What do you get when you mix the best browser with the best mapping service?

Yes, you get aerial photography of a huge crop circle of the Firefox logo.

Curious as to how the Firefox Crop Circle was made? Here are all the behind the scenes details.

The latest full version of Firefox, the sexy open source browser from the fine folks at Mozilla, has been released.

I’ve discussed some of the changes to the search bar in this version in the past, but there’s a lot more new stuff to play with.

Here is a list of all the new features.

• I really like that spell checking is integrated in the browser now. In previous versions I used an extension to handle that, but it always felt kludgey and not very stable.
• The new theme struck me as a bit too “pretty” at first, but I got used to it quickly. The way the Go button is tethered to the address bar is nice.
• The built-in phishing protection will be nice for protection less savvy users from scams. It’s based on the Google Safe Browsing extension for previous versions of Firefox.
• The tabbed browsing changes seem useful for some, but I’m a huge control freak about that kind of thing and I use the Tab Mix Plus extension. Although it hasn’t been updated officially for 2.0, their development build is working perfectly for me.

Here are the full release notes for those of you that like all the details.

Don’t forget to go to Firefox Add-ons to check if there are new versions of your extensions.

After many years in production, Internet Explorer 7 seem to be nearing release. They’ve given the browser a new look, added real tabs support, an internal RSS reader, and to further achieve parity with Firefox and Opera, they’ve added a search bar to the main interface.

It’s nice to see them adapting to the browser market and adding many of the features people have become used to. I just hope that all the evil CSS bugs that have plagued IE6 have been fixed. I know quite a few rapidly balding web developers who would be very happy if this turns out to be so.

I wonder if Microsoft is timing the release of IE7 to coincide with the imminent release of Firefox 2 in an attempt to steal their thunder.

Some of you may have tried the rather nifty Google Suggest that auto-completes your search entry based on the most popular searched for queries. If you liked it, you’ll probably be glad to know that this functionality is going to be included by default in the search bar in Firefox 2.0.

Here is a shot of it in action:

Yahoo! also seems to provide suggestions in the beta, but I was unable to find a version of it on their site.

If you can’t wait for Firefox 2.0 to get out of beta to try this, here is an extension that will do mostly the same thing for current versions of the browser. The extension was coded by Google themselves, so hopefully that means it’s stable.

Apart from an internet connection and a computer, what else do you need when you want to search for something online?

Yes! A browser.

It’s true that many people still seem to think that the little blue e (or the little compass, if you’re on a Mac) is the internet, but more savvy users like yourselves know that a browser is just another program and that it can easily be replaced.

Mozilla Firefox has become amazingly popular in the last couple of years, but for those of you who still don’t know about it, allow me to pimp it out a bit. There are many security and usability reasons why you might like Firefox better than other browsers, but I’ll stick to pointing out its integrated search features.

By default, Firefox comes with a search bar positioned to the right of the address bar:

Other browsers such as Opera have this, and it seems that IE7 will add this whenever it is actually released, but I prefer the way Firefox does things. You can enter your keywords, including any other search syntax, such as Google’s site: command, and the search results will be displayed in the browser.

The default search engine used will be Google, but you can easily change that by clicking on the G icon. You can also add other engines by clicking “Add Engines.” This takes you to the Mozilla Add-ons site from where you can add new inegrated search engines.

If you dislike using the search bar, or if you get rid of it because it takes too much space, you can enter your search directly into the address bar, which will do a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. This can be changed to use something else since sometimes the results don’t seem all that lucky, but I’ll leave the details of that for another post.

If you want to use another search engine from the address bar, first go to the site and then right click in the entry area and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”

The keyword search is saved as a bookmark. A dialog will open asking you for a name, the keyword that will activate the search and where you would like to save the bookmark. I recommend the Quick Searches folder which should already be in your bookmarks.

Now searching with Ask.com is as easy as entering “ask anything” into your address bar. One cool thing to remember is that if you hit ALT + Enter, your search will open in a new tab, which in case you didn’t know, is one of Firefox’s best features.

That’s pretty much all you need to know about searching in this browser. What are you waiting for? Go download and make your searching more efficient.