Firefox 3.6 with more than 90 bugfixes

Mozilla has released a third beta for Firefox 3.6 with more than 90 bugfixes since beta 2, which was released just last week. If you’d like to take beta 3 for a spin, head over to the Mozilla downloads page.

Although beta 3 doesn’t contain any significant new features, it does have some welcome bug fixes and is considerably more stable than the previous betas. There is one feature not found in previous releases — add-ons can now access Firefox’s built-in geo-location features.

Unfortunately for Windows 7 users, much of the Windows 7 integration — like Aero tab previews and jump lists — has been removed. It remains to be seen whether or not those features will make it in the final release or will be postponed for Firefox 3.7.

The good news is that more than half of all add-ons now work with Firefox 3.6, including the recently released Weave update and other popular add-ons like Ad Block Plus and Firebug.

One big change on Firefox’s backend being introduced in beta 3 is a new restriction on how third-party add-ons integrate with Firefox. The Firefox components directory is now off limits to third-party tools. According to the Mozilla Developer Blog, “there are no special abilities that come from [accessing the components directory].”

The move is mainly designed to make Firefox more stable by preventing add-ons from accessing lower level tools that could cause crashes.

As the Mozilla Links blog points out, current Firefox 3.6 nightly builds are labeled as “preb4,” which might mean we’ll see a fourth beta before Firefox 3.6 arrives in final form. If Mozilla continues to crank out new betas every week, look for beta 4 around Thanksgiving with the final release arriving during December.

Resource: http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_3DOT6_Beta_3_Gains_Security_Features__Loses_Windows_7_Integration?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+(Wired%3A+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))

Microsoft fights back in browser wars, with Internet Explorer 9

With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft showed Wednesday it's trying to retake the browser initiative. IE remains the Net's dominant browser. But perversely, it became something of a technology underdog after Microsoft vanquished Netscape in the browser wars of the 1990s and scaled back its browser effort.

That left an opportunity for rivals to blossom -- most notably Firefox, which now is used by a quarter of Web surfers, but also Apple's Safari, which now runs on Windows as well as Mac OS X, and Google's Chrome, which aims to make the Web faster and a better foundation for applications.

Microsoft has been pouring resources back into the IE effort, though, and at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, some fruits of that labor were on display. In particular, Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky showed off IE 9's new hardware-accelerated text and graphics.

The acceleration feature takes advantage of hitherto untapped computing power in a way that's more useful than other browser-boosting technology such as Google's Native Client to tap into a PC's processor and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer.

"This is a direct improvement to everybody's usage of the Web on a daily basis," Hachamovitch said in an interview after Sinofsky's speech. "Web developers are doing what they did before, only now they can tap directly into a PC's graphics hardware to make their text work better and graphics work better."

Why go to all this trouble? In short, to help keep the Windows business alive and kicking.

"Our goal in building a great browser for consumers and for everyone is that they are Windows customers. That's at the core of it," Hachamovitch said.

He didn't bring it up, but it should be noted that an increasing fraction of Microsoft's business is moving online, too, through its Bing, Live, and now online Office 2010 sites. "We want to build a better IE so all the Web sites have a better experience," Hachamovitch said.

Turning up the heat Microsoft began work on IE 9 just three weeks ago, Sinofsky said. But signs have been clear that the company has taken interest in its browser again.

When it arrived earlier this year IE 8 brought significant new security and privacy features, and in a significant departure Web developers appreciate, it attempts to follow various Web standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and Cascading Style Sheets.

More recently, Microsoft joined the HTML standards effort in August. And earlier this month, Microsoft sent a dozen IE team members to a World Wide Web Consortium meeting.

"High-quality specifications that improve interoperability between browsers are important. Our goal is to help ensure these new standards work well for Web developers and will work well in future versions of IE," said Adrian Bateman, a Microsoft program manager who's involved in the standardization effort, describing the motivation. That point of view is music to the ears of programmers who struggle to make sure their Web sites work with the ever-wider variety of browsers on the Web today.

Hardware acceleration

Under the covers, the IE 9 acceleration works by employing Microsoft's Direct2D interface rather than its GDI (Graphical Device Interface). Direct2D provides a general way for software to take advantage of hardware acceleration for graphics, and IE 9 will employ it.

