My Technology Guide

Mozilla has released the second beta version of its improved and redesigned Firefox 4 web browser. The new version can be downloaded from the release notes or official beta download page. It available for all supported operating systems (Linux, Mac, Windows) and now available in 24 languages. This second beta release also gives Apple Mac's the same tabs-on-top look as in Windows. The one orange main button is still isn't there in the Mac version, but the new toolbar formations are available now.

The most "talked about" new feature in Firefox 4 Beta 2 is "App Tabs", which looks like Google Chrome's "Pin Tab" feature. This "App Tabs" mode lets you keep an eye on sites you want to. Now, every tab in Firefox 4 has this new option "Make into App Tab," on right-click to convert it into an "App Tab".

Mozilla recently released a security update for their popular Firefox web browser, version 3.6.7. Firefox 3.6.7 fixes several security issues that were found in the 3.6.6 version. Over half of the vulnerabilities fixed in Firefox 3.6.7 were listed as "Critical," which is the highest danger level that Mozilla associates with security issues.

Mozilla has now done a quick update of Firefox 3.6.7 to Firefox 3.6.8, which according to The Mozilla Developer Center blog, "fixes a single stability problem that affected some pages with embedded plugins".

A lot of my readers were asking this question to me. They wanted to know how to completely disable flash in Google Chrome after Google decided to integrate Flash natively in Chrome web browser. So, I went in the quest to find the answer. Today, I found the answer hidden inside Google Chrome's plug-ins manager (not the extension manager).

It is a very simple trick and disables flash completely 100% in Chrome web browser.

Mozilla developers have recently released the first beta of Firefox 4.0 web browser. Many new changes can be seen in Firefox 4.0. The most significant change in this version is the new user interface. Browser tabs are now located on top of the address bar by default (on Windows only - OS X and Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change) just like in Google Chrome web browser. But users do have the option to revert the user interface to the old Firefox design.

A second major change that cannot go undetected is the addition of the Firefox button on Windows Vista and Windows 7 that replaces the menu bar, and looks very similar to the One button present in Opera web browser. It will be shown if the user decides to hide the menu bar in the browser.

At the Google Chrome Help Forum, Google employee Blair has posted a list of software identified to crash Google Chrome web browser. In the list users will also find some popular software such as WinMount, NVIDIA NTune, SpeedBit Video Accelerator, etc listed along with others that causes instability in Google Chrome.

Blair suggests to temporarily disable the marked softwares and see if it resolved Chrome crashes. Blair also listed some softwares, for which you can simply disable some of its functions without disabling the software completely to solve crash issues.

Opera web browser fans should rejoice as Opera has released Opera 10.60, "faster than the fastest browser" recently. Opera 10.60 is based on the new version of Presto 2.6.30 rendering engine. It now includes support for several new HTML5 features, such as GeoLocation, Web Workers and Offline applications. It has also notably improved Javascript and DOM performance. The latest version also have thousands of bugs fixed since 10.54. Opera 10.60 is the first web browser that supports for the high quality video format WebM.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 3.6.6, less than a week after the release of the long-awaited Firefox 3.6.4 version. Firefox 3.6.6 fixes a stability issue in the web browser. This update addressed issues with the new plugin handler causing issues with the immensely popular Facebook game Farmville. See bug 574905 for full details.

Firefox 3.6.6 modifies the crash protection feature to increase the amount of time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before being terminated.

The developers have increased the time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before they are terminated by the browser. The timeout was set to 10 seconds initially and now has been increased to 45 seconds in this new release.