Mozilla have release Firefox 3 on Tuesday night, and the open source project is opening a new front in web browser wars. Firefox 3 will be the first internet browser to offer offline web application support. Despite repeated server crashes, it looks like the new Firefox 3 web browser is on a roll.

As of Wednesday morning, the day after the latest version of Firefox 3 was released, more than 7.9 million copies of the software had been downloaded.

The crush of demand made access to the new software spotty for much on Tuesday after its debut. But by Wednesday, new copies of the software were being downloaded at a rate of 5,523 per minute.

Mozilla is pushing to set a record for more software downloaded in a 24-hour period, and it’s clear Mozilla is set to beat that goal, in addition to surpassing its own target of more than 5 million downloads over that period. Mozilla said it’s waiting for the Guinness Book of World Records to review the results.

Of course, it’s easy to dismiss the rush to download the new software as hype. The open-source software has been available in various beta forms since 2007, and none of its new features have been kept under wraps.

New features of Firefox 3

Enhanced bookmarking abilities and security features are main themes for Firefox 3, the Mozilla-backed open source Web browser. The new browser will also sport a slightly new look. Makers of the software, many whom have volunteered their efforts for free, hope to set a world record for the most downloads in a single day when the final version of Firefox 3 goes live next Tuesday.

Many of the enhancements in Firefox 3 involve bookmarks. The new version lets Web surfers add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic. A new “Places” feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they visit frequently but haven’t bookmarked.

There’s also a new star button for easily adding sites to your bookmark list — similar to what’s already available on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other new features include the ability to resume downloads midway if the connection is interrupted and an updated password manager that doesn’t disrupt the log-in process.

The new features of Firefox 3 include the following:

Personal

• Library

• Tags

• Smart Location Bar

• One-Click Bookmarking

• Smart Bookmark Folders

Security & Privacy

• Instant Web Site ID

• Anti-Malware

• Parental Controls

• Anti-Virus Software

• Clear Private Data

• Customized Security Settings

• Add-ons

• Automated Update

• Password Manager

• Anti-Phishing

• Pop-Up Blocker

Customization

• Add-ons Manager

• Over 5,000 ways to customize

• Browser Look & Feel

• Beyond Add-ons

Productivity

• Platform-Native Look & Feel

• Feed Reader

• Download Manager

• Spell Checking

• Session Restore

• Full Zoom

• Image Loading

Search

• Smart Keywords

• Search Suggestions

• Integrated Web Search

• Hundreds of Search Engines

• Find

Tabs

• Tabs

• Reopen Closed Tabs

• Drag & Reorder Tabs

• Smooth Scrolling

• Save on Exit

Universal Access

• Universal Customization

• The Language of Firefox

• Emphasis on Accessibility

• Improved Text Rendering

Performance

• Improved Memory Management

• Smaller Memory Footprint

• Faster JavaScript

• Graphics Engine Improvements

• Faster Page Load

Standards

• Online Application Support

• Color Profile Support

• Advanced Graphics

• Support for Advanced Web Technologies

• Offline Browsing

Help

• Live Support

• Firefox Support

You can read the details information of the new features of Firefox 3 here: [URL=http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/#instant-id]Read More [/URL]

And you can download Firefox 3 from here: [URL=http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/]Download Firefox 3[/URL]

Collective Development
Firefox is the No. 2 web browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It comes from Mozilla an open source community in which thousands of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products. Mozilla has been developing Firefox 3 for nearly three years and has been publicly testing it since November for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

There was recently a buzz regarding the web 2.0 award held by Seomoz.org after which the PR7 page got completely de-indexed from Google and the PR7 changed to a complete gray bar. First there was no reason that strongly could hold the answer for it, but then the SEO’s after some research could just conclude that it was the “0″ ending in the URL that led to the penalty.

