The successor of Firefox 3.0 has entered the Beta development stage as of October 14, 2008. In this context, Mozilla has made available for download Firefox 3.1 Beta 1. The next iteration of the open source browser, codenamed Shiretoko, is making headway in terms of development, having already passed through a couple of Alpha phases. With the 3.1 Beta 1 release, Mozilla is touting various improvements across the browser, including enhancements delivered to performance, web compatibility, and speed.

“This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1,” revealed Samuel Sidler, Quality Assurance Engineer at Mozilla. Even though it is nothing more than a development milestone, Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is available in no less than 36 languages for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Mozilla has added a plethora of features to Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 in comparison to the Alpha 2 release. In this regard, the draft specification for Geolocation was implemented along with support for the @font-face CSS property. However, one of the most relevant enhancements is the TraceMonkey new JavaScript engine, which is yet to be turned on by default. Mozilla informed that users would have to navigate to about:config, and then set javascript.options.jit.content to True, after which a browser restart is required.

Sidler added that “new features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include: Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine; added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties; a new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you're switching to; improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search; support for new web technologies such as the < video > and < audio > elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications”.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for Linux is available for download here.
Source: http://akupunyasitus.blogspot.com/

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The first Beta for Mozilla's Firefox 3.1 has been released to the public. Beta 1 adds one of the coolest features ever to hit the popular web-browser – a new tab-switching shortcut, bringing an enhanced Mac-feeling to the browsing experience.

First of all, everyone should note that Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. Although the beta includes a host of new features, and performance improvements, it is highly recommended that you read the release notes, as well as the known issues before installing it.

And now for the good stuff. Among the new additions in Firefox 3.1 Beta is added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties. The newly-added support for “CSS @font-face” allows users to specify a true type font file that includes a specific font they want to use to render a web page. This was one of the most widely-request features in Firefox, according to the development team. The Mac version, as well as the Windows one, includes @font-face support. Firefox for Linux, however, doesn't, but adding support is underway and “will be done by Firefox 3.1 final,” according to Mozilla.

Also worth noting is that Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is the first beta from Mozilla to include support for the

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Google Browser (Google Chrome) and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 are nothing short of resource hogs compared to Firefox 3.0.1. This is the conclusion presented by researchers from the Devil Mountain Software company, who threw the three browsers one against the other on the same "arena", a Dell OptiPlex 745 (Core 2 Duo @ 2.66GHz) with 2GB of RAM and running both Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3.

The conclusion on IE8 Beta 2 is not that flattering: "What we found was another example of unchecked Microsoft code "bloat," complete with "shirt-bursting, waistline-stretching" memory consumption and the kind of CPU-hogging thread growth normally reserved for massively parallel server farms," a representative from the Devil Mountain Software company stated.

But the fact of the matter is that Google Chrome, is even worse. "What we found was truly shocking: After re-executing our 10-site, multi-tab scenario across all 4 browsers, we discovered that it is Google Chrome, not Internet Explorer 8, that is the true memory consumption leader," the Devil Mountain Software company member indicated.

In a 10-site, multi-tab browsing scenario, IE8 Beta 2 consumed no less than 332MB of RAM, with Chrome Beta also eating a lot of system memory, namely 324MB. By contrast, Internet Explorer 7 only managed to climb as high as 250MB. In this context, it appears that the new technologies, features and capabilities built into Internet Explorer 8, as well as Google Chrome, require more resources than Firefox to perform the same tasks.

"Of course, both browsers look absolutely porcine when compared to the lean, mean Firefox 3.01 (151MB peak, 104MB average working set size). And lest we forget, IE 7 continues to hover somewhere between the fit & trim Firefox and the obesity that defines Chrome/IE 8 (209MB peak, 142MB average)," the Devil Mountain Software company researcher added.

But when it comes down to CPU utilization, both Firefox 3.0.1 and Google Chrome managed to shame IE8 Beta 2, in terms of their hunger. Google Browser took no less than 45% of the processor while Firefox 3.0.1 managed a high of 42%. IE 8 Beta 2 used just 22% of the CPU under XP SP3 and 33% under Vista SP1, while IE7 took only 13% and 24% respectively.

"Both Firefox and IE 7 spawn a relatively modest number of threads (25 and 43, respectively), a fact related to their reliance on a single process instance to handle all tabbed sessions. By contrast, IE 8 spawns potentially hundreds of threads (153 in our latest test round), and spreads them out across its various instances (in our case, 6 discrete copies of iexplore.exe)," the Devil Mountain Software company member indicated, adding that, by contrast, Chrome was managing just 48 execution threads at the apex of the test scenario.