"It's a remarkably different level of performance," said Hachmovitch, who's using the technology. "It's like the difference between watching Pixar or an Xbox vs. watching an old PC chug along."

Direct2D also facilitates a technology called sub-pixel positioning that can smooth the appearance of text on the screen. That cuts eyestrain, he said.

In a video touting the Direct2D browsing technology, Microsoft showed off the acceleration effect on a map-based Web site. While panning the view one way or the other, "The map literally keeps up with your mouse," said Microsoft graphics developer Christian Fortini in the video.

With the old technology, that chore can update the screen at a rate of about 5 to 10 frames per second while using 50 to 60 percent of the processor's horsepower, but using the Direct2D method, the frame rate jumps to a range of 40 to 60 per second while the CPU usage plunges, Hachamovitch said.

Compatibility sales pitch

Hachamovitch touted Microsoft's approach as broadly relevant and compatible with the Web as it stands today. Unlike Native Client and WebGL, it doesn't require new programming skills for Web developers.

"Web sites didn't have to change behavior and code in a different way" to take advantage of the Direct2D technology, Hachamovitch said.

"With a lot of other technologies, it takes a lot of work and a lot of time to figure out how to do something different. It isn't necessarily an interoperable, standards kind of thing -- it's something from one particular vendor. We're taking interoperable implementations of things like CSS, things that developers are using and expect to work everywhere, and making them demonstrably better."

He didn't comment on whether Microsoft supports some Web standards for better graphics, including Canvas and Scalable Vector Graphics, but he did say the new display technology will broadly help whatever graphics technologies IE does support.

"Once we're on top of this super-rich graphics infrastructure, all the graphics we do will have this," he said.

And although Microsoft certainly hasn't committed to it, Eliot Graff, an IE lead technical editor, is helping edit the Canvas interface at the W3C group.

Full standards support remains a sore point when dealing with IE. On one test, Acid3, IE 8 scores just 20 out of 100. IE 9 currently scores 32, and "the score will continue to go up," Hachamovitch wrote in the blog posting.

Faster JavaScript

The acceleration is one aspect of performance Microsoft is focusing on. Another is the execution of JavaScript, a programming language used widely on the Web for everything from mundane tasks to full-on applications such as Gmail and Google Docs.

In another Microsoft video, John Montgomery, a leader of IE's browser compatibility and tools team, shows off the browser tackling all the components of the SunSpider JavaScript speed test.

"We're whipping through these faster than (IE) 8 was," Montgomery said. "We're pretty early in the development process. There's still some stuff we can still squeeze out of the engine, but we're doing a lot better than we were."

Hachamovitch, though, takes pains to point out JavaScript isn't the only bottleneck for browsers. Even though JavaScript engines are important enough to warrant brand names these days -- Chrome's V8, Firefox's TraceMonkey, Safari's Nitro, Opera's Futhark and Caracan -- Microsoft's prefers to shine a light on nine other aspects of browser performance.

In a blog post about IE9, Hachamovitch shows how a variety of chores -- two different news sites and two separate tasks in Microsoft's online version of Excel -- exercise different parts of the browser.

"The work we do in performance involves many systems in the browser," he said. "As these script engines converge and effectively have the same performance, you realize all the other subsystems get more important. You need the other nine parts of the browser to work, too."

Resource: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/19/cnet.internet.explorer.nine/index.html

Tiny Insect Brains

Insects may have tiny brains, but they can perform some seriously impressive feats of mental gymnastics.

According to a growing number of studies, some insects can count, categorize objects, even recognize human faces -- all with brains the size of pinheads.

Despite many attempts to link the volume of an animal's brain with the depth of its intelligence, scientists now propose that it's the complexity of connections between brain cells that matters most. Studying those connections -- a more manageable task in a little brain than in a big one -- could help researchers understand how bigger brains, including those of humans, work.

Figuring out how a relatively small number of cells work together to process complex concepts could also lead to "smarter" computers that do some of the same tasks.

"The question is: If these insects can do these things with such little brains, what does anything need a big brain for?" said Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London, who presented his arguments along with colleague Jeremy Niven in the journal Current Biology. "Bigger isn't necessarily better, and in some cases it could be quite the opposite."

