Four formats on a single disc?

Does riding the DVD/HD DVD/Blu-ray Roller Coaster of Consumer Confusion make you queasy? Supporting three formats is giving the movie studios indigestion, but so far they haven't found the right antacid. It costs time and money to produce discs in multiple formats, and it takes a valuable shelf space at retail. Surely there must be a better solution than selling three kinds of discs and three kinds of players?

Talk of a hybrid player that could handle both new high-def formats set the tech world buzzing when the chipset was demonstrated early this year, but hardware based on it has yet to materialize. The other approach, making hybrid discs, has so far produced only HD DVD/DVD hybrids. While HD DVD and traditional DVD share enough in common to make the manufacturing processes similar, Blu-ray requires an expensive technology upgrade.

The basic problem is that the different technologies use different types of lasers and store data at different depths. Traditional DVDs use a 650nm red laser, while Blu-ray and HD DVD both use a blue laser at 405nm. DVD and HD DVD share the same data depth, though, at 0.6mm, while Blu-ray's pits are only 0.1mm from the surface.

A recent patent unearthed by New Scientist suggests that Warner has seen the hybrid future and could one day produce discs featuring all three formats, plus CD.

The patent, which lists several top Warner execs as the inventors, describes how "a dual disc may also be formed with two high-capacity data layers, one conforming to the HD DVD format and the other conforming to the BD [Blu-ray disc] format." Warner engineers have figured out a way to use semireflective coatings to allow the two layers to coexist on a single side, using HD DVD's greater depth to position it beneath the Blu-ray data layer.

The patent then describes an implementation in which both sides of the disc contains data layers, which means that we could see discs with CD and DVD layers on one side, HD DVD and Blu-ray on the other. The downside to this approach is that each format gets only one layer, reducing its total capacity. Discs are not especially expensive to produce, so it may make financial sense for studios to begin shipping two-disc movies that contain all three formats. While this would simplify things for consumers and would free up valuable shelf space, it would also make it hard to offer different price points for DVD and high-definition formats. It might well make more sense for studios to release DVD editions in one box, high-definition versions (Blu-ray on one side, HD DVD on the other) in another.

Intel pioneers silicon laser technology

Technology is advancing to a point where copper connections over small distances cannot achieve throughputs needed for high-performance computing. The electrical characteristics of wire at these high frequencies usually cause more problems that it's worth. In order to expand bus transmission rates to a terabit scale, optical connections are necessary. However, photonic semiconductor components have traditionally been expensive and difficult to manufacture in high volume. This is why most fiber-optic equipment is expensive and only used when transmission distances make it more costly to use copper. This is why you'd never see an optical bus in many high performance computing scenarios, let alone someone's desktop.

Intel has been working on ways to solve these problems and through a partnership with the University of California Santa Barbara, they've achieved a method of producing components using standard semiconductor processes that are reliable and cost-effective. They call this technology hybrid silicon lasers. A hybrid silicon laser is a laser that small enough to be built on modern electronic scales (nanometers) and allows for the conversion of electronic signals into highly efficient optical signals.

There are two components to a hybrid silicon laser. The first is a material that, when a charge is placed across it, emits photons. In this instance, Intel is using Indium(III) phosphide. The second component is a substrate of silicon that acts as a waveguide. Depending on how this silicon waveguide is designed, it will affect certain characteristics of the laser's output, such as wavelength. Previously, these two components had to be aligned precisely in a process that was costly and time-consuming. In Intel's new method, the two materials are coated with a thin layer of oxygen plasma and bonded at around 300°C. This creates a layer of what is essentially glass that bonds these two components together. What is important to note, however, is that via this process, the two layers no longer need to be precisely aligned, removing the expensive barriers to mass-production.

This means that bandwidth-intensive subsystems of large computing projects such as supercomputers, and someday high-performance workstations can have their copper bus architectures replaced with efficient optical versions. This would remove many of the limiting characteristics of copper technology which becomes increasingly bothersome at the frequencies involved in high bandwidth operations. This new technology will expand data rates between components dramatically. Intel has demonstrated a silicon-based optical modulator operating in excess of 1GHz while other researchers have demonstrated data transmission rates as high was 160Gb/s. Intel is optimistic that these technologies can expand to "terabit" level connections in the future.

