Mozilla has made the first release candidate for Firefox 3.6 available for download this morning, following a recent announcement that further releases would be delayed. Firefox 3.6, codename "Namoroka" , looks to improve startup time and general responsiveness , among other issues. Sponsor For those of us who aren't in the know about software versioning, as a "release candidate", Mozilla is hoping this is what Firefox 3.6, without the asterisk, is going to look like. "Should everything run smoothly during testing this is what will be released to our users as the official version after a beta period," reads the description on Mozilla's development wiki . Downloads are available for Windows , Mac and Linux from Mozilla's FTP site. Discuss

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Firefox 3.6 RC1 Released

Just over a year ago, we were excited to report on a new website for programmers. StackOverflow was the brainchild of coders/rockstars Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood , and it was a social Q&A channel that promised to give programmers solutions for even the most obscure bugs. Apparently, that approach to developer support was a solid one. These days, the site gets well over half a million unique visitors a month and has served as a prototype for white-label Q&A sites for companies, too. The site's latest merit badge is an official nod from the Android team, which has announced StackOverflow as the official home of Android developer Q&A support. Sponsor Android rep Roman Nurik wrote in a blog post , "We're working with StackOverflow to improve developer support, especially for developers new to Android. In essence, the Android tag on Stack Overflow will become an official Android app development Q&A medium." Nurik further noted that StackOverflow's format was particularly helpful for beginners new to the Android platform. However, he did state, "It's also important to point out that we don't plan to change the android-developers group, so intermediate and expert users should still feel free to post there." The StackOverflow "Digg for developers" model has worked well for all kinds of programmers, clearly. The models has also been successfully applied to such diverse topics as mathematics , parenting and even World of Warcraft - all built on the company's StackExchange white-label platform. Discuss

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Google Taps StackOverflow as Official Android Dev Support for Noobs, Q&A

The Google Chrome team released a beta version of its Mac browser this morning and opened up an official gallery of browser extensions . That's exciting news because the addition of more than 300 extensions, combined with blazing speed and good stability, makes Chrome the best browser on the market today. We got a chance to talk with Nick Baum, Product Manager and Brian Rakowski, Director of Product Management at Google Chrome this afternoon and they shared a number of interesting tidbits with us about the nature and future of extensions in Chrome. Sponsor Chrome was released more than a year ago and users have been clamoring for extensions ever since. Rakowski and Baum said that a request for extensions was bug #18 filed in the browser's bug tracking system - it's something that Firefox has conditioned users to expect. Now those extensions are here and it's a very interesting story. Understanding the Versions of Chrome Between Chrome, Chromium, dev and beta releases, things are getting a little complicated. Here's how it breaks down: Chromium is open source developer channel, "the bleeding edge" of Chrome development. That's what we've been using here on Mac and it's the only Mac version today that supports extensions. It's untested and less stable than the other versions. We've been using it for months, though, with only occasional problems. Chrome is the official release. There are 3 versions of Chrome: dev , beta ( Windows or Mac ) and stable (Windows only). The vast majority of users use the stable version, Mac users got beta build 4.0 today. Dev builds come out every week or so and are at most 1 week behind Chromium. Baum and Rakowski asked in our interview for us to please switch to using the Dev version for Mac instead of Chromium as soon as it supports extensions. Mac Dev Version Will Get Extension Support Very Soon Some of Nick Baum's Favorite Chrome Extensions So Far Aviary - screen capture and image editing Google Docs PDF/PPT Viewer Google Translate - truly, a wonder to behold Brizzly - an advanced Twitter experience, built by Baum's former co-worker on Google Reader, Jason Shellen Right now the official extension gallery won't allow Mac users to download extensions. Officially, at least. This bookmarklet will allow you to install them in Chromium on a Mac with just one extra click. (Thanks, MG Seigler , for finding that.) That bookmarklet will not allow you to use extensions in the official beta for Mac that launched today, just in Chromium. Baum and Rakowski told us today that the next dev build for Mac will allow extensions. That could be out as early as tomorrow morning or in a few days, and it's anyone's guess when extension support will come to the Beta version released today. (Who wants to use the Beta version when Dev is so much cooler?) Anyone can get extensions from an unofficial site called ChromeExtensions.org and if you're on a Mac it's probably most effective tonight to grab Chromium and the bookmarklet above. Then you can get extensions from the official site as well. Chrome Extensions Are Not Like Firefox Extensions Unlike Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions install without a browser restart and they update automatically. Too many extensions have been a part of the bloat that's made Firefox-use nearly intolerable for many of us, but the Chrome team says extensions will cause no more drag on Chrome performance than opening up a new web page in another tab would. That's a big part of the premise of Chrome, that every process is running distinct from other processes, so one tab can't slow or crash the others. It's an architecture well suited to running web applications, not just loading web pages, and it's great to hear that the extensions platform works the same way. GreaseMonkey? Oh, There Will Be GreaseMonkey One of the most enjoyable tide pools of innovation in the Firefox extension world is built on top of the Javascript user script plug-in GreaseMonkey . These tiny scripts re-organize web pages in radical ways for more usefulness and fun. Scripts like AutoPagerize will load the next page at the bottom of the one you're on, creating a continuous scroll, or WikiDashboard will insert a drop-down dashboard into every Wikipedia page to show a scatter plot graph of who has edited that page the most. The fun never stops with GreaseMonkey. What of Chrome, though? Guess where, Aaron Boodman , the creator of GreaseMonkey works now? That's right, on the Chrome Extensions team. Boodman recently made it even easier for GreaseMonkey scripts to be added to Chrome than they are in Firefox. A single click transforms the scripts into Chrome Extensions, at least for Windows users. We haven't found a successful Mac implementation yet, but we've got our fingers crossed that this will no longer be an issue when full extension support comes to Chrome for Mac. Red Hot APIs On the Way Baum told us today that the team "will add APIs for other data types soon, personal web history being a prime candidate, so extensions will be able to access that and manipulate it in all sorts of ways." That sounds great. It's one thing for a browser to promise not to sell my web history, but it's a whole new ball game when developers can build software that lets me derive all the more value from the history of my activity around the web. Bring it on, Team Chrome! We might feel a little guilty for abandoning the wonderful community project that is Firefox, but this new browser is just so damn good it's hard not to give it a serious try. It just so turns out, we have a particularly relevant sponsor this month that we should point to. Add-on-Con is a major event all about browser add-ons. It's being held in Mountain View, CA this Friday. Google is a sponsor and Aaron Boodman, the man behind GreaseMonkey and now working on Chrome Extensions, is a speaker. Check it out! Discuss