Then Jane from Seomoz had kept in touch with Google and they have finally come to a conclusion that URL ending with a “0″ will not be in the index of Google and that’s why the web 2.0 awards pages were penalized. Rand got in touch with Google and was advised that changing the URL so it doesn’t end in “.0″ would be a wise decision. Google would prefer not to make an official or public comment about this issue. After a lot of investigation by SEO, it was found that it’s not just inadvisable, but literally impossible to get a URL indexed in Google’s engine if it ends with a .0 similar to how Google won’t index file extensions ending in .exe, .dll or .tgz

Later on, Matt Cutts reported in is blog, that they finally allow and crawling pages with 0 ending URLs.
Here is what Matt says and I coat -

“Even though urls ending in “.0? are often binary and therefore end up getting dropped later in our indexing pipeline, it’s always good to revisit old decisions and respond to feedback by running new tests. So just in the last day or so, we switched it so that Google is willing to crawl pages that end in in “.0?. This will help the small number of pages out on the web that want to serve up HTML pages with a “.0? extension.

- An easy was to use the filetype: operator, so that you can decide whether to avoid a particular filename extension yourself.
- Google is willing to revisit old decisions and test them again, which is what we’re doing with the “.0″ filetype extension.”

But still, Google will not be able to crawl web content that ends with extensions such as .exe, .tgz or .dll etc. as that all has binary data which can not be entirely crawled and so they are just termed as “Meaningless blobs” according to Matt, this kind of extensions are mostly binary i.e not-very-indexable files, so avoid URLs ending with binary files extensions, for crawl by Google.

After the revisit of old decision and switched to crawl pages that end with .0 the Seomoz.org web 2.0 page now got PR again but it PR6 and not PR7 again.

The process of web site optimization implies many operations regarding the changing of different web objects’ properties. The main purpose of optimization action is to reduce the size of large files, such as multimedia files for example. Web page code optimization will lead to a higher rendering speed of the page by web browser. The internal links and external links validation represents also a stage in the overall optimization process.

A complete website optimization process includes various individual steps, which could take a lot of time to be executed. Their efficiency could not have the maximal value, due to the fact that optimization operations are performed manually. Fortunatelly, automatic optimization tools exist, allowing the webmaster to perform website optimization directly from computer desktop or from a web server. (more…)

As millions of travelers prepare to fly home for the holidays this year, a few thousand can expect to try out a new generation of onboard e-mail and text-messaging services using their own cellphones and portable devices.

Starting this week and over the next few months, several airlines in the United States and Europe are due to begin testing these new services on some of their planes, with plans to roll out the technology across most of their fleets over the next 12 to 18 months. (more…)

For the last several years, Red Hat has been pushing forward the development of real-time enhancements for Linux. Yet the company has made no formal product announcement of how it would attempt to productize its real-time Linux innovations.

That changed today, with the announcement of the Red Hat MRG (Messaging, Real Time and Grid) platform. The product is expected to be available as a public beta this month, with a generally available release set for early 2008.

The product’s real-time enhancements provide deterministic performance for the kernel that enables actions to occur within the same amount of time, every time — a feature critical for a number of industries including telecommunications, the military, healthcare and financial services.
(more…)

Web hosting and domain name provider Purohits has reintroduced its .INFO promotion, the company announced recently. The promotion offers considerable discounts on .INFO domain name registrations.

The company’s promotion began December 3, 2007 at 09:30 GMT and will end December 27, 2007 at 09:00 GMT. Those purchasing .MOBI domain names receive a free .MOBI Site Builder. The company is also offering .IN, .NET, and .MOBI domain names.
(more…)

Poor configuration is leaving DNS servers open to attack, but overall the system is growing and modernising, according to a new survey.
DNS servers are increasing and modernising, but many are still vulnerable to attacks, according to a new study.
The third annual survey conducted by Infoblox and the Measurement Factory looked at the state of Domain Name System (DNS) servers across the public internet by surveying 80 million named servers.
DNS servers map domain names to numeric IP addresses. If such systems fail - from a malware attack or server failure, for example - then a company’s email and public-facing website will become unavailable.
According to the study, the DNS system is growing overall - showing that the public internet is experience growth. The internet-facing DNS server count jumped to 11.5 million this year, up from nine million in 2006.
“An increase was expected, but the actual number is a surprise - it’s a pretty substantial increase,” said Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture at Infoblox. (more…)