Apple iPhone Clues in iTunes 7

An Apple analyst said Friday there is further proof the computer company will soon make its own iTunes-enabled cell phone.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said in a research note, “We believe there is more tangible evidence of the existence of the iPhone from the resource files in the new iTunes 7.” He was referring to reports that the latest iTunes software, which was released Tuesday, has messages that suggest features for a mobile phone, such as messages about copying games and synching photos to mobile phones.

Mr. Munster said such features are not on the ROKR phone that was jointly developed by Apple and Motorola and released last October. “This resource file message suggests there will be a phone that will be capable of synching with iTunes, and that the phone will support iTunes and photos,” Mr. Munster said in the report. He added, “We believe this phone is most likely the iPhone, with an outside chance the message is in reference to an upcoming phone from a current phone manufacturer.”

The evidence, rather than the revelation of a phone, is what’s more compelling here. Indeed, UBS analyst Benjamin Reitzes said in a research note Tuesday that he is “still expecting new products in the coming months… including touch-screen video iPods with larger screens and cell phones.”

What’s more, talk of a phone made by Apple has been on the lips of observers for more than a year. Some believed the ROKR was deliberately made clunky—it’s an old-school candy-bar style with room for just 100 tracks—so that Apple could later offer an improved model.

Others believe that due to the extremely enthusiastic following of Apple fans, the Cupertino, California-based company could become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), selling its phones as well as Apple-branded cellular service.

Microsoft announces plans for Zune phone

Microsoft plans to release a Zune-based phone sometime in the future, according to Zune's general manager of global marketing, Chris Stephenson. The phone will be part of Microsoft's plans to expand into the digital music player market, although like the Zune itself, there were no details or timeline given for when to expect the Zune phone.

Microsoft, unlike Apple, doesn't seem to like keeping secrets about its plans to bust into the Apple-dominated digital music player market. Although there has been no official confirmation of the long-rumored "iPhone," Apple's CFO Peter Oppenheimer was quoted during an earnings conference call in July saying that "We don't think the phones that are available today make the best music players. We think the iPod is. But over time that's likely to change, and we aren't sitting around doing nothing." Apple's certainly not sitting around doing nothing according to some, who claim that the Apple phone is ready for production.

Without any details regarding either company's tight-lipped phone plans, it's hard to speculate whether one will trump the other or whether either of them will succeed at all. Apple's first foray into the phone business with the Motorola ROKR ended up being somewhat of a failure, and may have been due to Apple not having full control when working with Motorola in determining the phone's design and usability. Will the rumored Apple phone, when and if it ever happens, be able to put the ROKR out of its misery, and will the Zune phone be able to top it?

Intuit and Google get together on QuickBooks

In a move that seems like a win-win for both companies, Google and Intuit are partnering to give small business owners the ability to create AdWords ad campaigns, get their businesses listed on Google Maps, and selling products via Google Base. Under the terms of a deal announced today, small businesses buying QuickBooks 2007 will have access to a number Google features from within the software.

Along with easy access to Google features, QuickBooks 2007 will also come bundled with Google Desktop. A tweak in the search application will ensure that QuickBooks data can only be accessed by Google Desktop when the search is initiated from within QuickBooks.

According to Google, less than half of businesses using QuickBooks have any sort of online presence. The search giant hopes to change that by creating simple "notecard" pages for such companies, as AdWord click-throughs need somewhere to go. QuickBooks 2007 users will be able to easily create AdWords accounts with information supplied by the application, and will receive a $50 credit towards Google services.

"By adding key Google services into the world's most popular accounting product, we're making it easier than ever for small businesses to find and use all of the tools available to them," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

New iPods now, Apple iTV coming in early 2007

Apple did take the wraps off of a new iPod today, but it was not the mythical "true video iPod" that we've been waiting for since last year. The company looks to be focusing on improving the video playback experience, however, touting a 60 percent brighter screen and better battery performance when playing video. The 6G iPod will get many more games, as popular time-wasters such as Bejeweled, Cubis 2, Mah-jong, Mini Golf, Pac Man, Tetris, Texas Holdem, Vortex and Zuma are coming to the iPod, and can be purchased at the iTMS for $4.99. The iPods will also feature newly redesigned Apple headphones.

