Please note: Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. We recommend that you read the release notes and known issues before installing this beta.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is now available for download. This milestone is 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 in #granparadiso.

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 compatabilty 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.

(You can find out more about all of these features in the “What’s New” section of the release notes.)

Testers can download Firefox 3 Beta 5 builds for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 45 different languages. Developers should also read the Firefox 3 for Developers article on the Mozilla Developer Center.

Note: Please do not link directly to the download site. Instead we strongly encourage you to link to this Firefox 3 Beta 5 milestone announcement so that everyone will know what this milestone is, what they should expect, and who should be downloading to participate in testing at this stage of development.

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Firefox 2.0.0.14 security and stability update now available for download

As part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 2.0.0.14 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from http://getfirefox.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 2.x, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

For a list of changes and more information, please review the Firefox 2.0.0.14 Release Notes.

If you are still running Firefox 1.5.0.x, you are highly encouraged to upgrade to the Firefox 2 series as Mozilla ceased supporting Firefox 1.5.0.x in May 2007. Simply choose “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu to begin the upgrade process.

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Firefox just reached  500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.

OR, you can affect change and invite 15 of your friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone today with FreeRice.com –500,000,000 grains of donated rice in one day. Imagine helping to feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary too!

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Microsoft the every surprise filled software developer who made Vista has now announced that the company will be extending the life of Windows XP till 2010. This overturns earlier announcements that they would be ending support and phasing out(which includes stopping the selling) of the most stable Windows Operating system ever. This is to give way to the newer Windows version, Vista which has again and again disappointed users even with the much promised improvements with SP1 (what…where?????? the improvements….. I see bugs, tons of them) which has failed to impress users from around the world. Big businesses are wary of the new operating system due to stability and support issues (which is only gathered from many years of continuously refining a program like XP, you’d think they’d have learned) which is still quite shaky at best.
The European arena isn’t too impressed either with the many lawsuits the company faced due to unfair commercial practices the software giant has allegedly committed(found Guilty and fined millions of Euros). The move may be a sign of what some bloggers are calling as a “continuing fiasco” regarding Vista’s capabilities which are irking more and more users everyday, having them revert to their old’ reliable XP installations for getting the simplest jobs done. Worst of all, better and improved versions of software from open-sourced communities and organizations is forcing big-M to do something fast for more and more are shifting to them for they are faster and better than Explorer with little overhead that eats up precious memory, hard disk space and video power.
Just hope the company would be more realistic than with their sudden twists and turns such as they have been doing in the last months regarding Yahoo and the announcement of other unusually generous gestures(again) from the company that is big-M.

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As expected, Facebook is beginning to roll out a chat feature. This weekend some users noticed the chat functionality showing up on their Facebook pages. But this appears to be a phased rollout, as many users still don’t have the ability to chat with their Facebook contacts in real time. You know, unless they use a third party service like Social.im or Babuki.

The Facebook chat service appears to be nicely integrated with the site. Users will notice some chat controls at the bottom of their Facebook page letting them know how many users are online. You can pull up a list of your friends and send them messages from any page on the site. If you accidentally close a window, Facebook will keep track of your history and show older messages when you launch a new chat with the same contact. But if you close the page entirely, you’re out of luck since there does not appear to be a way to save your entire chat history.

Honestly, we’re more impressed with third party services like Social.im and Babuki which use Facebook’s API to provide a standalone chat client that can be used without keeping Facebook’s web page open in a browser all day. But we get the feeling that plenty of folks will use the official Facebook chat client simply because it’s there and easy to use.

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