I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta’s for some time now. This latest version is faster, uses less RAM, has more features, and overall looks fantastic. In fact, it’s hard for me to go back and use anything else. There have been some noticeable improvements and performance enhancements to page rendering, handling of complex sites with AJAX modal windows over Flash animations, and many other improvement too numerous to list here. When the browser is finally released, nearly two years will have gone by since Firefox 2’s initial release. I think the improvements have shown that t his browser was well worth the wait.

Read more here at Computerworld.

Google’s Summer of Code has announced the projects it will sponsor. Among them, is video and voice support for the venerable Pidgin instant messenger software. This is huge. One of the only features Pidgin lacks is video and voice over IP support. Prometheon customers who use both Macintosh and Windows machines end up using both iChat and Pidgin when using instant messenger server products such as OpenFire. This always leaves the Windows users envious of iChat’s video and voice capabilities for conducting online meetings.

Cheers to Google for sponsoring this feature, and good luck to Michael Ruprecht on his endeavor to insert the last big feature into Pidgin!