Firefox 3.5 now available

Its been a long wait, but Firefox 3.5 is finally here, with perhaps a little less pomp than the world record setting Firefox 3.

While Firefox 3.5 is unlikely to beat its predecessor's world record of 8 million downloads in one day, this one is still a significant step forward, especially with its support for many of the HTML5 features we're all waiting for. What was meant to be a rather small 3.1 update has now become a major version in its own right.

Since the release of Google Chrome, the browser world had become rather more complicated, with some praising its simplicity while others criticizing its lack of features and lack of extendability. Most browsers have had to adapt to the Chrome's new innovative tab managements system, a feature has since been adopted in Opera and Safari too, and as of Firefox 3.5, you can now tear away tabs, and recombine them into the same window.

Another feature of Firefox which comes as a result of peer pressure is a private Browsing mode. By clicking on "Start Private Browsing" (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+P) you can now enter a land of no worries. No traces of your actions during a Private Browsing session are maintained across sessions. Even besides that the privacy features have been ramped up, and now you can choose to discard only the "offending" part of your history, for the last hour, two hours, four hours, or day.

Firefox 3.5 packs an updated Gecko 1.9.1 layout engine and the new TraceMonkey javascript just-in-time (JIT) compiler for blazing fast JavaScript execution, which means faster running web-apps, although it still doesn't manage to overtake Safari 4 or Chrome 3.

Other improvements in speed can come from Web-Workers which will allow web-developers to create multi-threaded web applications resulting in more responsive interfaces even while complicated JavaScript application churn away in the background, and native support for JSON. All resulting in a much happier Ajax experience.

Location sensitive browsing support is now also a part of Firefox. Web sites can now access data about your physical location to provide targeted content, and can share you location with others (with your permission, of-course!). With the new era of multi-touch computing Firefox is now also multi-touch aware, with support for pinching and swiping gestures for zooming, and moving in the history respectively.

This rather impressive list of features, which was more than what was initially planned was enough for it to be upgraded from a simple single point release (and till beta 3 it was Firefox 3.1) to rather more significant 3.5 release. This isn't the end of line for the Firefox 3 series though, coming up next is Firefox 3.6 (earlier 3.2) which besides other things will bring you a new graphical tab-switcher. Look out Safari, Opera and Chrome, your competition has arrived!

Download Firefox 3.5 here.

NASA crashes rocket on the moon in search of water!

In space, no one can hear you scream. So a rocket crashing on the moon won’t give out a satisfactory loud explosion either; but NASA’s plans to bomb the moon in search of water were still a little more tepid than we expected.

The US space agency has successfully bulldozed two spacecraft into the moon's South Pole in a search for hidden ice, but without the promised live photos and expectant.

The planned crash of the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) was to send up a cloud of lunar dust for miles, which the scientists would observe in detail to detect if there are water molecules on the moon.

But it made for quite a disappointing live broadcast. In a streaming transmission on the official Web site, NASA’s control room said the probe was nearing the moon, but then the screen went completely grey for a while. Momentarily, a team of NASA scientists high-fived each other for a job well done.

While we didn’t get to see it, the Associated Press has the full run of play as to how it all happened: “First, a 2.2-ton empty rocket hull smacked the moon's South Pole at 5:01 PM IST on Friday. Then, four minutes later, the camera-and-instrument laden space probe made its death plunge.

“The smaller probe had five cameras and four other scientific instruments and NASA had touted live photos on its web site. But those images didn't occur.

“NASA officials say they are sure the two probes crashed and are looking to see what happened to the pictures.”

Hopefully, we should see the images soon because they would make for some great viewing! In any case, it should take some time to analyse the data and reach a conclusion.

Touch Screens for the visually impaired

With all the success that touchscreens have, they are still essentially useless unless you are looking at the device while using it. Despite its multi-touch goodiness, you'll still need to take you iPod Touch out if you want to change the song. This is also a distinct disadvantage to the visually impaired, since they are not able to feel the 'features' on the screen.

Jussi Rantala of the University of Tampere in Finland along with colleagues have come up with a way to simulate a braille on the screen of a device, using vibrations. They simulated a braille character by representing a raised dot as an intense vibration, and the absence of a dot as longer but weaker pulsed vibrations. Braille encodes characters as a 2x3 grid of dots, where characters are represented based on which dots are raised. People trained to read braille can read the patterns using their finger and hence can read texts even without sight. This innovation promises to bring this marvelous.

To enable this they developed software for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which has piezoelectric¹ material built into the touchscreen. They tested two modes of operation for this virtual braille, one in which the reader places his finger on the left side of the screen and sweeps horizontally to read the rest of the dots, and the other in which the reader keeps the finger fixed on one location, and the dots vibrate in and out sequentially in that spot. The first one seemed to be quite difficult to read however. Much like many screen reading software read out the text displayed on the screen, they hope to present the screen content in braille form.

This is a wonderful innovation for touchscreens, as they can finally become more accessible to the visually impaired. This technology can have pretty interesting applications otherwise too. Using vibrations they can also indicate the presence of buttons and controls on the screen, allowing people to control their devices without looking at them.

Western Digital 1 Terabyte Caviar Black Edition HDD

It don’t matter if you’re black or white?

With newer Hi-Def video and audio formats becoming popular, games getting larger, and collections growing, you need more space, period. Western Digital plans to satiate your hunger for space with their new 1 Terabyte Caviar Black edition HDD.

This HDD is almost the same size of a 500GB HDD, despite the increased amount of memory platters. They managed to keep the height low by using perpendicular recording.

The WD caviar comprises of dual processors for twice the data processing speed as normal drives, coupled with a massive 32 MB of buffer memory that ensures that you get the maximum performance. Along with Acoustic management this drive also features Power management that allows it to power itself down when the drive is not in use or reduce its speed to a lower RPM when lower levels of performance are required.

We tested the WD Caviar Black edition HDD for its performance in real world scenarios using HD tach and SiSoft Sandra, and it did well, but not that much better. It gave us a random access time of 12.3 ms, while the average read and write speeds came to 81.1 and 92 MBps respectively, with CPU utilization at a maximum of 4 per cent. SiSoft Sandra gave it a Drive Index of 80 MBps, and listed the access time as 12 ms.

[Review] Need For Speed: Shift

Since NFS: Most Wanted, the franchise hasn’t seen any game that has been a major hit. With the widely different tastes of its followers, Electronic Arts (EA) decided to trifurcate the series into a simulation racer, an arcade racer and an online component.

Shift is the first of this new lot, where NFS is going back to its roots and giving sim racing one more try, undeterred by the calamity known as ProStreet. And surprisingly, they’ve almost pulled it off…

Need For Speed: Shift isn’t the wild ride that we have come to expect from the franchise. It’s an emperor trying out new clothes, while still trying to make the followers accept the change in garments.

Taken in the context of a game that is meant to build a franchise of simulation-based racing games, NFS: Shift is the perfect introductory point for arcade racing fans to get into this new groove. Race Driver: Grid was the only other game that made the transition as simple as this.