Mozilla releases Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, security update for Firefox 3

Mozilla has released the fourth beta for it’s upcoming Firefox 3.5 browser. The long awaited “Private Browsing Mode” is finally available by default in this development release. Among other stuff are improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and Gecko 1.9.1 layout engine, and support for HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags. Firefox 3.5 is fast approaching RC stage, but if you can’t wait for the final release, you can get this fairly stable beta from here.

Firefox 3 users have got news as well – Mozilla has released a small update (3.0.10) that fixes a security and a stability issue. To update, go to Help > Check for Updates in your Firefox window.

Get Agnitum Outpost FREE Firewall 2009 now

Agnitum has revived the free version of it’s popular Outpost firewall, whose first and only version (1.0) was released over three years ago. The latest Outpost FREE firewall offers you an array of features like :

• Bidirectional firewall
• Protection that can’t be shut down by hackers
• Application behavior monitoring
• Intuitive, resource-friendly operation
• Activity monitoring capabilities
• Windows Vista and 64-bit compatibility

Agnitum also offers a paid version of the Outpost firewall, which can obtained for free via TrialPay.

Get Outpost Firewall 2009 (32bit) from Download.com | Download 64bit version

 

Also read : Fortify your computer

Polaris brings quick-fire Google Analytics stats to your desktop

Polaris is an Adobe AIR based app that can fetch the Google Analytics stats for your website or blog. It brings you 8 standard reports from Analytics – Dashboard, Visits Overview, Map Overlay, Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, Top Content, Keywords, and Goal Value. Add to that a rich interface, and Polaris becomes an instant eye-catcher!

 

Polaris runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, provided you’ve got Adobe AIR. It’s free if you want to manage a single website profile, and costs a reasonable $15 a year for multiple websites. 

PC Decrapifier rids your new PC of bloated trialwares

Most desktops and laptops from renowned brands like HP, Dell, Toshiba etc. come preloaded with a bunch of useless trialware and bloat software along with Windows (Norton Antivirus 15-day trial, Microsoft Office 60-day trial, CyberLink muvee, to name a few). These crap usually take up a lot of space, and can slow down the PC considerably. Moreover, it’s almost always a pain in the backside to remove them completely through Windows’ inbuilt uninstaller.

Free utility PC Decrapifier comes to the rescue by automatically recognizing most of these bloat and removing them completely from your PC. Once installed, it’s as easy as selecting items from the list that it produces, and hitting Next to uninstall them one after the other. You can find the complete list of “crapplications” detected by PC Decrapifier here.

PC Decrapifier does a great job of freeing up some space on your PC, and making it smoother and more usable than before. And after you’re done with the crap-cleaning, do check out our “Complete PC Pack” or “Leanest PC Pack” to grab some really useful (and free!) apps for your PC.

 

Related : Revo Uninstaller takes care of leftover files, folders and registry items by uninstalled software

Update Notifier finds updates for software on your PC

More and more software are being exploited for their vulnerabilities everyday, and therefore it’s near imperative that we keep all our software tools updated with the latest patches and fixes from the publishers. Windows doesn’t provide any centralized feature to keep your third party software updated, but there are quite a few apps (mentioned here and here) that can do the job.

Update Notifier is yet another update checking tool that does it’s job nicely. Sporting a clean interface, Update Notifier makes full use of the 60,000-something database of CleanSofts.org to recognize almost all your installed software and monitors them for updates.

 

As you can see in the screenshot above, the software which are not up-to-date have a green “download” link next to them. Click on the link and you’ll be taken to it’s respective CleanSofts page to download the latest version of the software.

Update Notifier can be easily configured to display only the type of updates you want – major / minor updates, updates for commercial / free software etc.

  

Moreover, it can check updates for standalone or portable software as well, given you specify the folder where that application is present. 

