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Mozilla has released an update to its popular Firefox browser that is said to bring added security and greater stability. The patches are for Firefox 3.0.4 and 2.0.0.18 – bringing them up to version 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19, respectively – and address at least three problems classified as critical. Two of these issues could allow an attacker execute a cross-site scripting attack, while the third critical flaw relates to stability bugs in the browser engine which could lead to crashes and memory corruption.

Mozilla has said this round of patches will be the last for Firefox 2 and reiterated its request for all users of Firefox 2 to the latest version. It also warned that the Phishing Protection service will no longer be available for Firefox 2 users after this update because the browser uses an outdated version of a protocol used to import a blacklist of phishing sites supplied by Google.

Firefox’s auto update mechanism should automatically download these latest patches or you can manually update by heading to the download site. This comes after a handful of zero-day exploit were discovered earlier this month in all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is due to receive an emergency patch for the problems later today.

Opera users everywhere should check the Opera site for updates, as the company has announced that a new version is available to patch what they call an “extremely severe” vulnerability. The update that was released yesterday, covers more than a half dozen security flaws, though only one of those seems severe enough to warranty this rushed release. Apparently all three major platforms are affected. Three of the flaws can result in arbitrary code execution, which you can read about in the version change logs.

You can download the new version, 9.63, whether you are using Windows, Linux or Mac OS X right away. There's no feature enrichment for this release, obviously, but it's still an important update for anyone who makes use of the browser.

Mac OS X users have always been accustomed to using third party clients in order to use the AIM service. News of that changing was announced a few months ago, when AOL decided to begin developing and later release a beta of AIM 1.0 for Mac OS X. Now, it has exited beta, and the company has officially released AIM 1.0 for Mac OS X.

The article is critical of AOL’s official AIM client and its alleged feature-richness, noting that existing third party applications on OS X have a huge advantage over this new “Real AIM” client. Granted, this is AOL's first release – and I'm sure they will seek to expand upon it quickly. All the same, if you want to give the client a try it is ready for download.

There are a ton of remote control applications to choose from but few of them offer the simplicity of TeamViewer. This cross-platform (Mac and PC) tool lets you connect to other PCs within seconds for remote access, tech support and more with virtually no configuration. There’s no need to forward ports or know any IP addresses, just run TeamViewer skipping installation altogether and share your ID and password with the person you want to connect with.

This week TeamViewer was updated to version 4, bringing with it a new browser based remote connection feature and adding a new component in the form of shared web presentations – where up to 10 premium users can log into a browser session and share screens. Other features include 256-bit encryption based on RSA key exchange and AES, file transfers and a built-in chat client.

Overall, using the remote computer is a relatively smooth experience, though of course that may vary depending on your connection speed. Whether you find yourself constantly moving between computers and want to have them remotely accessible at all times, or are simply doing the “friend that knows about computers” thing for people, TeamViewer is certainly worth a try. The program is free for non-commercial use but can run you up to $1,400 for a premium version with a lifetime service license.

Yesterday at the Le Web 08 conference in Paris, Google VP of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer revealed that the company’s Chrome browser was coming out of beta soon. While Mayer offered no solid date, it appears that she spoke just a day too soon, for the release of Chrome’s final version is now official.

On its blog, Google reveals that problems with the way Chrome displays video and audio files have been fixed and that the final release version of the browser runs almost twice as fast as the very first beta release. The final version also has better bookmarking capability and privacy controls. Google says the team is still working to deliver native support for RSS feeds, extension support, Mac and Linux versions, among other requested features.

Chrome has a long way to catch up to Internet Explorer, which has about 70 percent of the market, and even Firefox which holds about 20 percent. However, the fact that this is one of the fastest beta-to-full launch offerings from Google yet highlights its importance to the search giant, which needs the browser to grow as part of its overall cloud-centric computing vision.

More than a year and a half ago, HP made it public that they were considering shipping desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Linux, giving their customers a choice between that and Windows. HP's reasons for stalling were numerous, ranging from questions about implementing support to what distribution of Linux would make sense for them to offer. They have had support for use of Linux on their servers, to an extensive degree, but nothing on their single-user machines. More recently, they began offering it on Netbooks, starting with the 2133 Mini-Note. However, questions still remained as to how they'd get it done on the desktop.

Those questions and more have been answered, apparently, as HP will now begin offering Linux on their business desktops, or at least one of them. The Compaq dc5850 machine will be shipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, a Novell-supported product, and with their move they are the last large desktop vendor to begin offering Linux as a stock option on desktops. All the major desktop vendors are now offering Linux on their desktops. Even though the hardware profile for those desktops is somewhat slim, it's still a landmark and represents a huge change from a few years ago.

Google's numerous products and web services, for better or worse, are often stuck in the beta limbo for a prolonged time. Take GMail for example, which despite of being several years old, immensely popular, and considered to be fairly stable, still has the “Beta” tag attached to it. The same goes to many other Google tools, like Google Docs. One recent addition, however, seems to be leap-frogging the rest.

According to a recent interview, the Google Chrome browser may actually be leaving beta sometime soon. If the rumor is true and Chrome indeed leaves beta in the foreseeable future, it could end up being the quickest Google product to ever reach a final 1.0 milestone just a few months after launch.

One must wonder what could be inspiring Google to push the browser out of beta. Could it be a technical reason, with them feeling it's reached a point of stability and feature richness to be a 1.0? Or is it more a logistical reason, with Google fearing that people will shy away from using Chrome when the other big browsers already have numerous “stable” releases available?

How about marketing? Most computer manufacturers ship their PCs with alternative browsers or toolbars installed that monetize search queries. Firefox itself gets tons of funding from its built-in search tools that default to Google. No doubt Chrome will see less barriers for such uses once it reaches a 1.0 milestone and will inevitably translate into more search traffic for the web giant.

If you love Firefox and are willing to serve as Mozilla's guinea pig, the foundation in charge of Firefox's development today announced the availability of Firefox 3.1 beta 2. The new version of the browser includes a lot of new functionality, focused primarily on feature addition and newer Internet technologies like W3C Geolocation, the TraceMonkey Javascript Engine, private browsing and more. The inclusion of private browsing is an important concern to people using the browser on public computers, and new support such as things like video and audio web elements.

You can download the software from Mozilla's site, where you can get a beta build for the three big platforms Firefox supports. As always, try beta software at your own risk, though I wouldn't worry too much about installing this one, plus you get athe chance to help Mozilla out.

Microsoft is looking to make its own open-document format, OOXML, seem more appealing to the world. They have recently announced a series of enhancements to the standard that seek to increase compatibility between other documents, particularly with documents created under the competing ODF standard.

This week, the company introduced a plug-in for Firefox that allows OOXML documents to be viewed within the browser, removing the need to first download a file. They've also introduced a new SDK for Java development, more “translator” tools that include new templates for creating ODF-compatible documents and better compatibility with ODF in general.

You can easily see where critics will lead with this. Microsoft in the past has been accused of “Extending” a standard, only to make their now unofficial standard de-facto and leave other companies who actually conform the original standard in the dust. Whether or not that is a tactic they plan to use with OOXML remains to be seen, though as it stands right now ODF has a better adoption rate than OOXML does.

Those looking for an alternative to iTunes or Windows Media Player might be interested to know that their open source competitor, Songbird, has finally reached its 1.0 version this week after two years in development. This free media player built from Mozilla code offers all the basic features for managing your music, from media importing and smart playlists creation to song ratings and (limited) device support, though its real appeal comes from its extensibility.

Like Firefox, Songbird supports user contributed add-ons, allowing you to customize the program’s appearance, playback capabilities and more – quite a few are available here. Sadly, however, there are still a number of features notably missing – CD ripping for example – while others such as iPod integration and concert ticket searches definitely need some polishing.

All in all, Songbird is a promising alternative for users who want a truly cross-platform option for organizing their music libraries and well it’s worth a look, though if you rely heavily on iPod integration and the iTunes Store perhaps you might want to skip this one.

Browser malware has generally targeted IE in the past, since it's the biggest target and doesn't exactly have a good reputation for security. That's one of the main reasons why Firefox has become as big as it has, with a worldwide market share around the 20% mark. That increase in usage has also made it become a bigger target, and now a new piece of malware has been identified that specifically targets Firefox.

The malware, called ChromeInject, holes up as an add-on in Firefox and identifies when you are visiting certain financial sites, like PayPal, to harvests usernames and password for those sites. Afterwards those logins get sent off to a remote server, where they are no doubt used to drain or transfer funds from people's accounts. Users still must visit a malicious or compromised site to become infected by this trojan, and security products are already being updated to detect it. One of the easiest steps to prevent infection is just to make sure any add-ons you install come from an official source, like Mozilla's repositories.

Even if the odds of infection are low, seeing harmful software written specifically for Firefox does demonstrate that it is now becoming large enough for people, including people with bad intentions, to take notice of it.

Opera has long been an underdog in the so-called browser wars (on the desktop at least), despite the fact that many of the features we take for granted in Firefox, IE and Safari often make their debut in the Norwegian web browser first. Hoping to get the recognition it deserves, though, the company has just introduced the first alpha version of Opera 10 touting it as the fastest and most standards compliant browser yet.

The release will offer a taste of Opera's new rendering engine, Opera Presto 2.2, which is supposed to be 30 percent faster than its predecessor driving Opera 9.5 and will be the basis for future versions of its mobile and desktop browsers. In addition to performance improvements, Opera says it has fine-tuned its standards support, achieving a score of 100 out of 100 on the Acid3 testing website – by comparison Firefox 3.0.4 earns 71/100, Google Chrome 0.4 gets 79/100, and Internet Explorer 7 struggles at 14.

Other new features include on-the-fly spell checking for text fields, support for HTML formatting in Opera Mail, and an auto-update feature to force browser updates. We don't recommend setting Opera 10 in its current alpha state as your default browser just yet, but the preview release seems stable enough for Opera fans to give it a try.

Browser extensions support is one of the biggest reasons Firefox has become so popular and is also the most requested feature by users of the Google Chrome browser. Thus it is not surprising the search giant would want to add support for them and in fact they have already laid out a plan for the feature.

Particularly Google claims user created extensions should solve three problems in Chrome: the addition of features that have specific or limited appeal, it would make life easier for users coming from other browsers that support extensions “they can’t live without,” and it will allow partners who want to create their own Chrome bundle to add specific features.

The company is not offering a timeline for the extension system but are making it a priority, to the point of specifically mentioning a bunch of popular Firefox extensions they would like to support: Stumble Upon, Delicious Toolbar, FlashGot, ForecastFox, the Skype extension and even AdBlock – despite of the fact Google relies heavily on advertising to generate the bulk of their revenues, they also seem to want this option to be available in their browser.

Following a healthy start of the holiday shopping season with last week’s Black Friday, many developers have decided to extend its sales through today with so-called “Cyber Monday” deals. Such is the case with VMWare, who is holding a one-day offer on its Fusion 2.0 virtualization product for the Mac that cuts the price in half to $39.99.

Online retailers participating in this offer include Amazon.com and MacMall – or you can just buy it directly from VMWare’s site using the Promo Code “CyberMondayDeal.” In addition, VMWare is courting users of rival software Parallels Desktop to switch platforms through an additional $30 rebate that knocks the cost of Fusion 2.0 down to just $10. The two offers are valid through 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time.

µTorrent is quite an impressive BitTorrent client that acquired a strong reputation almost three years ago for its tiny footprint and minimal use of system resources. The latest stable version (1.8.1) is just 263 kB in size and yet it boasts a wealth of features, including global and per-torrent speed limiting, simultaneous downloads, RSS auto-downloading, built-in scheduler, support for Mainline DHT and more.

