Treeduck

Mozilla's homegrown tool for synchronizing Firefox across computers and devices graduates to beta and introduces incremental syncing and a more streamlined, less obtrusive experience. Mozilla Weave 1.0 beta 1 looks and feels far more polished than its predecessors.

Weave integrates smoothly into the Firefox options pane.

It does away with the "about:weave" access to the add-on's configuration pane, better handles Firefox preference integration when syncing for the first time, adds an automatic on-demand sync for when changes are detected and should more comprehensively sync history. This first beta also fixes a problem that the previous Weave v0.8 had when connecting via Fennec 1.0 beta 5.

However, Weave still has numerous problems. It conflicts with many add-ons, including AdBlock Plus, one of Firefox's most popular. The new incremental sync transfers data in chunks, so you can still use the browser, but it also prioritizes the first sync based on "interestingness." This amounts to syncing the data that you use most first, but it means that an initial sync could take hours depending on how much data you have. Weave is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.
Originally posted at The Download Blog

Mozilla on Wednesday released two new versions of its browser, Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14, that patch three critical security holes and fix assorted other bugs.

The updates can be fetched through the Help menu's Check for Updates option, or can be downloaded directly.
Although Mozilla still supports the 3.0 version, it's pushing people to the 3.5 version, and support for the 3.0 series will end in a few months. Version 3.5, released in June, supports a variety of new Web page technologies and includes a faster JavaScript engine for running Web-based programs.
Interested folks can read the release notes.

Mozilla is exhorting users to "upgrade the Web" with Firefox 3.5 and variations on that better-browsing theme can be found with Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera.

The hope is that the Web will evolve from a series of relatively static pages to a lively home for Web applications--everything from today's e-mail to tomorrow's spreadsheets. But it could take awhile for reality to catch up with the vision.

It's indeed a bright, shiny future for browsers, and the avant-garde is advancing rapidly. Web developers eager to invigorate their Web sites or build fancy Web applications have to reckon not only with the massive, slower-moving army of ordinary Web browsers, but also with inconsistent support for the latest technology.

Browsers of the future
Many of new browser features stem from HTML 5, the still-not-finalized next iteration of the HyperText Markup Language standard that defines how Web pages are described. HTML 5 has spurred the arrival of built-in video and audio, local storage that Web sites or applications can use, "Web workers" that can perform background processing tasks for a Web application, drag-and-drop for better user interfaces, and other technologies.