I’ve using FileHippo ’s Update Checker for a long time, but Update Notifier looks clearly better on a lot of fronts, like larger software support and more configuration options. One improvement I would like to see in future versions would be the ability to directly start program updates in it’s interface (without having to go to the website).

All in all, Update Notifier is one solid update checking tool that can certainly make your PC a lot safer (provided you utilize it properly, of course!).

Gmail adds support for viewing PowerPoint and TIFF file online

Gmail has spruced up it’s online file viewer feature by allowing you to view Microsoft PowerPoint and TIFF files alongside PDF files (that it previously supported). This viewer builds upon Gmail’s older “View as slideshow” option to view PowerPoint presentations, by allowing you to zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and "print" the presentation to a PDF document. Similarly, multi-page TIFF fax files show up completely and have an option to be printed as PDF files. 

  Source : Gmail Blog

Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, is out

The latest Ubuntu, and quite possibly the best till date, has been officially released by Canonical.  This release is available in three editions – desktop, server, and the newly introduced “netbook remix”. Jaunty ships with the latest open source tools available, boots much faster than previous versions, and brings you a thoroughly revamped notification system. Take the tour for an official insight into what’s hot in this release. Ubuntu ’s official forks – Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu – have also been upgraded to version 9.04.

Get Ubuntu Jaunty

• If you’re using Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), navigate to System > Administration > Update Manager. A notification stating about the latest version will appear; just click through and follow the instructions to upgrade. People with older versions of Ubuntu (8.04 or earlier) need to do a stepwise upgrade to get Jaunty. For example, Ubuntu 8.04 users will have to first upgrade to 8.10 through Update Manager and then to 9.04.
• You can also grab the ISO file using this link, or via torrents.
• Windows users can try Wubi, which’ll download the Ubuntu package and install it as an application within Windows! This can simply be uninstalled from Add / Remove Programs (in XP) or Programs and Features (in Vista) any time.

Random Postlings

• Firefox 3.0.9 released

This minor update from Mozilla fixes several security and stability issues. To update, open Firefox and navigate to Help > Check for Updates… And, if you’re still not using Firefox, download it from here.

• Cool Chrome tip!

Here’s a cool trick about Google Chrome that I discovered yesterday – you can drag a tab from Firefox and drop it in Chrome! Google doesn’t publicly bash Firefox (it’s still included in Google Pack), but this somehow means Google wants you to switch from Firefox to Chrome. And in a very cunning way. :)

LinkScanner from AVG is now available for free

AVG has released it’s LinkScanner software as a free download for all Windows Vista / XP / 2000 users. LinkScanner, which works with Internet Explorer and Firefox, includes two components -

• Search-Shield : “scans search results and places a safety rating next to each link, so you know where it’s safe to click.”
• Active Surf-Shield : “scans the page behind any link you click on or any web address you type into your browser. If the page is poisoned, it stops you from opening it.”

LinkScanner was previously available as an independent download, before AVG brought the tool and bundled it with it’s main security tools (Internet Security, Antivirus Professional / Free). The active surf-shield feature was disabled in the popular Free antivirus version.

AVG LinkScanner

 

Via  : Webware

Grab the Windows 7 Regional Wallpapers Pack!

Source : Tweaking with Vishal / JCXP Forums

You can now download an awesome wallpaper pack containing 102 high resolution wallpapers of 17 countries in the different Windows 7 regional versions.

The pack is about 60 MB in size and is archived in .rar format, so you’ll need an archiving software like 7-Zip (free), PeaZip (free), or WinRAR (commercial – unlimited trial) that supports this format.

Download (from Mediafire) | Mirror

Improve your gaming experience with Game Booster

Games usually cause quite a bit of lagging and unresponsiveness on a system because of their heavy resource use. And if you’ve a lot of background processes running (a.k.a Windows Vista), the games themselves don’t run smoothly as well.

