Personal contact management is an application most software developers have neglected in recent years. Microsoft still dominates the landscape with its Outlook contact manager, Google on the other hand has never really had a serious offering.

Now Mozilla has entered the fray with Contacts, a contact management plug-in for Firefox.

It’s still at version 0.1, not even a beta at this stage. Which means Contacts is clunky and could cause crashes or other problems. In fact, Mozilla recommends you don’t use it with your normal Firefox profile.

The still-unfinished software promises to pull all your contacts together from a variety of sources. There are importers for:

• Twitter
• Gmail
• Gravatar Avatar Images and
• Native address book (on your computer)

The first three worked on my system. The Gmail importer works when you are logged into Google on one of your browser tabs. The Twitter importer needs a Twitter password stored in your Firefox password list. The first two work almost instantly, the Gravatar importer takes a few minutes.

At this stage, the contact list isn’t much better than Gmail’s and I found a many duplicates and unidentified contacts in my list.

Eventually, Mozilla contacts will allow you to auto-complete names and email addresses when filling on web forms.

For now, it has limited functionality, but there’s potential here. I’m particularly impressed with the data portability – keeping one set of contacts on my desktop and laptop.

Have you tried Contacts? What do you think of it?

A press release from Nielsen (not online at the time of writing) says Mozilla Firefox is winning New Zealand  users away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

It is, but Microsoft's browser still accounts for a 60 percent market share. According to Nielsen, Internet Explorer dropped from 72 percent to 60 percent between July 2006 and July 2009. Over the same period Firefox climbed from 11 percent to 20 percent. The remaining market share goes to rats and mice – with Google's Chrome picking up just 3.2 percent of the market.

At the current rate, it'll be at least two more years before Microsoft's market share drops below 50 percent – and longer again before Firefox goes past Internet Explorer.

Nielsen's press release doesn't explain what it means by market share. However, the company manages a net measuring business where it tracks traffic to a number of commercial websites. Browser information is included in the traffic information, so it's reasonable to assume Nielsen  adds up each browser's share of the total traffic to these sites. Because Nielsen's clients are among New Zealand's busiest sites, it is a reasonable measure of total share.

What Nielsen doesn't measure is the way many users, myself included, switch between browsers for different jobs. I'd also like to see data on which versions of the various browsers are used.

There's also no mention of mobile browsers – which may still be very much a freak show – but are likely to grab market share quickly now New Zealand has two reasonable mobile data networks.

http://nz.nielsen.com/news/index.shtml

It is four weeks since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 . That's ample time for testing and evaluating. I've used the software just about every day since the launch and feel ready to report on the experience.

Until now Microsoft Internet Explorer has been a necessity and not my browser of choice. A necessity because there are a limited number of sites and online services, including a number from Microsoft, optimised or in some cases restricted to Explorer.

For the past four years Mozilla Firefox has consistently performed better than Internet Explorer. It was always faster and less bloated. Add-ons give Firefox a flexibility older versions of Internet Explorer could not match. And, while Microsoft’s browsers were better integrated with Windows and certain key desktop applications, Firefox was still able to deliver a better all round user experience.

In practice I've needed to run the two browsers alongside each other. Explorer has always played second fiddle. Can the upgrade to IE8 change that?

What's good about Internet Explorer 8?

IE8 is fast

IE8 loads pages considerably faster than Firefox 3.0.8. One heavy-duty Web 2.0 page I frequent is ready in around 28 seconds with IE8. The same page takes 52 seconds with Firefox. The difference isn’t always as pronounced, however I did the anal retentive thing and timed a number of pages to discover they all loaded faster with IE8.

Once Firefox loads into memory, it  restarts in seconds. But the first time it loads in a session can run to as long as five minutes. That’s just plain awful. In many cases Firefox takes so long to fire up, I wonder if it is loading at all. I  find my self opening two or more instances. IE8 always fires up in seconds. However, there's a down side to this as we shall see later.

Fabulous developer tools

IE8 have great developer tools. Hit F12 and you can view a page’s source code and CSS. This is great for fixing problems with your own pages. To get similar features in Firefox you need to install the Firebug extension.

Internet Explorer 8 is cleaner than earlier versions

It is web-standard compliant, has a tidy user interface and most of the time renders pages beautifully with crisp text.