The new top-of-the-line is a 8GB beast that holds "20,000 songs" for $349.

As expected, the iPod nano is showing its new colors now: green, silver, black, blue, and pink. With the explosion in color options comes an additional model, too. The entry point is a 2GB (silver only) model priced at $149. For $199, Apple offers the 4GB model in every color except for black, which is reserved for the new 8GB model alone. Priced at $249, the 8GB model comes in any color you like, as long as it is black. The nano has 24 hours of battery life according to Apple.

Apple also announced a new generation of the iPod Shuffle, priced at $79. The Shuffle is now smaller in physical size, around the size of a matchbook. Capacity has been boosted to 1GB, and it has a 12-hour battery life according to Apple. It will begin shipping in October.

The movies have indeed arrived. Apple is launching with Disney as its sole partner, with only 75 movies to start. We all know how that will end.

The big news is the pricing. Apple has apparently listened to the movie studios, and has adopted a pricing strategy to promote new releases. While new videos will sell for $14.99, studios have the option of offering pre-orders for $12.99, and this special introductory pricing will also be good for the first week that a video is released. Older titles will be sold at $9.99.

Apple has turned up the resolution on videos sold through iTMS, moving from its paltry 320x240 resolution to a much more respectable 640x480. Encoded with h.264 (MPEG-4), the videos should be close if not better than many 480p sources. It's not HD by any means, but it's a big improvement and really the first resolution we can see performing well on the TV across all manner of content.

iTunes has been updated to version 7.0 and sports some new features, including "Cover Flow."

Breaking with Apple's tradition of not announcing unreleased products, Jobs said that the company will release a wireless, set-top box for the TV called... iTV. Approximately half the size of the Mac mini, the iTV will feature Ethernet, 802.11g, USB ports, component video, optical audio and HDMI ports. It will work with the Apple Remote and sport an interface much like that of Front Row.

iTV will allow music, TV shows, and movies residing on a computer to play on a television in another part of the house with what Jobs describes as instantaneous access. It is slated to ship during the first quarter of 2007 and will retail for $299.

"Apple is in your den now," says Jobs. "Apple is in your living room. Apple is in your car. Apple is in your pocket." Will Apple be in your wallet?

Flash RAM replacement promises high speeds

Since its introduction, Flash RAM has become immensely popular. It is widely used in digital music players, millions of people have USB thumbdrives on their persons, and hybrid hard drives that combine flash memory with the spinning platters are on their way. For all its usefulness, flash RAM does have its drawbacks: it's relatively slow and it has a finite (although high) number of read-write-erase cycles.

Enter PRAM. Despite sharing the same name, the new memory technology from Samsung is not to be confused with the stuff Mac owners zap when troubleshooting a balky machine. Phase-change Random Access Memory is Samsung's new memory technology that works much like flash memory, but is much faster and more durable.

So far, Samsung has built a fully-functional 512Mb chip to demonstrate the technology. It uses the same vertical diodes and three-dimensional transistor structure used in DRAM and unlike flash RAM, can write data without needing to erase data already present on the drive. Samsung says that overcoming this limitation means that PRAM can operate at speeds up to 30 times faster than flash RAM. It will also last longer—up to 10 times longer than flash RAM chips.

The chipmaker anticipates offering a full lineup of PRAM products in 2008, once it has the kinks in the manufacturing process worked out and fabrication facilities up to speed. It looks promising from a fabrication point of view, though. Samsung says that it will be less expensive to manufacture since it requires 20 percent fewer process steps than does conventional flash.

Microsoft preps Soapbox to take on YouTube

Microsoft is preparing to go live with their new user-generated video service and is ramping up to take on YouTube in the near future. Codenamed Warhol, the service's final name is said to be "Soapbox." It will debut on MSN instead of Windows Live, as many have expected, but will nevertheless be tightly integrated with Microsoft's MySpace competitor, Windows Live Spaces. The details of the new service are rumored to be very similar to those of YouTube, with a 100 MB upload limit from "almost any format," tags and categories, RSS feeds, integration of a Windows Live Spaces account, and the ability to embed videos on a web page or blog.

