The OpenOffice.org team has released a public beta of v3.0 It now has native support for Mac OS X and many more features.
WilksNet
Musings on Mozilla and open-source software
Filed under beta stuff …
Firefox 3 Beta 5 Download & Review
The nice links below will contain the power for you to download the hottest beta from Mozilla, Firefox 3 Beta 5 as well as a very comprehensive review from our friend over at Mozilla Links. I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta 5 for a while now and it works beautifully. Gmail is super fast and all web browsing in general is super fast. All of the UI enhancements, theme elements, and new features work well and will only get polished up before final release in June. Enjoy!!
Windows Search 4.0 Preview
I found this link on Neowin.net about the new Windows Desktop Search technologies coming out of Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft has released a beta or “preview” of their new search technology v4.0 for Vista, Server, and XP. You can find the links to download via the link below. I’ve just installed the Vista SP1 version right now for testing. It’s supposed to fix a ton of bugs and make searching very fast.
Neowin.net – Windows Search 4.0 Preview
NOTE: This is a preview release and as such may have some minor bugs. Also, to install for Vista you have to have SP1 installed.
Firefox 3 Due in June
I found this great update on the Firefox 3 release schedule straight from Mozilla. It looks like when they release beta 5, they’ll work hard to stabilize that and then start work on finishing Firefox with the release candidates.
***
“The final release of Firefox 3 is due in June, the company said Wednesday during a roundtable discussion with a small group of tech bloggers.
During the event, the key members of the Mozilla team, including CEO John Lilly, gave a quick overview of the product release schedule for the next version of the open source web browser.
According to VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, the first Release Candidate will ship in early May. The RC1 stage is the point at which most of the larger extension developers re-work their code to be fully compatible with Firefox 3. So if your favorite extension isn’t yet working, you’ll only have to wait another month or so.
Right now, the latest Firefox 3 release is beta version 4. The Firefox 3 betas have about 700,000 users right now — a small but dedicated chunk of Firefox’s entire user base of 160 million people. The public release of Beta 5 will be out the first week of April (the nightly builds are available for testing now), and that will be the last beta release before Firefox enters the release candidate stage.”
Firefox 3 Beta 5 and the RCs
I found out that the last beta for Firefox 3 will indeed be beta 5. After beta 5 is released in late March, Mozilla will begin work on the release candidates. There can only be speculation as to how many release candidates there will be, but we should have a final Firefox 3 very soon.
Download Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Beta
You can now download the fresh beta of the new Ubuntu Hardy Heron v8.04. There seems to be a lot of great new features, I have linked below to the beta and release notes. Enjoy! 
Microsoft FolderShare
You can sync files across multiple machines without the need for a centralized server with Microsoft FolderShare Beta. Very, very cool stuff here and if they can actually pull this off in a way that works well for the average user, it’ll be huge.
Mega Firefox 3 Beta 4 Review
Hey All – Percy over at Mozilla Links has written a four page article detailing Firefox 3 Beta 4 and explaining all of the new features in detail. If you are interested in Firefox 3 development, please check it out below:
Download IE 8.0 Beta 1
You can now officially download the new version of IE 8 Beta 1 from the link below:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/getitnow.mspx
From what I’ve read it looks like they’ve introduced a few new features with no major UI changes yet. Also, it’s supposed to support web standards with Acid2 but apparently it does not yet.
