Download Firefox 6 Final Today

Mozilla has wrapped up the development process of Firefox 6 and is already offering downloads of Firefox 5’s successor. However, the launch of Firefox 6 Final has yet to be announced officially, as the bits have not started being offered to the public. 

Instead, the open source browser vendor is serving Firefox 6 Final through its FTP servers, at least at the time of this article. I don’t doubt that this will change soon enough, but for now, users can grab Firefox 6 via the link at the bottom of this article. 

As I told you earlier this week, Mozilla was planning to launch Firefox 6 on August 16th, 2011. For all I know, that date continues to be the official release deadline for the latest major iteration of Firefox browser. 

Unofficially though, the fully-fledged Firefox 6 Final is already available for download in all supported languages. Mozilla had started populating the Firefox 6.0 Release folder on its FTP servers even before I began writing this, and the bits are live as the article went public. 

It’s important to note that early adopters will not see any differences between Firefox 6 Final and Firefox 6 Beta Refresh 5. 

Of course, our readers, and Mozilla testers, already know that Beta Refresh 5 was actually the Release Candidate (RC) of Firefox 6. 

With the documentation accompanying Firefox 6 releases yet to be updated, users who access it will come across a range of Beta references, but they need to understand that since Firefox 6 Final hasn’t been announced officially, the resources accompanying the Build have also not been refreshed. 

The Release Notes for example still mention Firefox 6 Beta, but it provides users with an idea of what the browser brings to the table, including new Address Bar functionality, new Web Developer menu, enhanced Firefox Sync, boosted browser startup times, and support for WebSockets, EventSource / server-sent events, window.matchMedia, etc. 

Firefox 6 Final for Windows is available for download here.

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Google+ Games Launches with Angry Birds, Zynga Poker, Dragon Age Legends

Google has made the inevitable announcement, Google+ is getting a Games section. There have been plenty or rumors about this and the feature was pretty much a given, but Google has only now made it official.

It's rolling out the Games section of Google+ to all users gradually, but it may be a few days, at least, until you see the Games button next to the Circles one on Google+.

"Today we’re adding games to Google+. With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations," Google+ head Vic Gundotra writes. 

"The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life," he explained.

Google+ Games is launching with only a few games from handpicked developers, but you'll see some very popular titles in there, including Angry Birds, Zynga Poker, Bejeweled, Dragon Age Legends and classics such as Sudoku.

Google will add more games in time and will allow more developers to publish them, but it will be a gradual roll out.

The company is also taking a few lessons learned the hard way by Facebook and applying them to the Games section. 

All notifications, achievements, shares and everything else related to games are only available in the Games tab, regardless of where they come from, your friends or the games themselves.

Nothing gets into your main stream, so it's easy to just ignore the entire thing until or unless you decide you want to play something yourself.

Sharing and the social aspect of games is still important, you'll be able to share your high scores and get invites from your friends, but everything is contained within the section.

Google+ Games is not available to all users yet, but Google says it's rolling out soon. And if the game selection is not enough, more are coming, keep in mind that the entire Google+ is only six weeks old.

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Apple iPhone 5 Event Kicks Off September 7th, Claims Japanese Source

A Japanese source that has previously pinpointed Apple product announcements with accuracy claims to have learned of a special Apple event scheduled for September 7th (the report said September 8th for Japan time), with the highly anticipated iPhone 5 being the centerpiece of the show.

The report in question was picked up by rumor site MacRumors which “confirmed” with Japanese site Kodawarisan that the September 7 date was not a guess.

 Rather, the intel came from “a source in the know”, according to the Mac-centric site reporting heavily on rumors and speculation.

To further add credibility to the Japanese report, they note that Kodawarisan correctly pinpointed the launch date of a new Mac mini computer in 2009.

However, it should be worth noting that Apple generally invests few resources in keeping Macintosh upgrades a secret.

Most of the times, the general public learns of their upcoming availability through part numbers moving back and forth between the assembly lines, retailers, and even Apple’s own outlets.

The iPhone, however, is a different thing altogether. Apple engineers may accidentally forget a prototype unit on a bar stool from time to time, but it’s the company’s highly-enforced policy to keep the iPhone business under the tightest wraps possible.

It is this fact alone that leads us to believe Apple will be very careful not to leak its iPhone 5 announcement plans until the few days leading up to the actual event.

Then again, the Cupertino company does have to make preparations ahead of time.

The upcoming Apple event will not only feature an iPhone announcement, but also an iCloud announcement, and perhaps will see some new iPods debut as well.

iOS 5 will also be a big part of the show.

If there’s one thing that can confirm an Apple event, it’s the invitations Apple sends to the media every year.

