Internet connection speeds have evolved in recent years to blinding speeds.  Today, we’re used to information delivered fast.  But what is your patience threshold?  How impatient do you get waiting for your browser to render the content you want to see?

I often resort to finger tapping or humming a little tune while waiting for my browser to render.  It seems though, that I have less time for humming and tapping since trying out the new beta version of Apple Safari for the PC.

Since Steve Jobs introduced Safari at WWDC, there’s been a lot of talk about why anybody who’s not on the Mac platform would want to use Safari over good browser options like Firefox.  Render speed may be one reason for me to at least keep at least one Safari window open, depending on what type of work I’m doing.

In truly unscientific tests, I’ve compared Safari, Firefox, and IE on the same PC hardware.  Head to head, Safari was leaps ahead of the competition loading record details, switching records in the console, and walking through Salesforce Setup and Customization.  I don’t have exact timing, but in many cases, it was rendering at about twice the speed of the competition.  Such performance gains make me tempted to keep Setup open in Safari, just to sail through Salesforce administration faster. 

I’ve read mixed reviews of people’s trouble installing Safari on Windows, but I got it in and running with no issues on Windows XP Professional and Home.  You can download Safari from Apple.

There are some things I’d miss if I tried to use Safari entirely, like Sxipper, Firefox Extensions, and things like custom buttons.  I’d also miss color.  Safari’s toolbars are almost entirely monochromatic so they’re clean, but almost too sterile looking.  But as with most Apple products, it’s functional and pretty intuitive.  If screen real estate is what you want, Safari delivers with minimal space required for most of the browser functions you’ll need.

If you like cruising through work, it’s worth taking a look at Safari and seeing if it’s right for you.  It may not become your primary browser, but it’s worth having on hand when speed counts.

Technorati Tags: salesforce.com apple safari browser firefox

My browser hits dozens of sites each day, whether work related or personal.  In order to provide a personal browsing experience, each one wants to know who I am.  Obviously certain applications like Salesforce.com use identity to ensure I see what I’m supposed to and nothing more.  My problem is, each site has one or more logins and remembering which login I use as well as which password I’ve associated with each site had grown to be a nightmare.  That’s when I found Sxipper.

Sxipper is a productivity plugin for Firefox that eases the burden of identity and password management.  Here’s how it works.  Once you’ve installed Sxipper, just go about your normal business on the web and when you come to a site that wants your identity, Sxipper will offer you any identities you’ve used in your browser before and with one simple click, you get logged in.  For new sites, Sxipper offers to pre-fill web forms for creating site identities and on your next visit, you can get in with one click.  Sxipper is also an OpenID provider so it works seamlessly with that identity on the web. 

A simple example of this is with Salesforce.com.  I have seven different logins to Salesforce, depending on which org and role I want to login as.  When I hit the login page, all seven identities are shown and all I have to do is click once on the user ID I want and I’m logged in.  It’s that simple.  This has really simplified administration in Salesforce as I can just hit Logout, and the next page I see has my seven identities on it.  No typing an email address or password, just a click and I’m in another org.

What works nice about this is that if I need to see what password I used for a site, I can just go into my Firefox Options and look it up.  To ensure I’m the only person who can lookup my passwords in Firefox, I set a master password which allows only me to be able to query on the passwords saved for each site.  If you install Sxipper, you should do the same, just to prevent anyone else form looking up saved passwords.

Sxipper comes from Sxip Identity, the enterprise identity management company founded by Dick Hardt.  If you haven’t seen Dick’s presentation of Identity 2.0, it’s well worth 15 minutes of your time.  It’s entertaining and helpful in understanding the types of identity we use every day, whether on the web or in the non-web world.  Dick was also a speaker at Dreamforce 06 on Identity 2.0, though you can’t see his slides on that video.  To fully “get it,” you need to watch the 15 minute one above.

If you look around on the web about Sxipper, you’d see that many people see it’s main function as just filling out web forms.  While that’s a noble function, that almost seems secondary to managing identity for me.  Take a look at the awards they’ve been nominated for at Next Web and WebWare.  Though still called Beta, I’ve found it to work like a champ for me and it’s been very stable.  To find out more information or to download Sxipper, visit their website.

Technorati Tags: sxipper, identity 2.0, passwords, productivity, addons, firefox, salesforce.com, passwords