Saturday, December 22, 2007

Beta Review update - XP SP3, Silverlight, and Firefox

This past week, we noted two significant pre-release announcements. A little follow-up ...

The Firefox 3.0 project (the next generation) released Beta 2. In brief, it's a huge improvement over Beta 1 but still not ready for prime time. While the memory problems (330 of them?) have been fixed, we found that the kernel still likes to stay resident for a less 5-10 seconds, and a few other minor glitches which we'll be passing along to the developers (They are seeking comments for those who mess with beta boxes).

Sidenote: Microsoft's Silverlight is very messy on the current stable release of Firefox but looks great in IE7. Silverlight 1.1 is being promoted for installation right on the front page of Microsoft.com. For now, if you're a diehard FireFox user, you may not want to 'push the button'.
As for Microsoft's release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate on Technet this week, we ran it on the beta box for three days so far with absolutely no issues or software conflicts. More to come on this important roll-up. We feel pretty confident this pack will make final release in short order and serve to fix a number of conficting update problems and more. Refreshing to see Micorsoft continuing to support the deeply embedded XP user base.

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