About two weeks ago we gave you a heads up that Flock 2.0 Beta was coming, and there was a lot of excitement surrounding the release since it's based on Firefox 3.0. With that you get all of the Firefox 3 goodness including performance enhancements, advanced bookmarking, new address bar, and much more.
VLC is an incredibly popular cross-platform media player, and it's well known for supporting a wide variety of media types.
With the Firefox 3 release right around the corner I thought this would be a good time to look over the extensions available, and see which ones haven't been updated.
Mozilla is hard at work getting ready for the launch of Firefox 3, and another Release Candidate is scheduled to be available tomorrow. They are still planning for a June launch of the next major milestone, and there is a lot of hype and anticipation surrounding the release. One thing you don't want to forget about is the Flock browser that is based upon Firefox!
Windows only Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta has been in production for months, and yesterday it received and update that provides even more improvements and features.
When we announced back in March that Photoshop CS4 had been leaked there were (and still are) some skeptics that it's the real deal. The timing of the leak seemed about right since the Adobe Creative Suite is on an 18 to 24 month release cycle, which would place the final release of Adobe CS4 somewhere between October 2008 and April 2009.
Win; Mac; Linux Flock 1.2 Beta is now available, and as hard as it is to believe this version is even more social. This Beta makes it possible to keep up with your friends' activity on Digg or Pownce, and get AOL email notifications instantly as new messages come crawling in.
Google has always been pretty good about catering to iPhone users, and the Reader team is kicking it up a notch with a new AJAXy interface (pictured to the right). Other good news is that it's not only supposed to work with the iPhone, but any mobile device that has an advanced browser. You can even use it in your desktop browser if you feel so inclined (ex. works in Firefox).
There has been a lot of buzz in the last week regarding OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta. Some people are excited with the new features that it brings to the table, while others are a little disappointed that the interface didn't get much of a facelift. No matter which way you look at it, this will be a huge release since milestones like this only occur once every three years for OpenOffice.org.
Win; Mac; Linux Opera is obviously not content with sitting on the sidelines when it comes to being the fastest browser out there. Back in February Mozilla decided that it was time to optimize it's JavaScript performance, and used a technique called Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) that gave it a nice boost.
Win; Mac; Linux It's here! I've been waiting for OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta for what seems like forever. I was getting a little bit worried when it wasn't released on April 30th like it was supposed to be, and the release date was never revised. Luckily it's only rolling in about a week late.
Yahoo Messenger is the number one instant messaging service, and they are really starting to show off the talent their development team has. It's been over a year now since we first got a glimpse of what their Vista-specific messenger looked like.
Weather is an important part of our daily lives, and can drastically affect any plans that we have. Lucky for us the Internet is making it easy to stay on top of weather developments as they happen, and the newest Beta of Weather Watcher for Windows lets you do it in style.
Back in February we took a look at the Evernote Beta that introduces an online synchronization aspect that plays nicely with their desktop offerings. After just two months of the Beta they have hit a huge milestone: 1 million notes have been posted! They've decided that a good way to celebrate the milestone would be to let anyone and everyone register for the Beta by visiting this "secret" site.
It looks as though Microsoft is more than just dabbling with the idea of offering a subscription-based version of Microsoft Office. According to CNet in the next few days they will launch a limited Beta program of a project codenamed Albany.
A few weeks ago we demonstrated an extremely simple backup solution called IdleBackup. It was nothing too fancy, and this time around we wanted to go to the other extreme with a freeware Windows backup application that will really knock your socks off. The program is called Cobian Backup, and I wouldn't have found it without Leland's help.
I've been meaning to give Digsby a spin ever since the public Beta was released about two weeks ago. It looked like it was a well designed cross-network (and cross-platform) instant messenger, and it offered quite a few features that no other instant messengers have touched on before. And after having used it for only about 30 minutes I think I may have found myself a new messenger.
For those of you looking for a great desktop RSS feed reader I would put the free Feedreader 3.13 Beta at the top of my favorites. The new Beta that was just released yesterday adds a feature that I haven't seen in any other feed reader before: adding or editing articles. It sounds crazy, but I could see how this would be incredibly useful.
Fedora 9 is stepping forward with their first Beta, and it looks like it has quite a few quality enhancements that both GNOME and KDE users alike will appreciate. Being a KDE fan myself I'm extremely happy to see that the Fedora team has taken the time to integrate the new KDE 4.0 into the operating system.
We've been asked for quite awhile to provide a performance comparison of the different mainstream browsers out there, and so today we are going to show you the stats from several different areas that users generally find to be the most important. Things like memory usage, page load time, and JavaScript performance will all be covered below.