Aside from RSS feeds, which is something that YouTube does not yet have (although they allow you to subscribe to various users' videos through their own web interface), another item to note is the lack of any sort of length limits to the uploaded videos.

Microsoft believes that it is already positioned to be a heavy competitor against YouTube for the user-generated video market. MSN's Todd E. Herman said in an interview that the game isn't about uploading, it's about availability and MSN is already good at making content available. Mr. Herman was very confident that while YouTube definitely "got to the party early," MSN's 4 million unique visitors per month would allow them to catch up in no time.

Initial screenshots of the Soapbox page (not yet live) sure do look a lot like YouTube (as usual... remember MSN search which looked like google) except with that signature Microsofty twist.

Mozilla taps former MS executive for security

Mozilla Corp. has hired a former Microsoft Corp. security strategist to help lock down its open source products against online attacks.

Window Snyder, whose hiring was announced Wednesday, worked on Microsoft's security driven Windows XP Service Pack 2 update. She also had a role in the development of Windows Server 2003.

Snyder will take charge of Mozilla Corp.'s security strategy, a role previously handled by Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer.

"Window has joined MozCorp recently as our new "Chief Security Something" (that's a working title)," said Schroepfer in a blog posting. "She'll be the public voice of Mozilla Corporation on security issues and helping to drive our long-term security strategy."

With hackers finding new and more sophisticated ways to compromise browser security, browser makers such as Mozilla need to keep pace, said Avivah Litan, an analyst with the Gartner Inc. research firm.

And as Mozilla has become more popular, security has become even more important, she said. "The attacks have really been targeted toward the 90 percent of the population using IE, but as their percentage of the browser population goes up, they have more need for [security]," she said.

Mozilla's Firefox is now used by nearly 13 percent of Web surfers, according to Web analytics firm OneStat.com. Microsoft's Internet Explorer has about 86 percent marketshare, the company estimates.

Google News Archive with 200 yrs of content

Google has just launched another project in its bid to rule the world organize the world's information. The Google News Archive Search allows users to find news accounts up to 200 years old from selected sources, and while that sounds incredible, the service isn't yet a compelling tool.

You can think of the new search in one of two ways: a more specialized version of a regular Google search, or a much broader version of a Google News search. Queries to the News Archive search magazines, newspapers, and some Web-only publications for content, and can return results in a standard format or a new "timeline" view that makes it easy to follow the progression of a story over time. Searches can be limited by date if you want only early 20th-century coverage of the Titanic sinking, for instance. Just as we've come to expect from Google, searches are fast, the interface is clean—and Google has no current plans to make any money from the project.

While this sounds like a fantastic resource, it has one substantial limitation: many (if not most) of the older articles cost money. Archived articles from papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are only available to users who pay a fee. In the sample searches that we ran at the site, most pre-1990 results came from pay sites (though much interesting content from Time and from the UK's Guardian newspaper was available for free).

In essence, this makes Google into a news database frontend of the kind that students and academics have used for years to track down articles. Since Google does not provide any sort of payment system of its own, however, users who want to view the results will have to set up accounts and make payments at several different sites. While this is no deterrent to someone pursuing serious research, it's likely to put off the average Web surfer, who in most cases could just go to her local library or college and access more complete information from proprietary databases, usually at no direct cost.

New Cisco's CRS-1 router

Cisco launched this week the smallest version yet of its biggest router -- a four-slot Carrier Routing System-1, intended to extend 40Gbps from a core network to regional carrier POPs.

The four-slot CRS-1 joins its eight and sixteen slot brethren and offers carriers another tool for expanding 40Gbps, or OC-768 connectivity throughout a network. The device includes four slots which can support four-port OC-192 (10Gbps) line cards, or single-port 40Gbps blades. The box also includes several traffic shaping and network virtualization features aimed at serving business and consumer network customers, Cisco says.

The four-slot CRS-1 supports up to 320Gbps of total routing capacity, Cisco says. Traffic management features in the router also allow users to carve up bandwidth or network services for various customers, with Secure Domain Routers. This feature allows users to create a virtual router for each line card in a CRS-1 system. The traffic on virtual Secure Domain Routers is segregated from other network segments, keeping various customer's data from mixing, and allowing carriers to apply different rules to traffic, and use different protocols and technologies for customer networks.

