software

With relatively little fanfare, Firefox 2.0 was released last week. (Yes, I know, IE 7 was also released recently. Does anybody actually still use IE???) Firefox 2.0 brings some very nice improvements. My favorite feature is session recovery. Although Firefox is generally pretty stable, it nevertheless suffers the occasional crash. Thanks to session recovery, it is now possible after a restart to continue where one left off before the crash. Firefox can also be configured to always start with the previous session, which is a tremendous improvement....

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....