Because we are intelligent animals with big brains, people have long assumed that big brains are smarter brains. Yet, scientists have found scant evidence to support that view, Chittka said. Studies that have made those connections are fraught with problems. "If you try many measurements," he said, "Eventually you will find one that shows a correlation."

There's a lot of evidence, on the other hand, that overall size is irrelevant when it comes to brain power. Among humans, individuals with larger noggins don't have higher IQs. Whales, with brains that weigh up to 20 pounds and have more than 200 billion neurons, are no smarter than people, with our measly 3-pound brains that have just 85 billion neurons.

Instead of contributing intelligence, big brains might just help support bigger bodies, which have larger muscles to coordinate and more sensory information coming in. Like computers, Chittka said, size might add storage capacity but necessarily speed or usefulness. At the same time, it takes a lot of energy to support a big brain.

On a smaller scale, scientists are finally moving past the idea that locusts, ants, bees and other insects are simple machines that respond to events in predictable ways, said Sarah Farris, an evolutionary neurobiologist at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Study after study now shows that insects can, in fact, change their behavior depending on the circumstances.

Honeybees, which have been the focus of Chittka's work, have tiny brains with fewer than a million neurons. Yet, the insects can classify shapes as symmetrical or asymmetrical. They can pick objects based on concepts like "same" or "different." They can also learn to stop flying after a prescribed number of landmarks rather than after a certain distance.

Ants and bees have notoriously complex social systems. Along with other insects, they can move in a surprising number of ways to communicate or get around.

Bees, for example, can sting, scout for food, guard the hive and fan their wings for ventilation, along with more than 50 other behaviors. The insect's behavioral repertoire, in fact, surpasses that of some vertebrates.”

"They are fantastically smart," Chittka said. "Perhaps we are only amazed by this because we think small brains shouldn't be able to do it."

In fact, scientists have calculated that a few hundred neurons should be enough to enable counting. A few thousand neurons could support consciousness. Engineers hope to use that kind of information to design programs that do things like recognize faces from a variety of angles, distances and emotional states. That's something bees can do, but computers still can't.

"Knowing how an insect functions and produces complex behaviors with a brain that's a million-fold smaller than ours makes it a little easier to envision that we might be able to model some of these behaviors," Farris said.

"It's wonderful to see that insects are finally being compared equally with vertebrate animals," she added. "They have smaller brains, but they still have complex enough brains to do these things."

Resource: http://news.discovery.com/animals/tiny-insect-brains-intelligence.html

Jaguar XT5 computer

The world's fastest supercomputer is devoted to solving scientific questions that may save the planet -- climate change, renewable energy, new medicines -- rather than advances in nuclear weapons, at least for the moment.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory's high-performance Jaguar XT5 computer, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc., was declared the fastest on the planet in the latest semiannual TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, announced on Monday.

WATCH VIDEO: How do we know for sure that our climate is changing? Take a look at some of the instruments used to monitor the atmosphere today.

After a $19.9 million upgrade funded with federal economic stimulus money, Jaguar posted a performance speed of 1.759 petaflops or quadrillions of calculations per second, making the National Science Foundation-funded, Cray-built supercomputer owned by the University of Tennessee and the National Institute for Computational Sciences the top "academic" supercomputer in the world.

This pushed the previous No. 1 supercomputer, Los Alamos National Laboratory's IBM Roadrunner system in New Mexico with a speed of 1.04 petaflops, to No. 2. Jaguar's computer stablemate at Oak Ridge, named Kraken, was ranked No. 3 with a speed of 831.7 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second.

The U.S. Department of Energy owns both Jaguar and Roadrunner, but uses them for different purposes. Jaguar is an "open science" tool for peer-reviewed research on a wide range of subjects. Roadrunner is devoted to the complex and classified evaluation of U.S. nuclear weapons.

"That tells you that science is really important, particularly for tackling some of the biggest challenges that we are facing today," said Thomas Zacharia, the Oak Ridge Lab's deputy director for science and technology.

"When you make these big trillion-dollar bets on energy, it needs to be informed by the best climate science," he said. "This machine is at the intersection of better climate change science and energy technology policy."

The questions scientists are hoping to solve with these machines run the gamut from the origins of the universe to the science of soap bubbles.

Resource: http://news.discovery.com/tech/new-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-named.html