On Google's blog yesterday comes the announcement of enhanced searching capabilities for Firefox, the up and coming browser. The enhancement allows Google to prefetch, or start downloading the top results of your search in the background allowing you to get to the site you click on faster. The Mozilla Organization which builds Firefox has an FAQ on prefetching available.
It's comes as no surprise that Google is trying to support Firefox in any way it can, as they want to erode people's dependency on Microsoft's Explorer browser. I switched to Firefox myself about 6 months ago. It's faster and more secure than MS Explorer. I was actually using Apple's Safari before Firefox, but Safari still has a few faults, although it renders images and fonts better than Firefox.
In looking at the web statistics for all my sites I found that 74% of site visitors use MS Explorer compared to 18% for Firefox and 4% for Safari. That's a significant increase for Firefox and a big drop for Microsoft, after all Firefox 1.0 was released just under 5 months ago.
In other news, Search Engine Watch, the respected leader in disseminating news about Search Engine's announced today the winners of its 5th annual awards. The most surprising result, Outstanding Search Service went to Yahoo, not Google who came in second. Google did however get 4 other awards including Best News Search Engine, best US Shopping Search Engine, Most SEO/Webmaster Friendly Search Engine and Best Search Ads provider.