Mozilla, racing to release Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, has released a second beta of the open-source browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Firefox 3.6 beta 1 introduced most of the new features, most visibly the ability to customize Firefox's look through Personas, less than two weeks ago. But among the 190 patches in the new beta is what Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, described in a blog post as "a mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox."
There also are a number of deeper changes in Firefox 3.6 that Web developers likely will be more interested in. Note that one of them, the ability to use color gradients with formatting technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), has changed syntax in between Firefox 3.6 beta 1 and beta 2.
Mozilla is trying to accelerate the pace of Firefox releases; Firefox 3.7 is set for release in the first half of 2010 and 4.0 some time later that year. The project faces new competition from Google's Chrome browser.
After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That's the company's latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.
"Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites," a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.
Reddit Bacon.
The site's humor-inclined team referred to the site update as "somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it." More likely, it'll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn't otherwise have it; Reddit's team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.
Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit's open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.
Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best "custom Reddit" from scratch (i.e., fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!
On Thursday, Mozilla pushed out a new security update for its new Firefox browser. Version 3.0.1 for Windows and Mac addresses vulnerabilities in malformed GIF files on Mac OS X, command-line URLs that could launch multiple tabs when Firefox is not running, and a potential remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter.
Meanwhile, Mozilla updated the earlier version of Firefox with 2.0.16 on Tuesday. The update addresses two of the Firefox 3 critical issues--command-line URLs and overflowing CSS reference counter.
Version-specific updates have been pushed out automatically to existing Firefox users.
Mozilla will continue to update Firefox 2 until mid-December.
Some digital publishers are complaining that the new Microsoft Outlook rolls back design standards by half a decade. The 2007 edition of Outlook, the most popular e-mail client for big businesses, ditches Internet Explorer's technology for that of Word 2007 to display HTML messages.
Same message, different Outlook
(Credit: Campaign Monitor)The result? In your Outlook 2007 in-box, background images may not appear within dressed-up HTML messages. Forget about filling out certain forms. Animated GIF images won't play, and a red X will mark the spot where a Flash movie would be. ALT tags, which describe pictures and help blind people to "see" them, won't work either. And there's more.
I hadn't noticed funky-looking messages during my beta tests of Outlook 2007, probably because I shun HTML newsletters in favor of plain old text. But if you like to get news and views from various sources via e-mail, those messages might look lopsided and incomplete in Outlook 2007. In that case, a Web-based e-mail program would be a better choice for your subscriptions.
Microsoft has attempted to improve HTML support within Word 2007, which even offers a blog-editing interface. HTML files within earlier versions of Word were a nightmare of sloppy code. Web content created in Word 2007 looks more elegant on the surface. But when I used Word 2007's blogging layout to create a document containing no more than a photograph and a three-word headline, the resulting HTML file contained a whopping 32,417 characters of code, about the length of a 2,000-word essay. By hand-coding in basic HTML, I cobbled together a nearly identical Web page with a mere 200 characters.
Why would Microsoft rely upon its word processor's technology rather than its nearly ubiquitous Web browser to display e-mail messages? Ostensibly, it's for the sake of security. Microsoft touts Internet Explorer 7 as its safest browser yet. So why aren't IE7's standards strong enough for your in-box?
(via Sitepoint Tech Times)
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