And he's got a point.  It really does kind of stink of Web Nouveau marketing hype.  I'm sure at some point "zeitgeist" stunk of magazine or television trends as well.  If there was a call to use the term more often, it might even find it's place on a list of Obnoxious Industry Terms That Have Lost All Meaning right in between "edgy" and "compelling".

Google doesn't care, though.  The word means something and is an accurate description of what Google Zeitgeist does. So there.

According to Google, their Zeitgeist describes:

[s]earch patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google. For both breaking news and obscure information alike, people around the world search Google. This flurry of searches often exposes interesting trends, patterns, and surprises. The Google Zeitgeist page is regularly updated to reflect tidbits of information related to the search behavior of Google users.

So firstly, let's face it: A zeitgeist of Google = a zeitgeist of the internet = a zeitgeist of the world.
What other channel receives and parses more information for a larger demographic?  This is it if you want to know what the modern world is thinking.  At the main page, called the Zeitgeist Report, there is an overview of recent and common Google searches seperated by category and type.  From there, more granular queries can be made.  It's all very broad and simple and gives a very digestable view of recent transactions at Google.com.

Will this change your world?  I guess not, it's didn't change mine.  But it's very cool all the same, so stop hating. 

Come on. I did it and I'm a total cheap skate!

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So Firefox 1.5 is a significant improvement. They've included a few features that probably shouldve been there all along, improved the preferences panel, dramatically shortened startup time, and solved memory and cycle leak problems. Downside? Some extension developers have been slow to update their products, and that's left a few of us without our favorite extended Firefox features.

So there are a few options here. You can wait for authorized updates from the developers. They're all coming, trust me. Or you can find versions that people have modified to work with Firefox 1.5, and hope they're stable. Some features can be replicated by other extensions that have been officially updated and you can try those out. Some people have advised modifying the config info for their actuall Firefox installation to make it think that it's only version 1, thereby causing it to not reject extensions that are not allowed for later versions. This will cause Firefox to allow ALL version1-ready extensions and frankly, makes me a bit nervous.

I choose instead, to modify the extensions directly. This is a more granular process and effects each extension individually. This way, you won't unknowingly install extensions that aren't rated for your Firefox, it'll have to be very deliberate. The odds of anything catastrophic happening are very slim. Worst case, you may have to startup in safe mode and uninstall any unstable extensions. All the same, I'm not in any way advising or taking responsibility for damage caused by what I'm about to tell you.

How to modify your Firefox Extensions to work in newer versions

• go to the download page for the extension
• Right-click and download the extension to your desktop
• Open the xpi file with a package explorer such as WinRAR
• Open the file called install.rdf in a text editor such as Notepad
• Find this line:

  <em:maxVersion>*</em:maxVersion>

• Change the line to:

  <em:maxVersion>1.6</em:maxVersion>

• Save the file back into the xpi
• Double click the xpi to install