SnapHawk Blog

Late last month, Mozilla revealed a new interface feature for Firefox called “Tab Sets” (formerly called “Tab Candy”)  that is poised to revolutionize and organize the way you browse the Web.  Tab Sets allow users to organize their tabs into separate spaces, or sets, and gives a full window view of their layout.  This new feature will be available within Firefox 4 Beta 4, to be released on August 23.  With Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome 6 set to be released soon, this feature could set Firefox apart from the competition.

Over the past few days, I have had the chance to play around and experiment with Tab Sets.  So far, my impression has been overwhelmingly positive. I have been known to have up to 30 tabs open at one time in the same window.  Some might call me a tab addict.  I often google something, open search results in new tabs, browse a little, and then think of something else to google.  Often I am hesitant to close a tab because I’m not sure if I’ll need to come back to it.  The result is a bunch of tabs crammed on the small strip at the top of the browser.  With Tab Sets, I don’t have to worry about the number of pages I have open, because I can now organize the tabs into separate sets.

In the past year or so, the world of gadgets, devices and consumer technology products has expanded and astonished shoppers around the world. Time and time again we learn that technology keeps advancing faster and doing more exciting things than ever.  Here’s a quick look at the coolest, most revolutionary products to hit the market in recent memory:

Smartphones that are even smarter. We all know it: smartphones have been on the market for a while now.  But there’s no doubt their presence is growing, and they’re getting more advanced every day.  Touch screens are becoming the norm, and there are over 70,000 “apps” available in the Android Market and 200,000 available in Apple’s App Store which can do pretty much anything you could want or imagine (within reason).  Now that 23% of all mobile subscribers have a smartphone, people are using these devices more and more for Internet searching and browsing.  And even though Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are getting most of the buzz, RIM’s BlackBerry is still the U.S. market leader.  The growth of the market size and fierce competition leave us with no doubt that smartphones will be hot gadgets for a long time.

Ever since Google began dominating the search engine market, many up-and-coming search engines have come and gone.  But as far as we can remember, none have stormed the market with as much vigor as Microsoft’s Bing has in this past year.  In fact, Bing’s driving force seems largely to compete with Google to be the world’s largest and most popular search engine—a bold move to say the least.

Right from the get-go, Microsoft made clear intentions it wanted to make a huge push in the search engine market when it decided to rebrand its current Live Search.  On June 1, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, and announced that they would spend between $80 million and $100 million on a marketing campaign for its latest search engine.  So far it seems to have been a fairly successful strategy, as Bing grew its US search engine market share to 13%, putting it in 3rd place just slightly behind Yahoo!.  With the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal already finalized and in transition, Bing will soon power Yahoo! Search making it, at last, a viable competitor with Google.  That would give Bing a 26% market share compared to Google’s 65%, though with Bing’s current pace of growth, a market share of 33% is very possible in the near future.  Bing’s growing market share is especially important to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) professionals, as a competitive market may mean lower prices for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, leading to a greater number of businesses adding SEM to their advertising model.