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Mozilla Corp. Thursday confirmed that it will release the final beta of Firefox 3.0 shortly, and that it expects to deliver the finished browser to users in June. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 has been code-frozen, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, and is working its way toward release. “That will be the last beta for Firefox 3.0,” he said. Once Beta 5 is out of the way, developers will move to the Release Candidate (RC) stage.
Release Candidate 1 (RC1) should be ready sometime in early May, said Schroepfer, assuming Mozilla meets its current schedule. “The release candidates will move a little slower than beta,” he continued, noting that the company must make allowances for public feedback.

Source: PcWorld

Microsoft’s latest efforts to persuade customers to upgrade to its much-maligned Vista operating system have met with a cool response from users. Historically, Microsoft’s first service pack for one of its marquee products – such as Windows – provides the impetus for users to upgrade. As Gartner analyst, Stephen Kleynhans recently noted, customers see SP1 as the sign that the OS has reached maturity and is ready for enteprise deployment.
But even the offer of free support for using installing Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and tools to lower implementation cost, the user response has been one of stony indifference. Vista SP1 includes a number of fixes for bugs that have plagued the operating system, as well as improved support for drivers. It initially became available to download from Microsoft’s website and will be included as part of the Window’s Update feature from mid-April.

View: vnunet

Apple took a quiet step forward this afternoon with the launch of the second beta of its iPhone software development kit (SDK). Apple sent an email to developers in its program informing them that the second beta was available for download on the company’s Developer Connection web site.
“The second beta version of the iPhone SDK includes Interface Builder, Xcode IDE, Instruments, iPhone simulator, frameworks and samples, compilers, and Shark analysis tool,” the site reads. Interface Builder is “an application for designing and testing user interfaces. Developers can use Interface Builder to create user interfaces that follow the Mac OS X human-interface guidelines by dragging user-interface elements from a palette of predefined controls and dropping them into the window or view they are configuring,” according to Apple.

View: The full story at CRN

Microsoft has just released a public beta of Windows Search 4.0, an update to the existing search technologies in Windows XP and Windows Vista. The knowledge base article lists the main updates as:

• Support for the Encrypting File System (EFS)
• Reduced affect on Microsoft Exchange when you index e-mail in online mode, and there is no local cache (.ost) 
• Support for indexing online delegate mailboxes
• Support for client-to-client remote query to shared indexed locations (ie you can search other PCs running Windows Search 4.0)
• Improved indexing performance
• Faster previewer updates for Windows XP
• Per-user Group Policy settings
• Windows software updates for Watson errors
• Support for the following new enterprise Group Policy objects:

While this is definitely an update aimed at the enterprise market, most probably removing some disincentives for adoption of Windows Vista too, there are some significant performance benefits to be had for consumers as well.

Installation on Vista took me just a few minutes, and after a reboot the first thing you’ll notice is that nothing has changed. No new icon in the system tray, no splash screen on startup, nadda. You’ll know something is different when you start a search from the taskbar, as results load significantly quicker. Unfortunately I’m unable to search for music files at the moment, but hey that’s why the beta tag is on.

This technology is something we’ve spoken about before over a year ago when Steve Ballmer demoed it as Windows Live Search Center. (Quick recap, it was also called OneView and Casino). As Microsoft PR tell MJF, Windows Search 4 provides an “update to Windows search functionality, while Casino was a research project.” It just happened to be a research project demoed at the Worldwide Partner Confererence. 

Download Windows Search 4.0 Preview