more.

You will be able to realize it’s power only after installing it on your browser (Firefox off course). Just get it from here and install it. Once it is enabled, you will see it in the bottom right of your browser. You can also change it’s position to some convenient place, from the options menu. Now browse the web as usual. When you are on a web page, it will automatically get information about the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of that particular page or domain, and displays them unobtrusively on your browser. You can enable or disable these ranks anytime.

How to use SearchStatus for link building? I am sure that you would love to get some nofollow free i.e., dofollow links. For this you need to know where you can get one. You have probably came across some dofollow blogs and even directories of dofollow blogs. But, mind it, many bloggers are cheating fellow bloggers by announcing their blogs as dofollow, when their blogs are still using nofollow on links!

So, how to know who really offers dofollow links to it’s commentators? Let’s use this Firefox add-on to get some good links. Right click on the add-on icon and select the ‘Highlight Nofollow Links” option. From now on when a web page uses nofollow on links, it will highlight the link. Go to blogs and post comments when you see no highlighting on comment links. Similarly use some brain and get good nofollow free links from relevant sources. So, with this add-on no one can cheat you about dofollow links. Just continue posting good and relevant comments on dofollow blogs and soon you will get a bunch of one way links to your blog.

In my view SearchStatus is a powerful add-on and it is a must for every blogger. I am using it for last few months and getting extremely positive results on some of my new blogs. Besides using for detecting nofollow links, I use SearchStatus to get a quick overview of a new site. It saves lots of my valuable time. If you are not using it right now, try it today. I am sure that it will become one of your favorite Firefox add-ons.

Digg has released a new toolbar for Firefox, which will let you to submit contents to Digg and keep track of Digg even if you are not on the Digg site itself. It also comes with a real-time notification feature, that informs you when new stories hit the front pages of Digg or when your friends Digg, submit, or comment on stories.

How this toolbar will help you? When you’re browsing the web, the toolbar will automatically check and let you know if a story has already been submitted to Digg. If that particular story is already on Digg, it will show how many Diggs and comments it got. And if the page you’re viewing isn’t already on Digg, the toolbar will display a submit button, which will help you quickly submit the story to Digg and share it with the community. So, this toolbar will save your time and improve your Digging experience!

What’s more? The toolbar will alert you when new stories become popular on Digg. The alert shows the story details in a small notification window at the bottom of your browser. This toolbar will also enable you to see what your friends are doing on Digg. You can easily customize the topics for notifications, placement of the notification window, time of display for a notification, and even how links should be opened. You can even hide the toolbar by clicking on the Digg guy in the navigation bar.

This new extension works with Firefox 3+. In future versions some more interesting features including Digging directly from the toolbar and notifications about your latest Recommendations will be added to it. Get Digg Toolbar today and never miss a popular story on Digg.

Recently I tested a cool Firefox extension called ScribeFire. It enables me to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Internet into my blog posts and optimize my ad inventory. ScribeFire comprises of two different functionalities - ScribeFire Blog Editor and ScribeFire QuickAds. You can use the Blog Editor to enrich your blogging experience, while the QuickAds will help you to serve ads on your blog.

What is ScribeFire Blog Editor?

The Blog Editor is the core feature of ScribeFire. It is an easy way to update and manage your blogs right from the browser. It works with Firefox (2 and 3), Flock, and SeaMonkey. But, it does not work with Internet Explorer. It is very easy to install, even easier to manage! After installation, you will see an icon in the browser status bar. Click the icon to open ScribeFire and take help from the account wizard to connect your blogs. Once your blog is connected, you can start using it to write and manage posts. With ScribeFire Blog Editor, you can write, categorize and tag your blog posts. Even you can upload images, save posts as drafts and share your posts on social sites.

ScribeFire supports the following services: WordPress.com, LiveJournal, Xanga, Windows Live Spaces, Performancing, Jeeran, Tumblr, MySpace, b2Evolution and Splinder. And the popular blogging platforms that are supported by ScribeFire includes WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Textpattern, Roller, Blogger and any software that uses MetaWeblog API.

What is ScribeFire QuickAds?

ScribeFire QuickAds is the first service to enable publishers to serve fully optimized banners ads on their sites with point and click functionality. It means that you can insert a fully optimized banner ad to your blog without adding a single line of code. Just click the “$” tab on your ScribeFire blog editor, choose an ad size and position the ad in the desired location on your site. That’s it. It takes only a few seconds to set up ads. You can also set up ads from within your account at www.scribefire.com.

QuickAds serve three different ad formats: 728×90 Leaderboard, 300×250 Medium Rectangle, 120×600 Skyscraper. Based on historical and real-time data, their special technology selects the optimum and highest paying network for the ad space on your site. So, it increases the chances of earning more from your ad space.

With QuickAds, you can take advantage of over 100 ad networks to maximum revenue from every impression your blog serves. It offers comprehensive reporting and you can track all your earnings from a single, all-inclusive dashboard. The payments are made on 7th of every month and there is no minimum for PayPal payouts. For payments by checks, $25.00 is the minimum amount you should earn.

ScribeFire QuickAds is currently in close beta and invites users on a first come first serve basis. So, you can give them your email ID, in order to get an invitation.

In my view, ScribeFire is a cool and handy tool for bloggers. It supports over 15 different blog hosting services and blogging software. Besides enriching your blogging experience, it also gives you an opportunity to maximize your ad revenue. Try it today.

Mozilla has released a third beta version of popular Firefox browser, with approximately 1,300 changes from the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. So, Firefox 3 Beta 3 should be more stable, perform faster, use memory more efficiently, and fit better on different operating systems.

This beta release is targeted to Web developers and Firefox testing community only. It has many improvements, compared to the earlier Firefox 3 Beta 2 release. The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when the product is fully ready for common users.

Some Features of Firefox 3 Beta 3:

• One-click site info. Just click on a site favicon to get more info about the site.
• Improved Malware Protection with warnings.
• New Web Forgery Protection page. Blocks suspected web forgery pages.
• New SSL error pages for invalid SSL certificates.
• New add-on manager to find, add, disable, and uninstall plugins.
• Automatic check for versions of add-ons and plugins.
• Secure add-on updates. Insecure add-on updates will be disabled.
• Informs your anti-virus software about download of executables.
• Supports Vista Parental Controls.
• Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.
• Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.
• Easier password management.
• Improved download manager with resumable downloading.
• Integration with the Mac and Linux.
• Improved Location bar & auto-complete feature.
• Smart Bookmarks Folder for easy management of your bookmarks.
• Improved speed and optimized memory use.
• And many more features to give you a safer, faster and better browsing experience.

If you are interested to test the Firefox 3 Beta 3, you can download it from here. It is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a variety of languages. Mind it that, this is a Beta release and for testing purpose only. If you are not sure about this version, better use your present stable version!

AOL on Friday, announced that it will end support for Netscape Navigator browser and encouraged the users to make the move to Firefox. Is it the end of Netscape? Well, according to the official blog post, AOL will continue to release security patches for the most recent version of Netscape until February 1. After that, there will be no “active product support” for any version of the Netscape Navigator browser. So Netscape’s reign is coming to an end!

The blog post says that, Netscape will still be available for download from the Netscape Archive, but no support will be offered. AOL recommended that users instead download Firefox and add the Netscape theme and Netscape extensions.

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” wrote Tom Drapeau, director of AOL/Netscape development. “Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.”

AOL is now focusing on ad-supported web business. They needs lots of resources to fight big rivals like Microsoft and Google. So, resources for Netscape are limited. After the death of Netscape Browser, Netscape.com will continue to serve as a general use Internet portal.