Design goals for Namoroka specifically include performance and customization.

Performance

Observable improvements in user-perceptible performance metrics such as startup, time to open a new tab, and responsiveness when interacting with the user interface. Common user tasks should feel faster and more responsive.

Integration of the Mozilla Labs Personas project, improvements to the Awesomebar and form autocomplete.

Personalization & Customization

Like any developer preview release, you can expect localization and language customizations to default to US English. Many (if not most) browser add-ons may not work correctly, although I have not seen a break in the ones I use most (Weave, Adblock Plus, and Illimitux). You may be able to get some more plugins to work by installing the Nightly Tester Tools extension, or by disabling compatibility checking as follows:

enter ‘about:config’ in the address bar (without quotes)

Right-click in the browser window > select ‘New’ > Boolean > “extensions.checkCompatibility” > FALSE

Restart Firefox

Sit back and enjoy a much faster browsing experience on the Mac with the new Firefox release.

Minneapolis tops our list of America’s safest cities, and not just for its crime rate. In ranking the cities on our list, we looked at workplace fatalities, traffic-related deaths and natural disaster risk; the City of Lakes ranked in the top 10 of all four categories. It’s also one of America’s best places to live cheaply and offers easy access to some of the most scenic drives in the country.

Click here for the full list.

(thanks psk)

Social networks are successfully adding (active) members from demographics that, until recently, were not even considered a target market. Facebook, of course, is quickly headed towards becoming the 800 pound gorilla in this domain with an estimated 175 million profiles (and growing). That is about 1 in 34 people on the planet, which is pretty impressive for a website that has only been around for around 5 years, even if you discount for the number of inactive and duplicate profiles.

Facebook maintains general statistics on their press page, if you would like some more numbers.

The new version of Wordpress (my blogging platform of choice) has a very cool new social news aspect to it. The dashboard shows popular blog posts from around the world that are related to the content on your own weblog. This is exactly how I found this interesting photoblog post by Matt Mullenweg, who apparently just visited the Taj Mahal in Agra with Om Malik, a well-known web and technology writer (and founder of the GigaOm network of technology blogs).

Heavy Arctic Icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent in Resolute Bay, Nunavut Territory, Canada.

Worker resting on bales of cotton, Thonakaha, Korhogo, Ivory Coast. Cotton crops occupy approximately 335,000 square klilometers worldwide, and use nearly one quarter of all pesticides sold.

Sand dune in the heart of vegetation on Fraser Island, Queensland, Australia. Fraser Island (named after Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked on the island in 1836) is the world’s largest sand island. On top of this rather infertile substratum, a humid tropical forest has developed in the midst of which wide dunes intrude, moving with the wind. Fraser Island has important water resources, including nearly 200 freshwater dune lakes, and has varied fauna such as marsupials, birds, and reptiles. Welcoming 200,000 visitors a year without damaging the local fauna and flora is a real challenge to sustainable development on the island, which was declared a World Heritage site by Unesco in 1992.

The Notre Dame de la Paix basilica in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast. In 1983, Yamoussoukro replaced Abidjan as the official capital of Ivory Coast. President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who died in 1993, made his native village into a modern city with a grid of wide avenues - which are almost deserted - and every modern facility: international airport, luxury hotels, golf course, prestigious universities, and so forth. Yamoussoukro also boasts the world’s biggest basilica, Notre Dame de la Paix (Our Lady of Peace), consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1990. The former president, who donated this building to the Vatican, insisted that he had financed the basilica’s cost out of his own personal fortune. This building was seen as a colossal waste by many Ivorians. It was highly controversial in a country that lacks schools and hospitals and has only nine doctors for every 100,000 inhabitants (compared to 413 in Norway).

Flock of sheep, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. After the missionary period, between gold fever and the first drillings for oil, sheep-raising became the chief activity in the north of the main island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. The local cabanas (sheep pastures) are huge sheep farms with 3.5 acres of land per head of livestock.

‘Tree of life’, Tsavo National Park, Kenya. This acacia is a symbol of life in the vast expanses of thorny savanna, where wild animals come to take advantage of its leaves or its shade. Tsavo National Park in southeastern Kenya, crossed by the Nairobi-Mombasa road and railway axis, is the country’s largest protected area (8,200 square miles, or 21,000 square kilometers) and was declared a national park in 1948.

Elephants in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The Okavango Delta is the world’s largest inland delta, flooding seasonally, and is populated by five ethnic groups of people, sharing it with hundreds of species of animals.

In other words, if you didn’t really pay too much attention to taxonomy in college but wished you should have, this video will freaking blow your mind.