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Amazon’s traffic ranking-service Alexa finally gets rid of its most criticized flaw - strong bias towards Internet Explorer - by releasing their toolbar for the Firefox browser!

it will be interesting to see how strong this is going to affect rankings over the next few weeks, while ‘Sparky’ (the nickname of the Firefox-extension) supposedly experiences some adpotion. of course, if Alexa’s extrapolation-algorithms have been on par, we probably might not see any changes at all…

according to Read/WriteWeb, Firefox 3 will offer support for running web-applications offline. though it’s not yet clear on which level this might happen, this is major news for providers of service-based web-software. the biggest advantage of online-apps - using them on any device with net-access with no need to sync data - is at the same time their worst caveat - when connectivity goes down, so do online-apps and all data stored within them (that’s why it is a good idea even for fulltime Gmail-users to backup their mail via POP3).

of course, Firefox isn’t alone in trying to move web-apps offline - Adobe’s Apollo framework promotes offline-services on top of their successful Flash-platform. Flash has bee used to store data in a local cache for quite a time, as it has been the only cross-browser solution besides storing (mini-chunks of) data within cookies (Niall Kennedy gives a good overview on various methods of storing data locally). applications like Scrybe (private beta) let us anticipate the way future online/offline-apps might look&feel.

besides Adobe, several open source projects are working on solutions for the offline-dilemma: the Dojo Offline Project and POW (Plain Old Webserver) both implement a proxy http-server for running local copies of web-applications. while Dojo Offline isn’t available yet, POW - a firefox plugin (which means basically a web-server implemented in Javascript!) - is ready for download.

naturally, existing web-apps require heavy modification to work with any of the mentioned offline-approaches, meaning we still have to wait for real-life apps leveraging the benefits of going offline.

beta 1 of Firefox 2 - codenamed ‘Bon Echo’ - was released to the general public earlier this week. current Firefox-users probably might not want to upgrade to Bon Echo yet, as most extensions don’t work with the new browser. at first glance, it looks like the Firefox-team is improving the browser only incrementally. besides the integrated spellcheck (which is great!) there seem to be no major killer-features. minor improvements include flexible RSS-subscription (supporting Bloglines, MyYahoo and Google Reader), advanced browser-history and individual close-buttons on all browser-tabs.

liferhacker has some nice screenshots…