The smaller-size CRS-1 can also operate with multiple CRS-1 chassis in Cisco's multi-chassis routing configuration, which allows multiple CRS-1 boxes to be lashed together for greater failover and distributed router processing capabilities.

The four-slot CRS-1 will be available in November starting at $160,000.

Fingerprinting WiFi could secure MAC addresses

MAC address spoofing on wireless networks could come to an end with a new security technique that would allow network administrators to see a unique WiFi fingerprints for each device. Carleton University researcher Dr. Jeyanthi Hall analyzed (pdf) the radio frequency (RF) signal of 15 devices and discovered that each and every device has its own unique signal—even devices from the same manufacturer—due to variations during the manufacturing process. The signals were so clearly different from one another that she had a 95% detection rate with zero false positives during her testing.

MAC addresses are a unique, alphanumeric identifier assigned to each individual network card. Network administrators use these identifiers to distinguish between individual machines on a network and ultimately limit network access to approved machines. However, savvy users quickly realized that they could easily spoof MAC addresses from other machines on their own devices to pose as someone else on the network. Although limiting network access to specific MAC addresses is very common, it is not considered the best form of network security for this reason.

The task of identifying unique WiFi devices was achieved by using a prerecorded set of RF signals, presumably from the same devices, and then comparing the two. This, of course, would mean that in order to make use of this method for network security, network admins would need some way to record the "tranceiverprint" of their users' machines when they first connect to the network, which requires equipment not currently available outside of specialized purposes. They would then need some way to store and compare the unique identifier in order to limit access. Additionally, Dr. Hall's report points out that because the transceiverprints were originally created via manufacturing variations, certain factors such as mobility and ambient temperature will affect the RF signal enough that recalibration will need to be repeated periodically in order to stay accurate.

What could this mean for WiFi security? Although it seems unlikely that businesses would want to incur the setup and repeating costs necessary to use this technique in the near future, it does seem that there is a need for a new, more secure method of access control as MAC spoofing becomes more common. By now, most admins have realized that MAC-based security means no security and therefore have been moving onto other methods such as user authentication and proxying in order to identify users. However, if wireless hardware were to utilize this technology and combine it with MAC addresses, unique device identification could pick up steam once again.

Wi-Fi Alliance won't wait for IEEE

The announcement (WiFi Alliance will start certifying next-generation wireless LAN products by the first half of 2007, regardless of whether the IEEE has signed off on new wireless specifications) last Tuesday was a break from tradition for the Alliance, which tests and certifies wireless LAN products from different vendors for interoperability; typically, the group waits until the IEEE has fully certified a wireless standard before testing products against it and putting its seal of approval on those that pass the test.

In question is final approval of a specification for 802.11n, a proposed wireless standard that would support data throughput of 100Mbps or higher.

A nasty fight over how to use multiple antennas and radios to achieve that performance boost has pushed back the expected approval of the specification several times. Final ratification of the specification is now scheduled for April 2008. With Wi-Fi products supporting some 802.11n features already available, the Wi-Fi Alliance couldn’t wait around, said Managing Director Frank Hanzlik.

The Alliance will use a two-phase certification process, testing for interoperability against whatever parts of the standard it believes are solid and unlikely to change, Hanzlik said. In Phase 2, the Alliance will use the approved IEEE standard, whenever it’s finished.

Vendors strongly back the Wi-Fi Alliance’s dual-stage plan, even though some chip set makers have already performed interoperability tests for draft 802.11n products, Hanzlik claimed.

CrossOver beta does Windows apps on Mac

Codeweavers has released the public beta version of CrossOver Mac, the firm's virtualization software that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows applications -- without having Windows installed.

Based on the open-source project WINE, CrossOver Mac provides the ability to run Windows applications and some games on the Mac without having to reboot or switch to a virtual machine interface -- applications appear in the same Finder interface that Mac users are accustomed to. Because it's based on WINE, which translates Windows-specific code references to other operating systems' technology, no Windows operating system license is needed in order to get CrossOver to work.

By comparison, Boot Camp, Apple's Windows-enabling software for Intel Macs, requires you to install a copy of Windows. