After months and months of talk the first public beta of the upcoming Firefox 3 is finally here. Like many I rushed right out this morning and downloaded it, because it’s a public beta, that means it’s got to be about done right? Maybe not so much. At first glance I can’t really tell it’s all that different from FF2, the interface does seem a bit sleeker but it’s hard to say. I guess I was expecting something drastically different.

Apparently plugins aren’t working yet so it looks like I’ll have to do without StumbleUpon and Google toolbars for a bit.? Ummm, no, that’ll probably be enough reason to switch back to FF2 for now. So be warned, if you’ve heavily customized your FF then you may want to use an alternate machine to test the new beta because it totally overwrites the older version. Beyond that, it seems pretty good, based on only a few hours messing with it. The biggest thing people will want to know is, does it still leak memory like a rusty boat? According to the release notes over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged. Sounds cool, but how about that one big leak that’s never really gone away?

Again, it’s hard to tell but this early look definitely has some promise to it. If your into ripping new software apart to find all it’s faults then you might want to give this a whirl. Otherwise, your probably better off just reading one of the indepth reviews that are starting to turn up. It’s worth a look but like I said, if you don’t want to lose any customizations you currently have, better to just sit this one out and wait and see.

I just love stuff like this. PC World tested Windows Vista on a bunch of different laptops, including Dell, Alienware and Toshiba to benchmark their performance. In the end, one laptop emerged a clear winner. By a single point the Macbook Pro outperformed the Gateway E-265M. I’m not sure which is the bigger surprise, the fact the margin was only one point or the next best thing is a Gateway. Um yeah…

The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.

via: Fosfor Gadgets

At 10am PCT Apple is holding a media event in Cupertino. It’s believed that a .mac update is coming, as well as, an announcement about new iMacs and possibly a new iLife release. The biggest rumor surrounds the possibility that Apple is axing the 17″ iMac and placing the 20″ model on the bottom of the Apple food chain. Users of .mac were notified of downtime so that seems almost proof positive something is happening there, and I fully expect an iLife update since I just bought a Macbook Pro this past weekend (more on that later). It’s the price of progress but if the rumors of the 20″ iMac being priced around $1100 are true, that could make for some pretty happy campers.

via: I4U News

Windows Vista successor is to be called “7” and it’s due out within three years. Participants at the recent Microsoft sales training conference in Orlando got the message straight from the horses mouth. It’s been rumored for some time the next release of Microsoft’s famous bloatware would be called Vienna, but now it appears they’ve gone for a simpler name. No doubt this is to save space on the packaging for all the hardware requirements that will need to be printed on the box. The question is, will “7” or “Seven” or “Siete” be everything it’s recently released predecessor isn’t or will it be the highly touted vaporware being called Windows Vista Service Pack 1? Only time will tell but I’ve seen this movie (Seven, Brad Pitt & Morgan Freeman) it wasn’t pretty.

via: Engadget