Firefox 4 Officially Released, Crosses One Million Downloads Within Hours


After a dozen betas, and two release candidates, Mozilla has finally released the public build of Firefox 4. It took nearly a year to come, but now that it’s here, expect it to break all records. With well over five thousand downloads per minute, at the moment, Firefox seems well poised to go past the ten million mark. You can tack Firefox 4 downloads in realtime from glow.mozilla.org.



Although, several planned features were dropped from Firefox 4, as it struggled to stay on schedule, Firefox 4 is a meaty update, which boasts of some pretty significant enhancements.

The user interface has been refined to give the website higher priority. Tabs are now on top (as they should be), and the menu bar has been replaced with a single “Firefox” button.

Firefox 4 is significantly faster than its predecessors, courtesy of the new JagerMonkey JavaScript engine, and should be able to hold its own against the likes of Opera 11, Chrome 10 and Internet Explorer 9. Also new to this build is hardware (GPU) acceleration and WebGL support. Unfortunately, hardware acceleration is currently not supported in Linux. WebGL compatibility means that Firefox is ready to meet the demands of the new age, graphics intensive web-applications and games.

Other new features in Firefox 4 include in-built synchronization option, “Panaroma” tab organization, app tabs, multi-touch support, DNT (Do Not Track) header support, WebM video playback, crash protection for popular plug-ins (Flash, QuickTime, Silverlight etc.), HTML 5 parser, and open type fonts support. The full changelog for Firefox 4 is available here.

Firefox 4 for Windows, Mac and Linux is available in more than seventy languages from firefox.com.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Announced; Is Thinner Than The iPad 2

Samsung has just announced two new Galaxy Tabs at their on-going event in CTIA. One Tab will come with a 10.1-inch screen, while another one will come with an 8.9-inch screen.

Samsung did announce the Galaxy Tab 10.1 at the Mobile World Congress last month, but the company has actually improved the product since then in a bid to make it an iPad killer. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is thickness is virtually the same as that of the Galaxy S II (8.6 mm), making it thinner than the recently announced iPad 2.


The 10.1 Tab has a PLS display with WXGA (1280×800) display. It is powered by a 1 GHz dual-core processor and packs 1GB of RAM. The back of the tab features a 3MP camera with Auto-Focus and an LED flash, while there is a 2MP camera in the front for video calling.

The usual GPS with A-GPS, Bluetooth, Accelerometer, Digital Compass, Ambient Light Sensor and a 3.5mm audio jack are all present.* The tablet supports HSPA+ for speeds of up to 21Mbps.

The Tab 10.1* has dual-Wi-Fi antennas and supports both 2.4GHz and the 5GHz bands. The tablet has a whopping 6800mAh battery for up to 10 hours of video playback and weighs in only 595grams.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 will run on Android 3.0 Honeycomb with Samsung’s TouchWIZ 4.0 UI on top of it. The tablet will be released on June 8 in some regions of the world. The 16GB Wi-Fi version will cost only $499 while the 32GB version will cost $599.

Best Mobile Apps Of The Week for Android And iOS

Welcome to the eighth edition of Best Mobile Apps of the Week for Android and iOS. Starting this week, I am going to list two apps each for Android and the iOS platform. Sadly, I will not introduce our readers to new Symbian apps from this week as well.

In this edition of BMATW, Android owners will be introduced to an app which will monitor their sleeping habits and an app which will help users create their own Android avatar! For iOS owners, there is a very popular Hindi news channel application and a RSS reader app.

Sleep As An Droid (Android)

Ignoring the grammatically incorrect title of the app, Sleep as an Droid helps a user to track his sleeping habit.



Track your sleep and wake up gently with nature sounds in optimal sleep phase

Alarm clock with sleep cycle tracker. Wakes you gently in light sleep for pleasant mornings. Features: sleep graph history, sleep debt stats, sharing (FaceBook, email), nature alarms (birds, sea, storm…) with gradual volume up, music volume down when asleep, captcha, sleep talk/snoring recording.

The app uses the inbuilt accelerometer of your Android handset to track your movement while sleeping, and wakes you up when you are in a ‘light sleep’. Users can also set mathematical puzzles as captcha codes, so as to completely wake them up from sleep!

Sleep As An Droid can be downloaded for free (2 weeks trial version) from the Android Market.

Androidify (Android)

Androidify was released by Google a couple of weeks ago on the Android Market. The app allows a user to create their own ‘Android’ flavored avatar just for fun! Users can customize each and every aspect of their Android avatar including its height, width, clothes and hairstyle etc.


Androidify yourself by customizing the little green Android as yourself, your family, your friends, anyone! Stretch it , shrink it, add a hoody, style its hair, throw on some shades, or even give it a parrot and a pirate hat. Arrrgh!

Once you’ve personalized your Android, share it with your friends, set it as a photo in your contact book, or use it in some inventive way we haven’t thought of yet. Have fun, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Sadly, the application does not allow users to create an animated avatar which is a letdown. Hopefully, Google will introduce this feature in a future update. Android users can download Androidify for free from here.

Reeder (iOS)

Reeder is one of the most successful RSS reader apps available for the iOS platform. The app has a very slick UI and with some nice and smooth transitions. Reeder supports syncing with Google Reader and allows users to browse their feeds either via feed or folders.


Users also have the option to share a given piece of news with their friends on popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Reeder also supports Instapaper, ReaditLater, Readibility, state saving and Image caching. The app is available for the iPhone as well as for the iPad. The mobile version of Reeder costs $2.99, while the tablet version costs $4.99.

