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".

Linux users always miss out on one feature that their Windows counterparts enjoy while listening to music. Most of the time, while listening to music using music players like Audacious, BMP, XMMS, etc in Linux, users misses out the equalizer presets that is present in most of the Windows music players like of Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.

For any die-hard music-aficionado who loves to listen to music and cannot compromise with quality, can never forgive a player that doesn't comes with an equalizer preset. If you are a music lover who don't likes to compromise with music and likes to have equalizer presets for fine tuning his music, there's a simple trick to import the Winamp equalizer presets into your Audacious, BMP, XMMS, etc Linux music players.

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.

I triple boot my system with Windows XP, Windows 7 and Ubuntu but I also like to test other Linux distributions. Most of the time, to test the other operating system and distributions, I use VirtualBox or VMware to virtualize them. But for those Linux distributions that offers Live CD/DVD option, I use my USB flash drive to test them live. This saves me time as I don't have to first configure the virtual machine and install the Linux distro to test it. In my previous articles, I covered two softwares, UNetbootin and Multiboot USB Menu that helps me to make the distros ready to be booted directly off my USB flash device.

Another, very good utility that helps me create persistent storage on my flash drive is Pendrive Linux's Universal USB Installer. What I meant when I said "persistent storage"? It means that you'll actually have some permanent storage space in your flash drive to save things like your files and preferences, instead of having a clone of your disc image in your flash drive.

Mozilla has finally released Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash. The feature is like that in Google Chrome as it runs plugins in their own process to increase browser stability and security.

Out-of-process plugins are enabled by default and make sure that a crashing plugin will not crash the browser itself as well. Firefox can now prevents Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight crashes from bringing down your entire browser on Windows and Linux computers just like Google Chrome does. Read the Crash Protection FAQ for more detailed information about this new feature.

VLC Media Player is one of the best media player for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platform and its new avatar is even better. VLC Media Player is updated to version 1.1.0, adding many new features like extensions, new user interface, support for GPU acceleration among others. If you are still living under the rock and is unaware of what VLC Media Player is, well:

VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project. It is one of the most platform-independent media players available, with versions for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BeOS, and BSD.

Users of 64-bit operating system who always wanted to use a 64-bit edition of the popular web browser Firefox were previously restricted to using only the builds provided by their operating systems or, the ones available through the Mozilla-x86-64 project. Mozilla Firefox 64-bit builds for Linux, Mac and Windows is now available on the official Firefox Nightly FTP server. Mozilla plans to distribute the final version of Firefox 64-bit editions with the release of Firefox 4 later this year.

If you install the experimental version of Firefox 64-bit you will notice that most of the browser plugins are not compatible and only Java and a non-final Flash version are being supported.