The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay. Despite Google's recent extension of its partnership with Mozilla, it was just a matter of time before Google got too big for anyone else's browser and decided to write its own.
Or, rather, it was just a matter of time before Google decided to borrow the best of others' open-source projects and extend them, as this is what Google generally does. And so Google has done with its newly announced open-source Chrome browser: What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build. So writes Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, and so plans Google. The difference this time is that Google will actually have to contribute code back, making its Chrome browser an experiment in community building, rather than merely community borrowing.
Ars technica thinks Chrome sounds really innovative, what with its ability to segment the processes running in different browser tabs, among other things. 4: System-wide iPhoto browser. Since Apple developed its "digital hub", with iLife and now iWork, I have wanted to have a system-wide panel that would let me choose pictures from my iPhoto library without having to open the application.
For example, if I want to add a picture to a TextEdit RTFD document, I had to launch iPhoto, chose the picture, and drag it to the document. Waiting for iPhoto to launch can be long if you have a lot of photos. But there is a way to get around this, using an Automator action. Optimized Firefox 2.0 for G4, G5, and Intel Macs: BeatnikPad Journal. For those of you who somehow missed the news, the long-awaited release of Firefox 2.0 is finally here, and so are optimized builds!
There’s a bunch of new features and fixes in this release, so instead of repeating what’s already been said I’ll just point interested parties to the Firefox 2.0 release notes. Why is the name / icon different? I really shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but every time I post a new Firefox release I still seem to get people annoyed / pissed off / confused as to why these builds are missing the Firefox name and icon. So here comes the strong emphasis: The Firefox name and icon are copyrighted and cannot be used with non-official builds. So, without further ado… Make sure to choose the build that matches your processor. Previous download links removed. Recommended downloads Here’s a small list of extensions and whatnot that I highly recommend: Posts on “essential extensions to use with Firefox” are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, so I’ll end here. Picture-in-Picture for the Web.