IOBit’s Game Booster is a free tool that aims to enhance your gaming experience by temporarily turning off all unnecessary background processes and optimizing system resources. Game Booster has a very simple interface – all you’ve to do is to switch to the “gaming mode” just before starting your game. Once the game is over, revert back to “normal mode” and exit Game Booster.

I’ve been trying this tool on Vista for the last few days and so far it has been very promising.

Game Booster is a free download for Windows Vista / XP only. You can also avail it with Advanced SystemCare Pro / Free – the system optimization utility from IOBit.

Ubuntu 9.04 is just 3 days away!

Here’s a little reminder that the latest Ubuntu, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, is just round the corner.

Ubuntu 9.04 will ship with Gnome 2.26, X.Org Server 1.6, Linux kernel 2.6.28, experimental ext4 filesystem support, and a thoroughly revamped notification system, among other improvements.

You can get a countdown banner for your blog / site from here. And it you’re too excited to wait, go grab the release candidate now!

Three tools to organize your photos in Windows

Manually organizing a truckload of pics can be a daunting task. But as is always the case with Windows, we’ve some got some serious tools that can make your job much easier. In this post, we shall take a look at three such photo management apps, which have become hugely popular for their rich features and intuitive interfaces.

Windows Live Photo Gallery (Windows 7 / Vista / XP)

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a blown-up version of the default photo management app in Vista – Photo Gallery. It includes all of Photo Gallery’s goodies and throws in some handy extra features like

• seamless integration with Windows Live Spaces and Flickr
• creating a panorama using Photo Stitcher
• batch resize of photos, and rotation of videos
• better video playback

Live Photo Gallery is extremely fast, and can import photos and videos from your camera without a glitch. It also includes all basic image editing options like cropping, red-eye removal, colour adjustment, etc. Live Photo Gallery is extensible – you can find useful plug-ins at the Windows Live Gallery (don’t confuse Gallery, Photo Gallery and Live Photo Gallery!).

Google Picasa (Windows Vista / XP)

Today, Picasa is the most popular photo management tool on Windows, and is swiftly winning hearts of Linux and Mac users as well. Within it’s simple interface lie a robust set of features, including

• auto-sync with your Picasa Web Albums account
• creating and editing videos
• all basic retouching options
• taking screen and webcam captures
• Photo Viewer, for fast mage viewing

Once loaded, Picasa keeps scrounging your personal folders for any new pictures and instantly loads it into the album. The software has been known to slow down with an increasing photo collection, but frequent updates keep improving memory management.

FastStone Image Viewer (Windows Vista / XP / 2000)

We saw Photo Gallery from Microsoft and Picasa from Google. Now, enter FastStone Image Viewer. FastStone doesn’t come from some multi billion dollar company, but that doesn’t stop it from being a fierce competitor to the above mentioned products. FastStone’s interface can look a bit overwhelming at first, but it’s a breeze once you get used to it. The feature list is hefty, and you can find all here. If you’re in want for some serious editing of your photos, FastStone will definitely come in handy.

 

Mac & Linux?

Google Picasa runs both on Mac and Linux. Moreover, Mac users can also use the built in iPhoto tool. Gnome Linux users have F-Spot, while KDE fans have the more solid digiKam.

Firefox bug? Vista theme reverts to XP theme “automatically” on my laptop!

I had a weird experience with Firefox 3.0.8 on my Vista Ultimate machine today. I had left one tab open while doing something else, and the theme had somehow switched over to the XP one when I checked next. Everyone who has used Firefox 3 on Vista and XP will be knowing that the default theme is different for both OSes. 

I’ve got screenshots as well -

And no, I’m NOT using the “XP on Vista” theme!

The theme was back to normal after one restart.

I don’t know what caused this, so if you’ve got some ideas do enlighten me.

:)

SP2 for Microsoft Office ‘07 to add support for ODF and direct PDF publishing

Yet another sign that Microsoft is finally starting to ‘open’ up. In a welcome move, Microsoft has announced that the second service pack for it’s popular Office 2007 will include support for the open document format, the default format for Office alternatives like OpenOffice.org. SP2, due to be released on 28th this month, will also allow you to directly publish a document as a PDF file.