It also has a minimalist, intuitive interface and supports the protocol encryption joint specification to prevent arbitrary throttling by certain Internet service providers. µTorrent is probably not a new name for torrent lovers using Windows, but one of the reasons I chose it as this week’s recommended download is that for the first time this nifty little client has become available for the Mac as well – as it was promised when acquired by BitTorrent Inc. back in 2006.

The Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment, and is still in Beta, so there’s a chance you will encounter some bugs here and there. I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly test the Mac version yet, but if you give it a try, feel free to share your experience in the comments.

The second Firefox 3.1 beta release is past due, but already we are hearing that a third beta will be necessary before Mozilla can proceed to a release candidate, as it would give testers more time to try out with recently added features debuting in beta 2 such as Private Browsing Mode, Worker Threads, Speculative Parsing and TraceMonkey.

The open source group also needs more time to work on so-called “blockers” – bugs that are deemed serious enough to hold up code to be frozen prior to a milestone release. The good news is that Mozilla plans to make Firefox 3.1 beta 2 a stable enough release for add-on developers to start testing their code and that all the features arriving in the final release will be a part of this beta.

Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner says that the proposed move could be done without major impact to schedule, with the second beta still expected to be available in early December and beta 3 in early January. Meanwhile, the final version of Firefox 3.1 is set to arrive late in Q1 2009.

If you are a Fedora user, today is the day to upgrade, following the release of Fedora 10 which was made available today. The latest release adds a significant amount of features to the desktop distro, ranging from better out of the box webcam and printer support, more automated wireless connection sharing, improved boot times, full support for the Sugar desktop and more. They’ve also included OpenOffice 3.0 in this release, a great boon to just about any desktop user.

Ubuntu has proven to be wildly successful as a stock desktop Linux choice, which has sometimes come at the expense of other distros. Fedora is one of them, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing. As the popularity for any desktop distribution rises, the speed of development and feature-adding of others increases, which usually benefits everyone.

If you use a 64-bit edition of Linux, then you are probably aware that getting Flash support for it can be tricky. As there is no native 32-bit edition of Flash for 64-bit kernels and 64-bit browsers in Linux, the closest you could get was by using wrappers to install the 32-bit version of the plug-in. That's about to change, with Adobe recently announcing and releasing a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux.

Flash 10 was initially released back in May, with the Linux release only slightly delayed from the Windows release. The 64-bit version has been a long time in coming, and with its introduction Linux users are one step closer to a fully 64-bit desktop, something hard to accomplish even on the Windows front.

If you're currently using a 64-bit kernel with Flash 10 installed, you may want to try the now native 64-bit version.

An alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04 (codenamed Jaunty Jackalope) is now available for download from the official mirrors. This is the first test release in the usual Ubuntu development cycle for this next update to the popular Linux distribution, which usually comprises six alphas, one beta, and a final release candidate before the final edition is released to public.

As previously reported, this release should optimize the boot process at both a kernel level and a service level and bring some usability improvements too as Canonical attempts to push the platform into the mainstream. Ubuntu 9.04 is still at a very early stage of development so it goes without saying that you shouldn’t install this alpha on production machines. Testers, developers and beta users who want to take an early peak can download Jaunty Jackalope here, though.

Those who have been around long enough will probably remember a time when Netscape dominated the browser market in terms of usage, only to lose most of that share to Internet Explorer during the browser war in the late 1990s. But how did Microsoft pulled it off? Simple, by pre-installing its software and having it ready to go with every copy of Windows sold.

Now it seems Google is mulling a similar scheme with their browser, Google Chrome, in a move that could significantly boost their presence in search and also put some of their web based apps in front of new users. According to Google VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, the browser's beta period will end in January after which the company “will probably do distribution deals” with OEMs.

With Microsoft not expected to release IE8 until sometime in the first quarter of 2009 and its browser share slipping lately, now might be just the right time for Chrome to strike – and securing pre-installation deals could be the way to go. Of course, Google must also go against Mozilla and Apple who have been steadily growing a strong presence in the market.