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5 Cool Things to Know About Google Chrome Extensions

According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog , the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you'll be able to see "more pictures than before," writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post. Sponsor The New Image Results To be clear, this update is for universal image results only - not Google Image search itself. "Universal" results refer to the search results you receive when doing a traditional search on www.google.com. Introduced back in 2007, the term refers to the combined search results from multiple verticals, including image search, news, video search, and the other specialized engines linked from the top of Google's homepage. With universal search, you only have to refer to one set search results page to see all the relevant information on a particular topic. The page serves as the jumping off point for whatever knowledge you're after - whether that's a photo, a video, the latest news, or just good ol' fashioned information. The updated image search results represent a minor change to Google's interface and one that many mainstream users may not have even noticed. But every little tweak that Google makes is only done after extensive testing. In this case, the update allows for one more image to appear in the universal image results box. One image may not seem like a major improvement, but it could mean the difference between a user clicking through to see more or abandoning their Google Search altogether. (You would be surprised how quickly some users give up on a non-productive search. Forget refining queries, they just go elsewhere or stop their search entirely!). Google Announcement's Timing Aimed to Deflate Interest in Bing It's also notable that Google is announcing this change around the same time as Microsoft plans to make another announcement regarding updated features for Bing , the company's new search engine. Since its launch earlier this year, the Bing Search Team at Microsoft has been busy rolling out updates that have included things like a revamped mobile search , improvements to maps , integration with math engine Wolfram Alpha , Twitter integration , and a new visual search interface . As most of these announcements were made, Google would make an announcement of their own - for example, how they were planning on adding Twitter to their results, too . And when Bing announced Visual Search, Google posted to their blog about a Google Experiment called "Fast Flip" which lets you visually peruse print articles online. There's no doubt that the timing of this latest, albeit minor, news about Image Search improvements has to do at least partially with the upcoming Bing announcement. Clearly, we have entered a new era of "search wars." As angel investor Ron Conway noted earlier this fall at the TC50 conference, this time war is a good thing: "I think the huge winner here will be consumers because competition breeds innovation, and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is fantastic for consumers." Disclosure: Sarah Perez also freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10. She is not a Microsoft employee. Discuss

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Google Rolls Out New Format for Image Results