We’ll wait for those to start flying around and then we’ll get your hopes up in a proper manner

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Apple Threatened Intel to Abandon Their Chips If Power Consumption Wasn't Improved

Apple has reportedly threatened Intel to move away from using their processors in future ultra-portable notebook designs, such as the MacBook Air, if the chip giant doesn't do anything about decreasing the power consumption of their processors.

According to the Mac Rumors website, which cites Greg Welch, director of Intel's Ultrabook group, this threat was a real wake-up call for the company.

To make sure that it doesn't loses Apple's business, Intel has recently announced a sharp revision in its product roadmap and outlined that future mobile processors will be built to fit inside a 15W TDP.

This is a dramatic change when compared to today's mobile CPU as the regular voltage models usually have a thermal design power of 35W.

To put things in perspective, the 15W TDP announced is even lower than that of Intel's current ULV (ultra-low voltage) chips, which have a power draw of 18W.

To further improve on its processor designs, Intel also plans to introduce a configurable TPD technology in its upcoming Ivy Bridge and Haswell chips.

This will enable the CPUs to surpass their maximum TDP for small amounts of time by increasing their operating frequency in order to complete heavy tasks in less time, quickly returning to an idle state when the extra power is no longer needed.

Furthermore, the configurable TDP technology will also come with a special docked mode, which will allow the processor to exceed the system's TDP consistently when installed in a special dock with extra cooling.

According to the latest findings from IDC and Gartner, Apple commends about 5% of the global computer market share, but in the US this value has reached 10.7% in the second quarter of 2011, which represents a 11.6% growth over Q2 2010.

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New Windows 8 “Revealed” Video Released

A new video boasting to reveal Windows 8 to the public, but actually failing to deliver on that promise, is now available on YouTube. 

As the hunger for Windows 8 details grows to insatiable levels, Microsoft continues to keep mum on the next major iteration of the Windows client. 

The software giant has pointed to the BUILD Windows conference in mid-September 2011 for the first deep insight into Windows 8. 

Michael Palermo, Microsoft Developer Evangelist, which is featured in the new Windows 8 Revealed video, provides no actual information of the successor of Windows 7. 

All his answers to Windows 8 questions do nothing more but mention the upcoming BUILD event. In fact, the entire Windows 8 “bait and switch” video is more of an advertisement for InterfaceTT than anything else. 

I guess it’s a bit funny, albeit frustrating, the way that Palermo actually dodges answering Windows 8 related questions, him and InterfaceTT’s Spike Xavier looking like they’re having a blast. 

But then again, BUILD has turned into something of a “promise land” for developers, customers, early adopters, etc. looking to find out more about Windows 8. 

The conference has already been sold out, even before Microsoft posted the agenda. The software giant even canceled the pre-sessions which were supposed to be a sort of prelude to the event, all scheduled for September 12. 

While those attending BUILD will be able to register as early as September 12, the conference will debut on September 13 with the opening keynote address. 

The Redmond company is expected to share a pre-release Build of Windows 8 at BUILD, although it is unclear whether Microsoft will offer a Milestone 3 (M3) pre-Beta release, or the fully-fledged Beta. The software giant has yet to confirm anything about BUILD, except that it will be a Windows 8-centric event.

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Fix Windows 7 SP1 Intermittent Crashes "0x0000007E"

A fix from Microsoft Support is designed to resolve an issue that causes Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 computers to crash intermittently. 

The software giant has confirmed the problem, and revealed that affected customers get the following stop error message: "0x0000007E."

 Not only the plain vanilla, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 platforms can experience this glitch. It appears, that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 can also crash intermittently.

According to the Redmond company, the full error message reads: “Stop 0x0000007E (parameter1, parameter2, parameter3, parameter4) - SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED”

“The parameters in this Stop error message vary, depending on the configuration of the computer,” Microsoft explained. 

The software giant has already identified the source of the problem, and provided details to customers in a knowledge base article. 

“This issue usually occurs on a file server, and does not occur when Server Message Block (SMB) Version 2 is disabled,” Microsoft said. 

“This issue occurs because of a race condition that is triggered when a NULL lease handle is accessed after the lease spinlock is released.”

In addition to accessing details about the crashes, Windows users can also grab a hotfix from Microsoft Support. 

The software giant stresses that Windows 7 customers can come across "0x0000007E" stop error messages that are related to other problems. In this regard, the KB 2528614 hotfix might not end up resolving some Windows 7 crashes. 

At the same time, there are bound to be customers with Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 crashing machines that will recognize the symptoms from this article and who will surely benefit from the hotfix offered by Microsoft. 

The company is not providing a manual workaround or an update. According to the software giant the plan is to integrate KB 2528614 hotfix into Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

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Improve Windows 7 SP1 and Vista SP2 Compatibility with Advanced Format Disks

Microsoft has been offering an update designed to improve the compatibility of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Advanced Format Disks for some time now, and it appears that the company is now offering something similar for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. 

