Firefox is an award winning preview of next generation browsing technology from mozilla.org. Firefox empowers you to accomplish your online activities faster, more safely and efficiently than any other browser, period. Built with Tab browsing, popup blocking and a number of other seamless innovations, Firefox stands out ahead.

Download: Firefox 1.5 Final
View: Release Notes | Homepage

After a host of test releases and one false start, a new version of the Firefox browser will be ready tomorrow, according to a media alert issued by the Mozilla Foundation today. Firefox 1.5 will be available for free tomorrow afternoon, U.S. Pacific Standard Time, at www.getfirefox.com and www.mozilla.com, according to the open-source group. A complete statement outlining the new features in Firefox 1.5, as well as some additional Mozilla news, will be issued tomorrow at the time the new version is available.

New features in Firefox 1.5 include a better system for updating software, faster navigation using the “Back” and “Forward” tabs, and a redesigned Options/Preferences window that increases the number of category icons and moves them from the left side of the window to the top. Firefox 1.5 also includes new support for Web standards, adding support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and new versions of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). SVG is a language based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) for writing sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and JavaScript 1.6 is the latest version of the scripting language.

Full Story: Computer World
Source: MSFN

The six month old flaw in Microsoft Windows’ IE has been re-rated to “Extremely critical” by security company Secunia. This flaw, exposed to the public not too long ago by Computer Terrorism, still exists, since Mircrosoft is more busy with trying to get the exposers of the flaw to pay then fixing this now extremely critical flaw.
The reason Secunia has now made the flaw extremely critical is according to The Inquirer:

S. Pearson, of computerterrorism.com, has worked out that if a Javascript prompt box was of the right size and form to allow the insertion of custom shellcode a remote attacker can execute arbitrary code embedded into an otherwise normal looking Web page.

Source: The Inquirer | Computer Terrorism | Security IT Hub

With speculation of a ship date for Windows Vista ranging in the second part of 2006, word has surprisingly surfaced that it can be expected much earlier. BusinessWeek has received a copy of the internal blog of Chris Jones, who is a top Windows executive. The blog states that the code for Windows Vista will be completed by August 31, giving Microsoft the opportunity to place Vista on PCs for the 2006 Christmas season.

If Microsoft is able to release Vista around October 2006, the company could benefit from a major spike in sales for December ‘06. Five years ago when Windows XP was released, Microsoft was rewarded with record revenues of US$7.74 billion, which was an 18 percent increase over the previous year. Will Microsoft set records again in 2006 with the release of Windows Vista?

View: Full Story
Source: MSFN

In an effort to gain developers attention regarding the lack of anticheat support in Call of Duty 2, a mass server strike, whereby Call of Duty 2 servers will be renamed to “on strike” and locked, or simply shutdown. This event is set to take place on December 16th and seems to be gaining mass server admin support.

View: Digg | IW Nation Forum
Source: Flexbeta

CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. That removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space. The best part is that it’s fast! (normally taking less that a second to run) and Free.

Download: CCleaner v1.26.218 (Freeware)
View: Version History | CCleaner Homepage
Source: MSFN

And here it is: 10 reasons why you should skip Microsoft’s 360 and wait for the real gaming revolution.

We like to consider ourselves equal opportunity gamers. We love Nintendo and we adore its home consoles. But we’ve never been in the practice of ignoring or, worse, proactively picketing competing systems simply because they are not made by Nintendo. That being true, we have naturally followed the launch of Microsoft’s new console from concept to ship date, carefully weighing the pluses and minuses to jumping into the next generation. Our Xbox 360 sister site recently published the article, “Top 10 Reasons to Buy an Xbox 360,” and the piece made some convincing arguments. These were arguments, we’re confident, that the scores of consumers lined up on Monday night to get the new console would heartily second without a moment’s hesitation.

For the record, we have already purchased our Xbox 360 consoles and we would recommend the console to players whose wallets know no boundaries.

And yet, what kind of editors would we be if we didn’t play devil’s advocate? Are there any reasons not to get an Xbox 360? And just as valuable to any Nintendo fan, are there any advantages to passing on Microsoft’s system altogether and getting a Revolution instead? We thought about both questions for a time and came up with 10 legitimate reasons for single-system users to wait it out. Here they are…

View: Full Story
Source: IGN via Flexbeta

People from xbox-scene.com forums are reporting various crash cases of their brand-new Xbox360. No matter they play games or even try to boot the console, it might crash. The console either gave a mysterious error code, or just froze. Users from TeamXbox are also experiencing the same situation. Well we don’t know what has led to all this.. Could this be a few rogue 360s or is this a widespread issue?

View: Picture’s and Comments
Source: Flexbeta

The NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) is the foundation for the companys award-winning ForceWare drivers and delivers forward-and-backward compatibility across all implementations of NVIDIA desktop, workstation, mobile, platform, and multimedia processors. With a single driver, UDA delivers ongoing performance and feature improvements, reduced maintenance time, increased scalability, and a lower total cost of ownership.

Release Highlights:
- WHQL Certified
- Adds support for GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and GeForce 6800 GS
- Improved performance for Quake 4
- Improved performance and compatibility for Call of Duty 2
- TV-Out/HD-out support for NVIDIA SLI.
- Added support for VSync on Direct3D games when running NVIDIA SLI.
- Performance enhancements for dual-core CPUs.
- PureVideo high definition MPEG-2 de-interlacing support.
- Usability enhancements when connecting to an HDTV.
- Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 2.0 support
- For a full list of fixed and known issues please view the Release Notes.

View: Release Notes (pdf)
Download: Windows XP | Windows 2000 | Windows Server 2003 64-bit | Windows XP 64-bit
Source: MSFN

The MSN Beta team is currently recruiting likely candidates to test an array of new services and products from the Windows Live family.

Successful applicants may be asked to test MSN Messenger 8 (Windows Live Messenger) or future versions of Messenger. The countries range from Afghanistan to Turkey so everyone will be able to get involved.

If you’re interested in becoming an MSN Beta tester then follow the link below for the codes and sign up at Microsoft’s connect community.

Good luck

View: Beta Invite Codes
View: Microsoft Connect
View: Windows Live
Source: Neowin