Social web browsing plugin Yoono has emerged from private beta. The new version still wears a beta label, but it's available to the public. Yoono is basically a utility that hangs out in the Firefox sidebar and gives you quick access to instant messenging services, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Piczo.

The public beta adds support for Firefox. It also packs a few new features:

• Filter your friends activity by network, group, or names
• Add FriendFeed and Flickr comments
  
• Send Twitter direct messages and replies
• Upload pictures to Facebook or poke friends
• Browse Digg video

Yoono will also be adding Google Talk and MySpace soon. There does appear to be a bug that prevents Yoono from working properly on Firefox 3 in some cases. The problem seems to show up if you've installed some other browser plugins. Yoono is expected to release an updated version addressing this problem within the next few days.

[via Mashable]

The big story this week was undoubtedly the launch of Firefox 3. And we covered the heck out of it. But while Mozilla's little browser was busy grabbing headlines, there was plenty of other news. Here are a few of our favorite (mostly) non-Firefox related stories:

• What to expect from Mozilla's mobile Firefox web browser
  OK, we promise, this is the last Firefox-related link of the roundup. But we got a chance to talk with Mozilla VP for Mobile Jay Sullivan this week and he gave us the a rundown of what we can expect from the upcoming mobile version of Firefox. For example, Mozilla is targeting Linux and Windows Mobile phones at first, but could develop a Symbian version soon as well.
• HELP! Windows cannot open this file
  Ever download a file from the internet only to discover that you have no idea what program you need to use to open it? We've got you covered with a roundup of software you can install on a Windows system to ensure that you can open pretty much any file you're likely to find.
• OpenSUSE 11.0 proves chameleons can take on herons any day
  Ubuntu gets a lot of attention for being a user-friendly Linux distribution for newbies, but the latest version of OpenSUSE is poised to give Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron a run for its money. It's fast, supports GNOME or KDE4, as well as the light weight Xfce interface, and comes with all the applications you'd expect from a modern Linux distro, including the latest stable version of OpenOffice.org.
• Giveaway: OpenSUSE 11 box set with all the trimmings
  Oh yeah, and we've got a special boxed edition of OpenSUSE 11 to give away. Follow the link for all the details and contest rules. The contest runs through Tuesday June 26th.
• Digg this Kevin Rose - Reddit goes completely open source
  Always wanted to develop your own Digg-killer? Now you can, using the source code for one of the most popular social news/bookmarking sites around. Reddit opened up its source code this week which lets anyone develop their own Reddit clones or applications designed to interface with the original web service.
• Qtrax launches free, legal, and limited P2P music app
  Remember when you could easily find and download any song on the internet just by firing up Napster or your favorite P2P music client? Yeah, we know there are still programs and P2P networks out there holding the free music torch. But you always run the risk of getting a nasty letter from the RIAA when you use those clients. That's not the case when you use Qtrax, a new P2P client that launched this week. What sets Qtrax apart from the competition is that the service only features 100% legal and free music. The service is supported by advertising and would be totally awesome if it weren't for two restrictions. First the software uses Windows Media DRM. Second, the music selection is still pretty pitiful.
• Skype 4.0 beta puts video front and center, takes over your screen
  Skype has released a new beta of its popular VoIP client for Windows. And for the first time, video seems like a primary feature and not an afterthought. The video window is larger and more prominent. But overall the client takes up far more screen real estate and starts in full screen mode by default. While you can certainly resize the window, it doesn't fit in the sidebar as easily as earlier versions, which makes it a bit more awkward to use if you're just looking to use the text chat or audio call features.

This morning it looked like Mozilla was on track to set a world record by serving up 5 to 7 million downloads of Firefox 3 within 24 hours of the web browser's release. But by day's end, (well, 24 hour's end anyway), you all smashed that number and downloaded Firefox 3 over 8 million times.

Mozilla is still waiting to get confirmation from the folks at the Guinness Book of World Records before proclaiming the official number, but Mozilla Links pegs the number at 8,290,908, give or take a few. And NetApplications says that Firefox 3 went from less than 1% of the browser market this morning to almost 3% in a matter of 13 hours.

No matter what, Mozilla will have set a world record though -- since they're competing in a brand new category.

Mozilla's attempt to break a world record by getting as many people to download Firefox 3 in a 24 hour period as possible got off to a bumpy start. But almost a day later, the Mozilla servers are humming along and sending out copies of the company's latest browser to every corner of the globe. Wait, a globe is round. Nevermind.

