Let's not beat around the bush: Download the new version of Firefox now.

• Users can now change their browser's appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

• Windows: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Firefox 3.6 Beta 1.dmg
• Linux: firefox-3.6b1.tar.bz2

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio-designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

Pollux is a new Mac OS X application by Chetan Surpur and Shashwat Kandadai that will automatically tag your music files in iTunes. It is capable of tagging the name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for each song, and it does so by analyzing the song's audio fingerprint. This means that it can draw on a database of tag information, and do so very accurately, even if the song has no identifying information at all to begin with.

To use Pollux, you select songs in iTunes, then from the Pollux icon in your menu bar, choose Tag Selected iTunes Tracks. Tagging can take a little while, so don't expect instant results. In my testing I found tags to return in anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds. Tagging an entire library this way could certainly take some time, but since it's all automated, why not? There is also an option in Pollux to automatically tag any new music that is imported into iTunes.

There are other applications that do similar things, but Pollux sets itself apart by being both unobtrusive and free. Pollux is still in beta, so you might experience a problem here and there, though in my limited testing it was solid.

Mac users are tired of hearing about how Chrome is the greatest thing to hit the web since, well, Firefox. While Windows users have been happily using Chrome for a year now, the Mac version of Chrome is only now starting to reach a usable beta state. Unfortunately, Google tends not to update the official Chrome beta for Mac very often, at least compared to the multiple-builds-per-day that are occurring to Chromium, Chrome's developer build.

The latest versions of Chromium are quite usable, but you can get out of date in a matter of mere hours. Fortunately, the folks over at TechCrunch hacked together a script with an Automator process for the purposes of checking for and downloading the latest Chromium build.

The net effect is that you can now download a small app called Chromium Updater who's sole function is to update Chromium, then launch it. Of course, all the scary hand-waving beta software warnings apply: don't use a beta browser for mission critical tasks, etc. But if you feel comfortable dealing with beta software, you will probably be pleasantly surprised by the current state of Chromium, and the rate at which it improves.