I also like:

• Colour-coded tabs Open a new tab and its colour will match that of the parent page.
• Tab grouping Tabs are grouped with their parent tab.
• Smart address bar Similar to the Firefox’s new address bar, it remembers where you’ve been and your most visited sites.
• Useful new tabs Open a new tab and you get links to the sites you’re most likely to want to visit.
• Tab view A quick tab feature allows you to see thumbnails of all open tabs.
• RSS Internet Explorer does a better job of handling feeds than Firefox.
• Search bar Sure Firefox has the same feature, but I like the way the IE8 search bar works and the way it can be used to search the current page as well as the entire Internet.
• Smooth integration Microsoft gets nervous when people talk about the way its products integrate, but IE8 works smoothly with Windows and Office.  The software also downloads and installs without a hitch.
• Security See the anti-phishing feature kick in for the first time is impressive.

Bad things about Internet Explorer 8

Within hours of installing and running Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows Vista Ultimate system I quickly discovered some negatives. Let’s look at them one by one:

1. Key features  don’t work or are erratic

There are two pre-installed items on the favorites bar: Suggested Sites and Get More Add-ons. Neither of them work. Clicking either opens a windows that says “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” and there’s a button labeled Diagnose Connection Problems. This doesn’t happen all the time, just most of the time.

Some basic things don’t work at all on some sites. For example I tried joining Chi.mp using IE8, but the Captcha feature didn’t show up making it impossible to use. I had to switch to Firefox to enroll.

While we’re on the subject, Microsoft hasn’t bothered to localize spellings. Outside of North America the word is favourite, not favorite.

2. Crashing

After one month of use I experienced three major Internet Explorer 8 crashes. In each case I’ve had to reboot the machine and lost work because of the crashes. I’m not certain what causes the problems, but there’s something weird happening. I’m running IE8 on a Windows Vista Ultimate system with 2GB of Ram. Firefox has its problems, but it never crashes in such a spectacular and worrying fashion. I’ve also experienced a number of less serious crashes which are fixed by closing and reopening IE8. Frankly this instability is the biggest barrier to my switching from Firefox to Internet Explorer. Presumably Microsoft will fix up the bugs over the coming weeks, but this does not fill me with confidence.

3. A lot of pages look strange

Internet Explorer 8 may be standards compliant, but it won’t display all the pages you throw at it. Ironically the biggest problem come when you view a page designed for IE7 or IE6. There’s a compatibility button in the address bar to ‘fix’ odd-looking pages by reverting the browser to IE7 mode. Nevertheless some pages still struggle. And curiously the button doesn’t always appear when you need it.

There are other anomalies. For example, if I visit the dashboard at WordPress.com, IE 8 frequently struggles to display the stats graph, even though it shows up perfectly well in Firefox.

4. Unable to automatically reload settings on start-up

It’s not a deal breaker, but one Firefox feature I love is the way it opens up with all the tabs exactly as they were left when you closed down. IE8 doesn’t do this. Apparently it was designed this way.

5. Active X is still a pain in the bum

Sorry Microsoft, I know Active X is your baby, but there’s a good reason everyone whinges about it. Here's a simple explanation of why it is so awful for non-technical readers.

6. Spell-checking missing in action

Yes I know I'm supposed to be a professional writer and I shouldn't need a spell checker. Generally I don't. I switched it off  in Microsoft Word, but when I'm adding comments to someone's blog my typing isn't so hot. A spell checker is a way of a avoiding red faces.

And the ugly?

Despite the headline, there’s nothing ugly. I claim poetic licence. Internet Explorer 8 is a good all-round browser. It will meet most people’s needs most of the time. It comes close to meeting mine – very close. I’m certain most users will happily browse away using IE8 without giving the technology a second thought.

However, it’s shortcomings mean, at least until the next iteration or service pack arrives IE8 remains on my machine by necessity for those IE only sites and not because it’s the best browser. If it was more reliable, this decision could change. This is a pity because there is much to love about IE8 – and that’s not something I would ever have said about IE7.

Thanks to social bookmarking tools like Delicious and bookmark synching programs like Foxmarks, there are smarter ways of dealing with bookmarks on your personal computer.

If you have to transfer your Firefox bookmarks from one computer to another and you're working on a locked down company machine, or you  like doing things this way, here’s how to export your Firefox bookmarks:

1. If you haven't already done so, open Firefox.

2. From the menu at the top of the screen select Bookmarks.

3. Choose the Organize Bookmarks option.

4. In Firefox 3 this opens a new window called Library. In older versions of Firefox it is called Bookmarks Manager.

5. In Firefox 3 chose the Import and Backup menu, then Export HTML. In an older version of Firefox you need to choose File then select Export.

6. This brings up a dialogue. From here save the bookmark.html file wherever you wish. Some people prefer to save to the Desktop. If you're saving to a USB memory drive then browse through the folders to find the drive.