Well, not an actual update, but a hotfix designed to kick up a notch Vista and Windows Server 2008 compatibility with Advanced Format disks. 

In the case of KB 982018, the update is available for Windows 7 RTM and Service Pack 1, as well as for Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM and SP1. 

The KB 2553708 hotfix, which went live today, August 12, 2011, comes with support only for Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2. 

“Advanced Format disks have a 4-KB physical sector size. This hotfix is only for Advanced Format disks that have a 4-KB physical sector size and that emulate a 512-byte interface for logical addressing,” Microsoft explains. 

“Advanced Format disks introduce a larger physical sector of 4 KB. However, these disks have a 512-byte interface for logical addressing to make initial versions more compatible with current computer systems. Therefore, these disks are known as "512-byte emulation disks" or as "512e".”

The KB 982018 update for Windows 7 SP1 is designed to resolve no less than five issues – users will find download links at the bottom of this article. 

By comparison, the KB 2553708 hotfix will only deal with three problems detailed by the software giant in the knowledge base article accompanying the fix on Microsoft Support. 

The “hotfix rollup package introduces a new storage infrastructure that lets you query the physical sector size of a storage device. Additionally, the hotfix rollup package updates the Fsutil.exe tool to report the correct sector size,” The Redmond company notes. 

- All supported x86-based versions of Windows 7

- All supported x64-based versions of Windows 7

- All supported x64-based versions of Windows Server 2008 R2

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SageThumbs 2.0.0.8

Converting images has evolved all these years from difficult to configure programs to light applications that come with settings preconfigured for the needs of the average user. With SageThumbs you get not only ease of use, but also a phenomenal range of supported input formats. 

I was hoping for a brief installation process, but the entire procedure is old-school. This does not mean that it is complicated or it takes too long, as you only have to go through a small set of screens.

SageThumbs has no application window to input the image files, because you don’t really need it. The program installs as an extension to Windows Explorer and you can find it in the context menu of every picture you hold on the system.

And when I say every picture, I really mean it, since the list encompasses more than 200+ choices. These are not just the popular formats you deal every day, but really exclusive ones, proprietary to specific cameras. So yes, it does support raw pictures, too.

As for the output result, SageThumbs is pretty modest with only BMP, PNG, GIF and JPG in its portfolio. However, the app has been created to offer you the chance to convert all sorts of image types, even if you have no software to open them up with.

During our tests we had no trouble converting to the above mentioned types any of the regular image formats. We also tried some raw formats from Nikon and Canon cameras and the application encountered no difficulty in converting them. However, given they were raw pictures, it took a while to display the results.

One of the best parts in SageThumbs is that its menu shows a thumbnail of the selected image. If multiple items are selected the thumb preview is no longer available and instead you’ll get a clear view at the main options of the application.

Besides turning the photos into one of the four popular formats mentioned above, the app also makes available the possibility to send the item, or just the thumbnail preview via email.

In the case of the single-item selection SageThumbs’ menu is a tad richer. It includes the possibility to set the chose picture as the desktop background, stretched, tiled or centered.

Handling the app is no rocket science, and it is makes for an extremely handy way to batch convert piles of photos to BMP, JPG, GIF or PNG with the least effort possible: select the files and choose the output format. The only problem is that you won’t get to pick the storage folder for the results, in case you want to separate them from the originals in one move.

The configuration panel of SageThumbs may appear slightly complicated for a novice, but leaving everything to default should be perfectly fine. On the other hand, advanced users won’t have any trouble with the screen and will be able to customize the size of the preview thumbnail in the context menu, define the quality parameters for JPEG output and the PNG compression.

Another customization option in the settings panel is to choose the exact type of files you want the application to process. Applying the settings actually requires running SageThumbs under an account with administrative privileges.

However, you will get the alert informing you of this condition even if you are already in an administrator account. Still on the downside, we noticed that while the configuration screen is visible, the entire desktop area becomes unusable if you launch it from the context menu of an image.

You won’t be able as much as refresh the workspace or access the context menu. But running it from Windows Start menu won’t give you any trouble at all.

On the downside, the conversion process offers no indication on the completion time. There is no progress bar available or any other sign that it is working, except for the bump in system resources usage, which, in our case, showed a 48% CPU average and RAM requirement beyond what we expected, continually increasing to demands of greater than 300MB. We worked with a batch of 63 JPEGs.

This would make it acceptable for small jobs that do not require numerous conversions, but it is an awful solution if you want it for batch conversions.

A shell extension allowing to preview many image formats.

SageThumbs is a powerful shell extension allowing to preview enormous amount of image formats directly in Windows Explorer by using Pierre-e Gougelet's GFL library (XnView's author).