Microsoft Office 2007 is already a very robust and productive office suite, and these additions will make it even more popular.

10 cool widgets for Opera

Opera has always been the underdog among the prime browsers despite it’s vast array of features packed into a small, fast, and smooth tool. Like most other browsers Opera also supports extensions, which are tiny separate windows called widgets in this case. Personally I’ve never been a great fan of the Opera widgets because they simply don’t blend into the main window. Keeping my personal distress aside, there are indeed some cool widgets out there that can spruce up your Opera quite a bit.

1. GoogleToolbar : Provides quick access to multiple Google services, and can be very useful for all ya power Googlers out there.

2. Twitter Opera : Allows you to easily update your status in Twitter. The widget provides almost the same functionality that you get from the web interface, but misses the bells and whistles of Tweet-apps like Twhirl or TweetDeck.

3. Panic Button : Caught off-guard while surfing porn objectionable content? Hit the Panic! button and Opera will close all current tabs and/or open Google instead.

4. Flash Video Downloader : Allows you to download videos from all popular video sites YouTube, Google Videos, MySpace, Veoh, etc. 

5. Password Generator : Generates simple, strong, and hashed passwords (4-20 characters) from sentences entered by you.

6. Lyrics Now : Retrieves the lyrics of your searched songs from two sites - lyricwiki.org & leoslyrics.com 

7. Stay Secure : Pulls in real time data from Secunia about the current security of five web browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Konqueror 3 (KDE Linux). I’m not quite sure of the usefulness of this widget, but probably you should keep jumping over to the most secure browser using this widget’s data!

8. Facebook Widget : Allows you to do basic tinkering with your Facebook account.

9. Jamendo Personal Player : Allows you to listen from over 15000 Creative Commons licensed songs with your Jamendo account.

10. Vista Editor HTML : Open source HTML editor that mimics the Office 2007 interface.

 

What other Opera widgets do you use? Pour out in the comments!

Access blocked websites and browse anonymously with Tor

One thing that absolutely stinks about most educational institutes is that they block access to a ridiculously large number of websites (and nearly everything that we frequently use). Thankfully there are software available that can help you get past the nosy firewalls of your college.

Open source project Tor provides a network of virtual tunnels that allow you to browse any website anonymously. The complete software package installs four tools – Vidalia, Privoxy, Tor and Torbutton (for Firefox), which work in coordination to give you access all those blocked websites like Facebook, Orkut, or Digg.

 

Do note that Tor works best in fast network connections, and you may encounter lags in a slow connection.

Tor is a free download for Windows and Mac OS X. 

 

Also check out the killer apps and resources for a rocking hostel life. :)

Opera fails to load Yahoo! Sports page properly

I’m having a strange problem with Opera 9.64; it’s pathetically failing to properly load the Yahoo! Sports page. This is how the “tennis” section of Yahoo! Sports looks like in Opera :

 

And here’s the same page in Firefox (and other browsers) :

 

 

Opera is a very web-standard compliant browser, so I’m not sure it renders a popular site like Yahoo! Sports so poorly. As far as I can remember, this didn’t happen in previous versions of Opera. If you’re using Opera, please have it checked and report in the comments.  :)

Top Posts

Here is a handpicked list of our top posts yet at PC Tonic.

Fortify your computer

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Eliminate fake security tools

Safeguard your PC from infected USB drives

Parental control tools

 

Useful free / open source software

Free alternatives to Microsoft Office ‘07 – Part 1 | Part 2

8 media players that’ll play almost any media file

The complete PC pack

The leanest PC pack

Update checking tools for your software – Part 1 | Part 2

Killer apps & resources for a rocking hostel life

 

Be sure to check out our Freeware Fiesta section as well!