But in the end, the fact that Firefox 3.0.1 is superior, in terms of resource usage, to Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 shouldn't come as a surprise. Both Microsoft and Google's browsers are still in Beta development stage, albeit IE8 is in Beta 2, with the gold version expected to drop in November 2008, and considerably slower than its predecessor.

"Chrome, like IE 8, is a browser designed with tomorrow’s hardware in mind. Its use of a multi-process tabbing model – which, according to Google, helps isolate failures and protect complex web applications (like GMail or Google Docs) – means that it will always use more memory than Firefox, IE 7 and similar, single-process browsers. How such model will hold up under heavy use, especially on today’s hardware, remains to be seen," reads the conclusion from the Devil Mountain Software company.

Google Chrome is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for download here.
Firefox 3.0.1 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.0.1 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 3.0.1 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
By: Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor (news.softpedia.com)

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If Microsoft is moving into the Cloud, Google is expanding to the Desktop and to the Windows client. The Mountain-View search giant is on the verge of making available a beta version of Google Chrome, a browser initially designed to integrate only with the Windows platform, but which is set to be tailored to additional platforms in the future. Not even out yet, Google Chrome is positioned as an Internet Explorer killer, far beyond what Microsoft's rivals Mozilla and Opera have been capable of doing with their own products.

"This is just the beginning – Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust," revealed Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, engineering director.

At the time of this article the Google Chrome bits were not available for download yet. Google is attempting what representatives from the company referred to as a "fresh take on the browser," with every intention to "launch early and iterate." Anchored on the desktop and owning the vast majority of both the operating system and the browser markets, with Windows and Internet Explorer, the Redmond giant is in fact an intermediary between the end users and Google, located almost exclusively into the cloud.

Even though Google claims that Chrome will be made available "because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web," the fact of the matter is that the Mountain View company is making a decisive move to reduce the relevance of Internet Explorer on the world wide web.

At the end of August 2008, Winifred Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and chairperson and former chief executive officer of the Mozilla Corporation, announced that "we’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income."

So in this context, Google and Mozilla are now obvious partners, on the same front against Microsoft. At the end of August 2008, all the supported editions of Internet Explorer accounted for over 70% of the browser market, according to data from Net Applications, while Firefox was close to breaking the 20% milestone. As a newcomer, Google Chrome will start from zero, but the browser is bound to get traction fast, especially with Google's resources behind it.

The Google Browser features components from Apple's WebKit and Firefox and is a fully fledged open source product. Chrome sports a new approach to the graphical user interface, with the focus on Tabs but also features such as Omnibox, an address bar with auto-completion functionality, as well as a Speed Dial, privacy mode via the "incognito" window, a new method of managing the execution and usage of web applications, and malware protection.

"Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers," added Pichai and Upson.

Update: Google Chrome is available for download here.
By Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor (news.softpedia.com)

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Just a couple of days ago, Mike Shroepfer, Mozilla Vice President of Technology, revealed the roadmap for the open source browser beyond version 3.0. According to Shroepfer, Mozilla plans to make available the final version of Firefox 3.0 by the end of June 2008, and push onward with the development of Firefox 3.1. In this context, Firefox 3.1 is planned to hit the second half of 2008, followed by Firefox 4.0 in 2009. But, at the same time, these versions are not set in stone. Mozilla might release Firefox 3.2 or even 3.5 instead of 3.1, and 4.0 is too far way in order to provide anything palpable.

"Although we are talking about a '3.1' as being the next Firefox release and a '4.0' as being the next major release to come from Moz2 (Mozilla 2, the successor of the Gecko rendering engine), the actual version numbers are likely not decided, it is just useful to have one for now to talk about. It also turns out to be easier to increase the version to what you are really going to use later than decrease it which tends to mess up extension authors and nightly testers," explained Dave Townsend, Firefox Engineer.

Shroepfer's version 3.1 contradicts the official Firefox Product Release Roadmap provided by Mozilla, which has a version 3.5 planned between 3.0 and 4.0. But, at the same time, version 3.1 might evolve at least to 3.2 if the situation requires it. This means, of course, that there is a chance end users would be running Firefox 3.5 by this year's end, although it is quite slim. Mozilla will most likely stick to the roadmap offered by Shroepfer and deliver Firefox 3.1 as the successor of 3.0, although version 3.2 cannot really be ruled out.

"Based on the current planned scope of the next release, its all but certain that we'll call it 3.1. If we need to bump api compat in a stable release before 3.1 ships, we'd just bump from 3.1 to 3.2. We've never done so though, and in any case once 3.1 ships, 3.0 has a six month support timeframe before it reaches end of life. If we needed to drop api compat during that timeframe, due to something major, its highly unlikely that we'd rev 3.0 vs. simply bumping everyone to the same 3.2, rather than having them go through two api bustages inside of six months," added Mike Connor, Mozilla Software Engineer.

Source: news.softpedia.com

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FoxyTunes now supports Blogger
Mozilla and Google are already two good friends but using the power of the browser extensions, the two companies aim to bring more consumers to their solutions. In case you forgot, the search giant designed a browser toolbar, 100 percent Firefox compatible, which comes with one click access for many of the Google services. In addition, the toolbar brings a little bit more security to Firefox, blocking all the pop-ups discovered while you browse the Internet. Today, the Blogger team proudly announced that a Firefox extension becomes compatible with their blog service which is supposed to be the most popular one on the Internet.

FoxyTunes is an interesting browser add-on, especially designed for the Mozilla application that allows you to control your audio player straight from the Firefox interface. Basically, FoxyTunes adds a new bar in Firefox which comes with control buttons such as volume, play or stop a song. However, the FoxyTunes – Blogger interoperability is not about this music control bar. Using the Firefox extension, a user who posts a new article on a Blogger page can easily add a signature in the message with the current artist and song.

"Signatunes is built into the latest version of FoxyTunes for Firefox - it adds a small icon to your favorite webmail and blogging services. This allows you to add a music signature to your message with a click. There is also an 'auto-insert' mode, which allows you to automatically add a Signatune to every message you compose," the official page of the Firefox extension reads.

However, Blogger is not the only blogging service which supports FoxyTunes. In addition, the add-on is compatible with the AOL Blogs, Bebo, Facebook, Yahoo 360, WordPress and many others. Also, you can add a signature into a Gmail, Yahoo, Thunderbird and other mail technologies.

Source: news.softpedia.com

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With Carbon Grove, Microsoft is introducing the first Internet Explorer Beta 1 and IE7 "tree-hugging" exclusive website. The Redmond company, and specifically the Internet Explorer team, have sponsored the project built by the Jackson Fish Market, a web design company that was also involved in building Tafiti, bundling Live Search and Silverlight. The Jackson Fish Market built Carbon Grove using asp.net and Silverlight 2.0, putting together what they referred to as a carbon reduction reminder service.

"Climate change is a problem that affects everyone on our planet. As is often the case with problems of this magnitude, it’s hard to feel like one person can make a difference. In reality however, every little bit helps. Carbon Grove can help you make your small contribution to fixing things and hopefully also help you show others that you care," stated Miel Van Opstal, Enthusiast Evangelist Microsoft.

The Carbon Grove website is not only an initiative designed to lower the carbon footprint by enabling end users to plant virtual trees, but also to spread seeds from Microsoft. In this context, the website delivers an unique approach to environmental initiatives, one that leverages Silverlight and is accessible exclusively through Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 (at Beta 1 stage).

Visitors coming to the website via Firefox 3.0 or Opera 9.5, for example, receive the following message from The Carbon Grove Arborists: "We’re so sorry, but Carbon Grove is currently only available for Internet Explorer 7 or 8. We’re sorry for any inconvenience. We still would love for you to plant a tree in Carbon Grove. Internet Explorer 7 is a lovely browser. You may even already have it on your PC, or you can download it here."

Essentially, Carbon Grove is meant as a way for users to deliver their own positive impact on climate change. The website features a questionnaire, and guidelines for reducing the carbon footprint and contributing to the environment. At the same time, visitors that will sign up will have the opportunity to plant their own tree out of 9 different species and follow its growth. It can take up to 26 weeks for the tree to reach full size, by which time the end users need to take care of a list of commitments to lower the carbon footprint.

"The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft helped to launch this site. They were eager to create a special experience for their IE users as well as show one small piece of their commitment to the environment. Not only is Internet Explorer the exclusive way to take advantage of Carbon Grove, but Microsoft’s Silverlight technology has made browsing the three forests a breeze," Van Opstal added.

Source: news.softpedia.com

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This March, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 got its first taste of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0. The Redmond company made available the first development build of Internet Explorer 8, namely Beta 1 on March 5, 2008. IE8 Beta 1 was announced by Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer General Manager, during his keynote address at MIX08 in Las Vegas. A few days later, Mozilla dropped Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 and announced that it was steaming ahead for Beta 5, planned for early April. In this context, it was bound that IE8 and Firefox 3.0 would clash, they are after all both set on inbound courses against each other.

Net Applications made available the statistics for March 2008 for the browser market, and this is the first time that the install base of Internet Explorer 8 was noted. IE8 managed to grab in a single month 0.02%, despite being in Beta 1 stage and a release aimed exclusively at developers. But by the end of the past month, Firefox 3.0 had no less than 0.28% of the browser market. It is a small victory for the open source browser, generated by the gap between the public builds of Firefox 3.0 and IE8, but at the same time a prefiguration of the market's evolution once both products will be available.