As SageThimbs is a Windows Explorer context menu extension, there is no an executable file that you should launch to bring it up. To use it, just open any folder with image files in Windows Explorer, and then right-click a file you want to preview. You'll see the thumbnail immediately in the context menu. Easily preview almost any image format using this powerful shell extension.

Here are some key features of "SageThumbs":

 · Extended thumbnail image view of Explorer folder

 · Thumbnail image in explorer context menu (rigth-click menu)

 · Extended info tips

 · Support 162 image formats (224 extensions) via GFL Library

 · Support additional 26 image formats via XnView plugins (if installed)

 · Send by mail support

 · One-click conversion to popular image formats support

 · Wallpaper selection support

 · Copy to clipboard support

Requirements:

 · About 2 Mb of disk space + additional space for cache

What's New in This Release:

 · Combined 32/64-bit distributive

 · Added "JPEG quality" and "PNG compression" convert options

 · Added "Convert to PNG" context menu item

 · Optimized options dialog

Download here

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Download Free Office Web Apps Browser Plugin for Firefox

Microsoft has released a browser extension designed to bridge the Cloud version of Office with older versions of the productivity suite for Firefox users. 

Version 1.0 of the Office Web Apps Browser Plugin is now available for download free of charge from the software giant. 

According to the Redmond company, the extension is designed to integrate seamlessly with Mozilla Firefox, but only in the context in which users are leveraging Office 2010’s predecessors. 

By deploying the Office Web Apps Browser Plugin, Firefox users essentially install an add-on for their browser that connects the Cloud and desktop flavors of Office. 

Once the plug-in has been installed, users can navigate to Office Web Apps using Firefox and seamlessly transition content from the Cloud to the desktop versions of Office components. 

“If you have Firefox and either Microsoft Office 2003 or Office 2007, this plugin enables you to open documents directly from Office Web Apps into the appropriate Office desktop application,” the software giant explained. 

“For example, in Word Web App, clicking Open in Word results in the document being opened in Word 2003 or Word 2007. When the document is saved in Word, it is saved back at the web location where it was opened.”

It’s important to note that the functionality described above is already featured by default into Office 2010. 

Essentially, Office 2010 includes the add-on for Firefox out-of-the box, according to the Redmond company, with the extension being necessary only for Office 2007 and Office 2003 users.

Microsoft has not said if it’s working on similar Office Web Apps plugins for additional browsers, such as Chrome, Opera or Safari. 

Office Web Apps Browser Plugin is designed to integrate with Firefox 3.5, Firefox 4.0, Firefox 5 and supports Word Web App, Excel Web App and PowerPoint Web App as well as Office 2003 SP3 and Office 2007 SP2.

An add-on that enables Office documents to be opened directly from Firefox into the appropriate Office desktop application

Microsoft Office Web Apps Browser Plugin is a Firefox extension designed to enaple you to open documents with the assciated Office software.

If you have Firefox and either Microsoft Office 2003 or Office 2007, this plugin enables you to open documents directly from Office Web Apps into the appropriate Office desktop application. 

For example, in Word Web App, clicking Open in Word results in the document being opened in Word 2003 or Word 2007. When the document is saved in Word, it is saved back at the web location where it was opened.

Requirements:

 · Microsoft Office

 · Mozilla Firefox 3.5+

Download here

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Firefox 6 Final Available for Download on August 16, 2011

Firefox 6 is almost finalized, with Mozilla now gearing up to release the successor of Firefox 5 to the general public in less than a week. 

In fact, if no bugs, including regression issues, will be identified, Firefox 6 Final could be made available for download in as little as five days. 

Firefox 6 continues to be in Beta development stage at the time of this article, and will remain here for rest of this week. 

Mozilla launched no less than five Refresh Builds of Firefox 6 Beta, with the last such testing release shipped to early adopters on August 5, 2011. 

Firefox 6 Beta Refresh 5 was labeled the Release Candidate (RC) Build for all the right reasons it appears, since Mozilla is now confirming the final release for August 16. 

“Beta [6] is done. We pushed out the final Beta build last Friday and are spinning up release builds now. At the last minute, we took two very safe fixes for two very serious dataloss bugs on Android. If this works out, and no problems are found, we’ll be shipping Firefox 6 on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android next Tuesday, 2011-08-16,” the open source browser vendor stated. 

Considering the fact that Firefox 6 Beta Refresh 5 is also the RC or the last Beta of Firefox 5’s successor, this is THE Build to try by testers looking to see what the final version will look and feel like. 

End users might want to wait until August 16 in order to download the final version of Firefox 6. Of course, I’ll make sure to provide an update when Firefox 6 Final becomes available for download next week, so make sure to keep your eyes peeled on. 

Meanwhile, Firefox 6 RC is available for download and testing.

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