Anyway, as of this morning, Firefox 3 had been downloaded over 6 million times, with more than 2 million downloads coming from the US. Mozilla has set up a nifty little page where you can track downloads by region. And all we can say is Turkmenistan had better step up its game. Seriously, 7 downloads? There have been more downloads from Greenland. We didn't even realize that people lived in Greenland.

Of course population size, poverty levels, and access to computers all come into play, which is why much of Africa is shaded in blue on the map (meaning most countries have had less than 1000 downloads) while more developed nations like the US, Canada, Spain, the UK, France, Germany, China, Russia, and India are colored in orange or red to show that 50,000 or more downloads have come from those locations.

The world record attempt concludes this afternoon at 11:16am Pacific, 2:16pm Eastern. Anyone want to take a stab at what the final number will be? Keep in mind, Mozilla's already secured a world record, since this is a new category for the Guinness Book of World Records.

So you may have heard that Mozilla is hoping to set a world record for the most software downloads in a single day today. The company has been hyping today as "Download Day" for about a week. But a more apt name might be "Down Day." That's because GetFirefox.com is down. As in dead, kaput, service unavailable.

This probably shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but if you encourage millions of users to download your software on the same day, your servers are going to take a hammering. But it appears that even Mozilla had no idea how many people would be trying to download Firefox 3 today.

There's a good chance that you may get through if you keep hitting refresh. And there's a good chance that the company will manage to break the world record if it ever gets the servers back up. But you know what? If you don't really care about setting a world record, Firefox 3 RC 3 is pretty much identical to Firefox 3 final. So if you're already running RC2 or RC3, there's no need to kill yourself trying to update your browser today. Tomorrow, next week, or even next month will probably be soon enough.

In the meantime, if you've got your heart set on downloading a next-generation browser, you can always take Opera 9.5 for a spin. That company's servers are holding up just fine.

Update: Some users are reporting success with these download links. Windows, Mac, Linux

Update 2: It looks like the site is back up, but incredibly slow. Like dialup slow.

If you spend a lot of time using social web sites like Facebook, Pownce, Digg, Flickr Twitter, YouTube, or del.icio.us, you've probably heard of Flock, a web browser with integrated tools for interacting with those services and many others. The browser is built on Mozilla's Firefox, so it can render any web page that works in Firefox. But it also makes it easy to share links, photos, and videos or even write blog posts.

But there's one problem. Up until now Flock was based on Firefox 2 and couldn't take advantage of the speed improvements featured in Firefox 3. With Firefox 3 set to launch out of beta/release candidate limbo tomorrow, the Flock team has released the first beta version of Flock 2.0 which uses Firefox 3 as it's base.

What does that mean for users?

• Uses the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine for faster page rendering
• Improved support for web applications like Gmail and Zoho Office
• Reduced memory footprint
• Security enhancements
• Improved password manager that takes up less memory
• Uses the Firefox 3 "awesome bar" which auto-completes URLs based on your history and favories
• New favorites manager
• New download manager

For the most part you won't see a lot of cosmetic changes in Flock 2.0 It looks a lot like Flock 1.2 under the hood. But it's worth checking out for the performance enhancements. Keep in mind, this is still beta software though, and if you're lucky you might find a few bugs worth reporting.

It's been a busy week at Download Squad HQ. We've been busy covering the releases of several new web browsers, updates to several operating systems, and we've been continuing our never-ending quest to find as many ways as humanly possible to waste time while using a computer.

We're also expanding the Squad a bit. You may notice posts from some new bloggers over the next few days. Feel free to say hi, and please don't haze them. You know, unless you really have to.

And without further ado, here's a list of some our favorite stories from the past week:

