Firefox 1.5 has been released. You can grab it here. Some of the new features are improved popup blocking (I am curious about this one, now that some sites have figured out how to circumvent the previous version’s popup blocker), drag & drop tab reordering, noticeably faster navigation using the Back and Forward buttons, and more. You can find out more details about the new features in the Firefox 1.5 Release Notes....
Mozilla has unveiled the Lightning roadmap. Lightning is Mozilla’s next generation calendaring application and intended to integrate with the Thunderbird email client. It appears to replace Mozilla’s previous Sunbird calendaring tool. Lightning 0.1, which is scheduled to be released some time in November, will mainly focus on bug fixes and WebDAV calendar support. Improved Thunderbird integration is planned for the 0.2 release, which does not have a release date yet....
Opera Software has decided to offer the full version of their Opera browser (i.e. without ads) for free from now on. I don’t quite I understand how they are planning to make money, but they explain some of the reasons for making their browser free here. I have used Opera for a while a couple of years ago, and it’s definitely a good browser. But frankly, I’m not sure why anybody would choose to use Opera over Firefox these days....
Argh… My wife caught a virus on her laptop. It looks like it came in using some IE exploit, and the fact that the latest Windows security updates were not installed probably didn’t help… I’ve installed a better virus scanner and hope that I can still fix everything without having to reinstall Windows. If everything goes well, I’ll immediately install Firefox and have my wife switch from IE to this instead....
While browsing Gentoo Portage for some Bluetooth ebuilds, I came across an ebuild for quat, a “3D quaternionic fractal generator”. I had never heard of 3D fractals, let alone quaternionic fractals, so I checked out the website, and it looks pretty interesting. Here and here are some nice examples of what 3D fractals look like. If you’re interested in computer graphics, these are worth checking out.