How does Firefox make money ?

Firefox makes money from the in-built search bar in the browser. It gets paid for every sponsored link displayed in the search results when the search bar in the browser is used. See the second question in this link for confirmation. I am bit surprised to see that it made around $50 million in 2005 from this. Also see the blog of chairman of mozilla about 2008 financial results. The revenues are around $80million.

They really deserve it. It is really good business revenue model by being open source at the same time. No wonder how they managed to continuously come up with nice products and features. On the other hand, I appreciate Wikipedia also a lot. It has a very small team which manages the infrastucture. The organization is run entirely on donations. But I sometimes feel pity when they request for money. I could easily make $100 million a year if they place one ad per page. I appreciate their noble intentions.

Today I installed firefox 3.6 after spending a long time with my 3.0. I feel that it had lot of improvements especially the speed. I feel that there is a noticeable difference in the speed. Mozilla claims that there is 3 times improvement in the speed but I cannot quantify that. The responsiveness is also better. However, its consumes 300-400MB of main memory. Overall, I liked the new 3.6 browser.

Fix for itunes not grouping the same albums together

Sometimes it happens that even though a set of files has the same album name, they are not grouped together. This becomes a bigger problem when they are transferred into the iphone/ipod. In the iphone, they will be presented under different albums and hence with different covers. So, the nice cover flow feature of the iphone becomes ugly. Stupidly, even though the same album is shown with different covers, the list of songs under each cover will be the same. For me, this is an irritating problem.

After some googling, I found that itunes does not use just the album name to group the songs. It uses other fields like artist name, album art etc to group it. So, the fix is to have the same artist name, album artist name for the entire album. Even the album art does matter. If you want to be religious about the artist name do not want to change it, you still have a way. You can group them under a single compilation. See the discussions here, here, and here to get more details about the fix.

You can use itunes to change the properties of the music files. But, if you manage your own mp3 without itunes, it may be a good idea to use a tool to do batch edit of ID3 tag names. I use a software named "Media Monkey" to do this. Its a nice and feature rich tool. You can apply tags to set of files at the same time. Previously I used to use "ID3 TagIT". When you use a different tool other than itunes, you should remember that you should delete the files from itunes and reload them. Removing form the playlist is not enough, it should be removed from the music library also. Or else, if you place the files in the playlist, it will still retain the old tags. (I faced this problem first hand ;) )

Fix (Summary):
- Make sure that the artist name is the same
- Make sure that the album artist name is the same
- Make sure that the album art is the same
- Optionally, Try to group them as single compilation
- If you are not using itunes to change tags, remember to remove songs from itunes library (not playlist) and reload

Uninstalling/Removing Groove Monitor (Folder Sync)

What is groove monitor ? First of all, dont worry. Its not a malware or spyware. It comes with microsoft office 2007. You will start noticing a "Folder Sync" button in the explorer. It is a collaboration tool that helps people working in teams. One can create groove workspace which is used to share files between people working together. Once you update files on your machine, the latest version of it can be seen by your teammates. See this link from Microsoft for more info.

Not everyone who works with office 2007 will want to share documents. I do not understand why this feature is being forced on people. This gets installed by default when upgrading to office 2007. Nothing comes for free. The corresponding process (groovemonitor.exe) occupies 30K of memory. Moreover it creates panic in the users. First time I started seeing the "Folder Sync" on the explorer, I was suspecting that its a malware/spyware.

I searched on how to remove this from running. There are many sites which suggested to disable it in the startup programs by running 'msconfig'. But that solution did not work for me. The process kept on coming back and the "Folder Sych" button did not go away. Some sites even suggested to remove the exe file which I think is not a good solution. Finally, I found a neat way to remove it.

1. In control panel, go to "add or remove programs"
2. Choose "Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007" in the list
3. Click "Change". (Do not click "Remove")
4. Three options will be presented.
5. Choose "Add or remove features" and click "Continue"
6. A list of features will be presented
7. Click on box beside "Microsoft office groove" and select "Not available"
8. A small red cross will appear on this feature.
9. Click "Continue" and let the office 2007 uninstall the feature for you.