With a wealth of new features added to the upcoming release of Firefox, Mozilla has decided to skip calling it 3.1 and has gone right to 3.5.  Much of this is due to the increased scope of the project. A thrid beta was released today.  I’ve tried out the beta and it’s a wonderful piece of software.  Pages load quicker as does the program overall.  Things just seem much more responsive.  I can’t wait for Firefox 3.5 to be released!

Tiburon Homes, LLC has managed to avoid viruses such as Conficker and Vundo by using the free ClamAV software on their computers that run Windows XP.  ClamwinAV, the Windows version of the ClamAV, is a free and open source software package that has often rated higher than propriety products such as Symantec and McAfee.  Using a combination of ClamAV and Firefox, Tibuon has been able to keep their IT security high while keeping their costs low.

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!

There is a great article in the Sunday Wall Street Journal dispelling seven myths about outsourcing