• Firefox 3 is pretty much ready
  After years of working, testing, and tweaking, Mozilla plans to officially launch Firefox 3 on June 17th. This week saw the release of Firefox 3 RC3, which is basically identical to Firefox 3 RC2 if you're using Windows or Linux, but the latest version fixed a critical bug on Mac systems.
• Mozilla shows off Firefox mobile interface concept video
  But it's not all about desktop browsers over at Mozilla HQ. The developers of Firefox are also hard at work on a project to craft a mobile version of Firefox that will run on cellphones. The company unveiled a concept user interface this week that might make its way into the final release. Or it might not.
• Microsoft TownSquare: A social network for business communications
  Microsoft may own a stake in Facebook, but it looks like the company's not putting all of its social networking chickens in one basket. Microsoft is also working on a social network for internal use by businesses who want to faciliate communication and collaboration among employees.
• TidalTV: Web video doesn't get much more TV-like
  Tired of internet video looking more like video stuck on a web page than TV? TidalTV is a new video site that looks almost exactly like an interactive program guide from a cable or satellite network. And it features a combination of live video streams and on-demand programs from several networks including HGTV, National Geographic, and CBS.
• Viewzi visual search engine gives you a dozen ways to search
  Ever find yourself staring at Google Images wondering why it's so hard to find images? Viewzi can help. This highly customizable search engine lets you flip through images about a dozen different ways, and tries to predict which views will be the most helpful depending on your search terms. It's a bit overwhelming, but also extraordinarily cool.
• Opera desktop browser 9.5 is final - Take your stuff with you
  Mozilla's not the only company with a new web browser to promote. Opera 9.5 went gold this week, and the latest version of the browser is faster than ever, has a nifty new skin, and has a new Opera Link service that lets you sync your settings across browsers on multiple machines.
• HotPads shows real estate rents, foreclosure rates, and demographics heat maps
  HotPads is a real estate search engine with more eye andy than you can shake a stick at. Not that you typically shake sticks at real estate search engines. But HotPads lets you search by location, price, and number of bedrooms like any other real estate listing site. But HotPads also shows you heatmaps with information like the average rent, foreclosure rates, age, or income levels in a given area.
• Parallels for Mac hits 1,000,000 users
  No matter how much you love your Mac, the truth of the matter is that there are still some programs that are Windows only. So it's probably not surprising that Parallels, a program that lets you run Windows on a Mac without rebooting is so popular. Whether you use it on a daily basis or just on the rare occasion when you really want to fire up MS Paint, we're betting there's a decent chance you've got Parallels or another virtualization program if you've got a Mac.

Mozilla is set to release the final version of Firefox 3 next Tuesday, June 17th. The next generation of Mozilla's web browser has been in development for almost three years, and after countless alphas, betas, and release candidates, we can't tell you how much we're looking forward to finally reporting on point releases.

The company has big plans for the day. Mozilla is hoping to set a world record for the most software downloads within a 24 hour period. The company is also encouraging people to plan Firefox parties around the globe. Very, very geeky Firefox downloading parties.

We'll let you in on a little secret though. If you don't care about setting world records, but just want to make sure you've got the most up to date version of the web browser, go ahead and download Firefox 3 RC 3 right now. It's pretty much the exact same browser you'll be able to download next week. But it's a lot harder to set a world record if you don't give people some warning, so Mozilla is delaying the official launch by a few days. That's a bit of a different tactic than Opera took when the company pushed out a release candidate of Opera 9.5 Monday and followed up with a final version of Opera 9.5 this morning.

The add-on manager in Firefox 3 adds a couple of nifty new features, including a recommended add-ons section. When you click the Tools menu and select Add-ons, the first thing you should see is a list of 5 recommended add-ons. This list will change regularly, and there's a link you can click to go to the add-ons web site to find more Firefox extentions.

But what if you want to see more than 5 items? Easy, jsut change hte default number using the about:config screen.

1. Type "about:config" (without quotes) into your address bar and agree to any warnings you may see about voiding your warranty or being attacked by dragons
2. Type "extensions.getAddons.maxResults" into the filter field
3. Change the number from 5 to something higher (or lower)

For some reason, Firefox 3 won't return more than 8 results no matter what number you put in the box. Go ahead and try 112, it won't break Firefox, because your browser will still only show you 8.

[via Daily Gyan]

Want to tweak the heck out of your Gmail interface, but don't want to install dozens of Greasemonkey scripts one at a time? Lifehacker's Gina Trapani has whipped up an updated version of her awesome Better Gmail 2 extension for Firefox. The latest version adds support for Firefox 3, plus a few other nifty features. Here are a few of our favorites:

• HTML signatures
• Gmail Redesigned skin, which makes Gmail look more like a desktop app. An awesome desktop app.
• A few other slightly less awesome skins
• Hide Spam count
• Include icons for file attachments

Once you install Better Gmail 2, you can find the options dialog in the Firefox Tools menu. Just check the boxes next to the features you want to enable and refresh your Gmail window.

Firefox makes it easy to select a default email application like Outlook or Thunderbird. When you click a mailto: link on a web site, that application will automatically open. But with Firefox 3 RC1 you can also choose a webmail application like Yahoo! Mail or Gmail.

