Software-Programming

The full version comes less than two weeks after Mozilla made Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available. The release candidate followed a run of betas that started in early November and featured nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued December 17.

While the final version of Firefox 3.6 is not as big of an update as the more ambitious Firefox 3.5, it includes a number of under-the-hood improvements, and a handful of changes that you might discover as you use it. Here are some of the most notable improvements.

Google has posted a thought-provoking piece to the Official Google Blog, discussing at length, Google's system for understanding synonyms in search. As author Steven Baker says, "An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers."

Cisco Systems Inc. Tuesday announced software for its Wi-Fi products to improve video performance, reliability and scaling on 802.11n wireless networks. The new code, dubbed VideoStream, compensates for Wi-Fi weaknesses that degrade video quality as the number of streams and clients grow.

IBM Corp. doesn’t expect that its collaboration software offerings will outright replace popular user-driven social networking tools like instant messaging and Twitter, said one executive at the Lotusphere 2010 conference.

Mozilla's Firefox is doomed. Caught between the immovable object of Microsoft Internet Explorer and the irresistible force of Google Chrome, the free open source community's poster child will soon be relegated to the ash heap of history.

The Zend developers have announced the release of version 1.9.7, 1.8.5 and 1.7.9 of their open source Zend Framework. In addition to more than 40 bug fixes, the latest releases address a total of six security related vulnerabilities. The updates fix a total of five cross-site scripting (XSS) related issues and the sixth update corrects a potential MIME type injection problem. According to Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Software Architect for the Zend Framework, the latest updates are the first to comply with Zend's new security policy.

Oracle has released 24 security fixes today.

In an announcement ahead of its latest quarterly patch, Oracle said the critical patch update contains 24 new security vulnerability fixes across hundreds of Oracle products.

Affected products include Oracle Database; Oracle Application Server; Oracle Access Manager; Oracle E-Business Suite; PeopleSoft Enterprise HCM; Oracle WebLogic Server; Oracle JRockit; and Primavera P6.

To most people these days, an "app" is something you download on your smartphone to help you do a specific task -- say, find a good nearby restaurant.

But big tech companies, seeing how applications have boosted the appeal of gadgets such as Apple's iPhone, are starting to view apps as low-cost enhancements for a broader range of products, from netbooks to TVs and beyond.

IT administrators could be busy next Tuesday, after enterprise software giant Oracle announced a hefty monthly patch update, with 24 new security vulnerability fixes set to be released across hundreds of its products.

The news comes just days after Microsoft announced it would be starting the year with one of its smallest Patch Tuesday releases ever – just one patch to fix a critical vulnerability in Windows 2000.

Mozilla yesterday patched 10 bugs in Firefox, half of them critical, in the browser's rendering and JavaScript engines, media and video libraries, and other components.

Firefox 3.5.6, the browser's first security update since late October, fixed five flaws rated critical by Mozilla, one tagged as high, three pegged as moderate, and one labeled as a low threat. The five critical vulnerabilities were located in the rendering and JavaScript engines, and in the "liboggplay" and "libtheora" media and video libraries.