Saturday 12 April 2008

Faster Browsing with Mozilla FireFacts

A spin-off group of the Mozilla Firefox team has developed a new browser aimed at reducing unnecessary browsing of web sites on the Internet. Aimed initially at online news sites, the new "FireFacts" browser compares the hosted content with reality.

Former Netscape programmer Simon Jennings, who has contributed key routines to the Mozilla Firefox browser explained. "We realized that a significant proportion of web traffic consisted of information nobody wanted to read, or that was so inaccurate it was laughable".

Key to its success will be a new algorithm developed to filter out pointless and baseless opinion as well as hidden agendas, boring diaries and opportunistic plagiarism. It searches its template database for matches such as "Today I did xxxxxxx", "I haven't blogged for a while as I'm so busy, but xxxxxxx", "Here are some photos I took of xxxxxx in my garden" and "It's the 3rd day of our vacation and we visited xxxxxxxx".

For news sites, the system checks the number of comment postings added by readers. If there are more than 3 comments, the article is most likely to have been written in a sensationalist style, usually based on a selective interpretation of the truth and designed to trigger mindless ranting by its readership.

In our tests of the beta version, we found that it reduced blog browsing by as much as 98% and some of the more popular news sites were reduced to just their logo.

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