In Firefox you've always been able to assign a keyword to any bookmark, which would take you to that particular site if you type the keyword in the address bar and press Enter. That's nice and all, but once you get a large number of shortcuts it can be tough to remember them all.
Last week Wolfram Alpha launched, and I immediately started playing around with it. Like every other search engine Wolfram focuses on being able to take your input and try to return the data you're looking for, but don't expect it to grab results like those you find at Google.
I've been waiting to see what Opera had in store for us in version 10, and it looks like everyone is finally getting a peak. In fact I'm a bit surprised by what has been revealed so far, but in a good way. For awhile it seemed like other browsers were trying to find their own ways to adopt features that were first introduced in Opera, but the opposite never really happened.
It was almost one year ago that we first got a glimpse of what Firefox Mobile looked like running on the Nokia N800. Then in January we saw some mockups of what their iPhone-like interface might look like for other devices, and even more recently we saw a video demonstration that knocked our socks off with an intuitive tab navigation system.
It seems like just yesterday Firefox 3.0 was released, and here we sit with the first Alpha release of Firefox 3.1 in our lap. This new release is supposed to reach final form towards the end of the year, but until that time comes there will be plenty of pre-release versions (like this one) that you can tinker with.
Now that Mozilla has shipped Firefox 3.0 they have begun working on the next milestone that's due out at the end of 2008. Firefox 3.1 Alpha (code named Shiretoko) is should be released on July 25th according to ZDNet, and the first Beta is expected as early as August.
One of the the most frequent comments I hear from new Ubuntu users is that the default theme for the operating system is a tad too brown. I kind of like the current Ubuntu theme, but it was supposed to get an overhaul with the last release. The new default theme has got pushed back to Ubuntu 8.10, and we're getting our first glimpse of the new theme now that Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1 has shipped.
It's been a long time coming, but it looks as though we might have our first full-fledged desktop feed reader that supports synchronization with Google Reader. The RSS Bandit blog announced over the weekend that they have released version 1.7 Alpha that is capable of downloading podcasts as well as synchronizing feeds with Google Reader.
I can't say that I was expecting this today, but I'm happy to report that Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 (codenamed Shredder) has been released. This version does of course have tabs, and as seen in the screenshot above you can open new messages in tabs for easy navigation. That's definitely a feature I've been waiting for, but now I wish you could actually compose a message in a new tab as well.
Opera Dragonfly is here, and as expected it is a new set of tools to help developers create functional websites. It's obvious that the Opera team wanted to develop something to draw developers to their browser, much like how Firebug has become an irreplaceable tool for the developers that use Firefox. The real question is whether Dragonfly is the tool we've been longing for?