NDTV (iOS)

The NDTV app for iOS brings the latest news and videos from the NDTV newsroom to the users. The app also allows users to watch the live stream of some popular NDTV channels including NDTV India and NDTV Profit. The video streaming works on Wi-Fi as well as on 3G/EDGE.


The NDTV Social section allows users to read and know more about the NDTV anchors and news reporters. The app is available as a free download for the iPhone as well as for the iPad.

WordPress 3.2 Plans Revealed : Faster, Lighter, Drops PHP4 and MySQL4 Support And Will

WordPress 3.1 has been out for almost a month now and is pretty much stable. Now, that the last major release of WordPress is out of the way, the developers have already started to focus on the next version; WordPress 3.2.


According to a blog post by the lead developer at WordPress; Mark Jaquith, the plans for WordPress 3.2 include several new and exciting changes which will make WordPress more faster and lighter than ever before. WordPress 3.2 will also have a faster release cycle than WordPress 3.1 and include several other changes.

Dropping PHP4 and MySQL4 Support – Welcome PHP5 and MySQL5

For starters WordPress 3.2 will drop support for PHP4 and MySQL4 and will require users to use PHP 5.2 and MySQL5. However, the developers have been asked to refrain from using PHP5 specific code in this build.

IE6 Nagging

In addition to that WordPress 3.2 may also include a nag for IE6 users and ask them to "use a real browser". This change is related to the BrowseHappy campaign.

Distraction Free Writing in Admin Panel

The Admin write panel may get a major overhaul with WordPress 3.2. The Full screen editor may get a overhaul similar to WriteRoom where users can focus on writing and avoid distractions. It will be interesting to see how this shapes up. One of the developers is actively working on this and may release a plugin for distraction free writing well before WordPress 3.2 comes out.

Improvements in Auto Upgrading

WordPress 3.2 may have better support for upgrading your installation. The developers will focus more on upgrading just the updated files rather than upgrading the entire installation and core files.

Speed Improvements

WordPress can slow down a website, specially with a large database. Also the admin menu loads a bit slowly at times. WordPress 3.2 will address the speed issues by introducing PHP lazy loading and disabling certain things which leads to the slowdown.

The new features in WordPress 3.2 have not been revealed yet, but from the WordPress 3.2 plans definitely look interesting. Speed and stability are a major part of any platform and outdating older versions of PHP4 and MySQL4 should help with adding more features in the future.

WordPress 3.2 is just a stepping stone towards adding more speed, stability and features to the best blogging platform in the world.

How to Run Windows Live Writer in Linux

Last week, an online buddy of mine told me that he’d use Linux more often if he could run Windows Live Writer in it. I had to agree, there are many different blog editors in Linux, but once you’ve gotten used to using Live Writer, you’ve been spoiled and won’t want to use anything less satisfying.

After a bit of searching around online, I finally figured out that the best solution might be to run a full copy of Windows inside a virtual machine. Then I’d have the best of both worlds within easy reach. After trying it, I discovered that it works quite well. In fact, this article was posted from Xubuntu Linux, using Windows Live Writer.


I decided to use VirtualBox as the virtual machine server, because it’s open source, but mainly because it’s already in the Ubuntu Software Center. Installing it was as easy as searching for “VirtualBox” and marking it for installation.

An old, unused copy of Windows XP was my choice for a guest operating system. I was familiar with the steps needed to set that up, but if you need help, you can find a great tutorial on installing XP in VirtualBox at Linux Journal.

After I had XP running the first time, I did have a few problems. I kept receiving warnings that I didn’t have the Automatic Updates enabled. Since this was virtual machine, I really didn’t want it to update. If I had any problems, I could always use VirtualBox’s snapshots to return to an older state when needed. I finally opened XP’s Services manager and turned off the “Automatic Updates” and the “Security Center”.

You can launch the Services manager by clicking “Start”, “Run” and then typing “services.msc” into the run box (without quotes).



I also noticed that I couldn’t copy and paste between Linux and Windows. I found out that I needed to install the “Guest Additions” in XP. You can find these in the VirtualBox “Devices” menu while the virtual machine is running.


There are two versions of Windows Live Writer. One version is for XP, while the most current version is for Vista and Windows 7.

Once you have Live Writer installed this way, you are ready to blog with ease, no matter what flavor of Linux you’re using. If you have your own favorite blog editor, let us know in the comments below.

Twitter Age is 5 Years

Despite Twitter acting like a dick this past week, pissing off both developers and users in the process, no one can deny that Twitter is a revolutionary (literally!) communication tool which has been one of the most popular web services on 2010.

Well, guess what?! Twitter is now exactly 5 years old. It was exactly 5 years ago, on this day that Twitter was born.

In these 5 years, Twitter has exploded in terms of users and tweets.

Here are some interesting statistics about Twitter.

           #tweets
3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.

1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.

50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.

140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.

177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.

456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).

6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

#accounts

572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.

460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.

182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

#employees

8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.

Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter just tweeted this out and also posted an interesting conversation with Biz Stone which describes the creation of Twitter.
IM with @Biz about starting work on twttr, March 13th 2006, 12:22PM Pacific

me: Biz! How goes? We’re starting work on the twttr implementation today.

Biz: really?! NICE

me: yeah, i roped florian in. i think we’ll be able to get most of it up and working by the end of this week. then i’ll do the sms and style side next week. along with ajax stuff.

Biz: two weeks and we’ll have twttr.
yay!

me: yeah! should be pretty quick. have all of florian’s time and all of mine.

Biz: oh man that’s awesome

Biz: i’ve looking longingly at my empty sms on my phone throuhout the panels

Biz: sucks that teen people has the shortcode

me: i know! that’s going to be tough. doesn’t help that the code also spells TXT

Biz: hmm

yah