Blog

Firefox 3 release candidate is already here! Its just a preview release of Mozilla’s next generation Firefox browser and is being made available for testing purposes only. Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is available in more than 45 languages as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features.

read more | digg story

Mozilla is about to release Firefox 3 beta 3. The new Firefox 3 is faster, more secure, easier to use, more personal and provides an improved platform for developers. The release notes for beta 2 give a good overview of the new features. There’s an interesting discussion on Ajaxian about Cross-Site XHR Security in Firefox 3: this feature will make cross-site communication easier, but possibly introduces security risks.

Google has come up with some new features to attract the regular user to the internet.

The mega search engine has devised an experimental search page and added some new features to its “alternative views” experiment from last May.

Map view is one feature that according to the official Google blog, solves the problem of looking through many sites for information by “plotting some of the key locations contained in your web results onto a map“, according to Andrew Hogue of Google.

Timeline view is another feature that looks up dates on the internet much like Map View looks up locations along with biographical information generated from a user’s search results.

Mr Hogue explained the control panel on the right side of the page: “Usually we show some text from the page that includes a few of the words you searched for.

“Now you can instead reveal text containing dates, locations, measurements, or images,” he said.

PORTABLE Adobe Illustrator CS3

Create sophisticated vector artwork for virtually any medium.

Create sophisticated vector artwork for virtually any medium with Adobe® Illustrator® CS3 software. Capture your ideas easily with industry-standard drawing tools, and experiment freely with flexible new color controls. Experience tight integration with other Adobe applications, and let improved performance help speed you through creating extraordinary graphics.

New features include Live Color, which provides tools for creating color harmonies based on color theory, and the ability to dynamically apply colors to selected objects and shift the tone of an entire illustration at one time. Remapping controls are also provided for reducing the numbers of colors in an artwork. Also new are better integration with Flash, with named symbol instances and dynamic/static text; improved drawing tools and controls; faster runtime performance; an Eraser tool that works on vector objects; a Crop Area tool; and an improved Isolation Mode for groups and symbol definitions.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the ninth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org

read more | digg story