Selecting Yahoo! Mail as your default email provider is simple. Just hit the Tools button, select Options, navigate to the Applications tab, and select Yahoo! Mail from the dropdown list next to "mailto." But for some reason, that's the only webmail service included by default. So thanks to Lifehacker, here are the steps to add Gmail:

1. Type about:config in the URL bar, and click the I'll be careful button to continue.
2. Type gecko.handlerservice into the filter field and find the listing that ends with allowRegisterFromDifferentHost. Click this button to change the value from false to true.
3. Copy this line of code into the URL bar:
   javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")
4. A window will pop up asking if you want to add GMail, say yes and you should be all set.

Next time you click a mailto: link on a web site, you should get a choice of services to use including Gmail. You can then set Gmail as your preferred email service.

Mozilla has pushed out the first release candidate for Firefox 3. That means this version should be more stable than any of the betas that have been released over the last year, but there may still be some bugs to work out. If you want to be absolutely certain you won't lose settings or mess up your system somehow, you might want to hold off on downloading Firefox 3 until a final build is released. That said, we've been playing with early builds of Firefox 3 for months, and it's way faster than Firefox 2 and includes some nifty new features like improved bookmark management and a more useful location bar.

Firefox 3 RC1 looks and feels a lot like Firefox 3 beta 5, but there are a few changes:

• Changes to the JavaScript engine and optimizations for web applications like Gmail and Zoho Office
• Improvements to the user interface
• Changes and fixes for bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom, and location bar autocomplete
• Security improvements

You can check out the complete list of changes in the release notes, or you can just go ahead and download the release candidate. Firefox 3 is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Mozilla has released yet another beta version of the next generation Firefox web browser. Firefox 3 beta 5 doesn't have a ton of new features, but it fixes a lot of bugs and packs a bunch of under the hood tweaks that make the browser easier to use and more attractive.

Firefox 3 beta 5 features tighter integration with the Windows, Mac, and Linux operating system. That means you have native icons and interface widgets. The OS X version supports Growl notifications, and the Linux version uses the native GTK theme.

The Places organizer has been updated, making it easier to organize, search, tag, and browse through your bookmarks and browsing history.

And the JavaScript engine has been updated, meaning web applications like Gmail and Zoho Office run much faster in Firefox 3 beta 5 than in Firefox 2.

Keep in mind that this is still a beta, and you may experience problems. Extensions and add-ons that work in prior versions of Firefox might not be compatible with Firefox 3 beta 5. And for those of you who are tired of hearing Download Squad bloggers complain that Firefox 3 beta doesn't work well with the version of Flash used by Blogsmith, our blogging client, you're in luck. That problem has disappeared with this build, so we'll finally shut up about it!

We've been following the development of Firefox 3 pretty closely around here, because we're a software blog, and what else are we going to do? The beta versions of Firefox 3 have added a ton of cool new features like an improved location bar, better bookmark management, full page zoom and better memory management. But it's still beta software. And we're not quite ready to agree with Mozilla VP Mike Schroepfer when he tells Reuters that Firefox 3 beta 4 is ready for the masses.

Don't get us wrong, most of the time Firefox 3 beta 4 works perfectly. But as far as we here at Download Squad are concerned, there's at least one fatal flaw. It's not compatible with Blogsmith, the blogging client we use, which relies on some Flash features that aren't supported by Firefox 3 yet.

Schroepfer may be right when he says that Firefox 3 "is much more stable" than most other browsers. But if there's a web site you need to visit every day that's not supported, stability only takes you so far. What have your experiences with Firefox 3 been like? Anyone else having problems or is it just us? What other features, bug fixes would you like to see in the final version which should be out in a few months?

Mozilla has released the 4th public beta version of Firefox 3. If it feels like the next generation of the Firefox web browser has been in beta for pretty much ever, that's because it has been. The first public alpha was released in 2006. But with each new test build, Firefox 3 gets a little more stable, and gets a few new features. Here are a few of the updates packed into Firefox 3 beta 4:

• Full page zoom - Up until now, Firefox would let you make text larger or smaller, but there was no way to increase or decrease the size of all the content on a web site (something you've been able to do with Opera for years). Now you can choose whether the zoom feature works for text or full pages.
• New download manager - The new download manager shows active time remaining, and the status of downloads. You can also search your downloads and see the site where your downloaded files are from.
• Improved OS integration - Firefox 3 beta 4 includes specific icons and themes for Windows Vista, OS X, and Linux (using the native GTK theme).
• Improved memory usage -
  

Firefox 3 beta 4 also includes a ton of other tweaks and bug fixes. The browser is also designed to use less memory, and there are major improvements to the JavaScript engine that should allow web based applications like Gmail and Zoho Office to run twice as fast in Firefox 3 as Firefox 2.