It doesn’t happen too much anymore, but in the earlier days of browsers they would crash far too often, and I consequently lost what I was working on. I remember several occasions when I was writing a long e-mail and the browser crashed and I had to write it all over again. Another time I was writing a blog entry and was looking at another site to do some research when the site caused the browser to crash, leaving me with nothing but a blank screen and lost time.

Word Processors solved this problem ages ago, and I’m surprised web browsers haven’t followed suit. The solution is to periodically cache any user-entered data. That way, if the browser crashes, the data from the last backup is restored and instead of losing the entire thing, you only lose what you typed since the last backup. Firefox would need to start restoring tabs (or maybe the feature could be added to the Session Saver extension) but Opera already saves sessions, so all that’s left there is to repopulate the fields. There are probably some complexities that I’m not thinking of that the developers would have to overcome, but I for one think it would be a very useful feature.

I saw banner ad for lowermybills.com and clicked on it to see exactly what they provided. Essentially, it’s a service to compare the cost of a particular service, like internet access, cell phones, insurance, debt reduction and loans.

It’s pretty straightforward. You just type in your address or zip code after selecting the area you want to research and they display a table with all the different deals. I like having one place to go where I can compare prices at several different companies. I don’t know how good the service is and I can’t vouch for it at all, but it seems like it’s just providing information and you go through the actual company to sign up.

Anyhow, next time I’m looking for a service covered on the site, I plan to take a look to compare prices.