Mozilla is now in the final stages of cooking of Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, and planning to release the browser by the end of June. Microsoft on the other hand is looking to drop IE8 Beta 2 by the summer of 2008, with the final availability date of the browser still unknown.

On the broader browser front however, Firefox has been gaining consistent ground and is eroding the dominance of Internet Explorer 8. Firefox 2.0 has grown all the way to 16.82%, while Mozilla is claiming a total share of 17.83% for the open source browser. Internet Explorer still has the lion's share of the market with a share of 74.80%, out of which IE6 is credited with 28.94%, while IE7 is up to 45.65%.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Mozilla is moving ahead with the development of Firefox 3.0 toward the official release date planned for June 2008. The last evolution of the browser took it from Beta 4 to Beta 5, and in this manner marked the 13th developer milestone of the product, taking into consideration both the Alpha and the Beta stages. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 went live on April 2, 2008, and is available for download here; and even though Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer stated that Firefox 3.0 was ready for prime time as of Beta 4, Beta 5 is still labeled as a developer preview designed for "testing purposes only."

According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 brings to the table not only new features but also consistent enhancements in terms of performance, memory usage and speed. "Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta," Mozilla revealed.

But even with the enhancements introduced in Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, Mozilla does not yet pass the Acid3 web standards test introduced in early March, ahead of Beta 4. Opera has managed to outperform both Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 8 in this area. Microsoft released IE8 Beta 1 at the start of March and is planning to drop the second Beta by the summer of 2008. By that time Mozilla should have wrapped it up with the development of Firefox 3.0.

"New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include improvements to the user interface based on user feedback, including changes to the look and feel on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. Changes and fixes for new features such as the location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and others, based on feedback from our community. Fixes and improvements to platform features to improve security, web compatibility and stability. Continued performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization continues to improve performance over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider test from Apple, and in the speed of web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office," Mozilla revealed.


Source: news.softpedia.com

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Red Hat, the Open Source leader, is proud to announce the first beta release of the upcoming 5.2 version of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. Powered by the 2.6.18-84.el5 Linux kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta comes with the following improvements:

Virtualization improvements
• Hypercall interface for NUMA topology discovery;
• Optimized placement at guest start up;
• Support in libvirt;
• Physical CPU support increase to 64 CPU/system;
• Large Memory Support increased to 512 GB/system;
• Network interfaces in para-virtualized guests no longer limited to 3.

Kernel improvements
• Add NFS client support for servers with 64-bit inode numbers;
• Enable config options for IPMI panic handling;
• Add HDMI support for AMD/ATI integrated chipsets;
• Update Infiniband support to OFED v1.3;
• Eliminate erroneous PCI ROM warning messages;
• Add support to offline CPU when realtime process is running.

Cluster Improvements:
• Resource Event Scripting Language allows complex application failover capabilities;
• Plock performance improvement;
• SCSI 3 reservation fencing support for active/active and active/passive DM/MPIO (multipathing).

Networking and IPv6 Enablement:
• Improved IPv6 compliance;
• SNMP IPv6 MIB improvement;
• IKE 2 support via OpenSwan;
• DHCPv6 client and server;
• Add memory accounting in UDP.

Laptop and Desktop Enhancements:
• Suspend and Hibernate improvements;
• Evolution 2.12.3;
• Firefox 3;
• OpenOffice 2.3.0;
• Thunderbird 2.0;
• Updated graphics drivers.

Encryption and Security Enhancements:
• New kernel crypto hardware driver APIs;
• SHA-256 / SHA-512 password encryption support;
• Add RFC4303 compliant auditing support.

The following known issues are present in this beta:
• Bug 428323: yum-updatesd: local variable 'result' referenced before assignment;
• Bug 430297: ibft_iscsi when used with Intel NIC which have iBFT misconfigured crashes;
• Bug 432776: /sbin/mkinitrd: line 939: [: : integer expression expected;
• Bug 432792: %post scriplet failure when installing: freeipmi-ipmidetectd;
• Bug 432977: Error in /etc/init.d/irqbalance results in potential misconfiguration and screen garbage;
• Bug 434847: RHEL4.6 -> RHEL5.2 anaconda upgrade produces multiple errors for several gcc packages;
• Bug 435173: Traceback when performing CDROM install on iBFT enabled iSCSI system;
• Bug 435475: RFE: [Performance] yum update is too slow between minor releases;
• Bug 435978: Rescue mode networking fails to start;
• Bug 436377: LTC42893-Rhel5.2 betarc installation failed calling SIGSEGV.


From Many Source

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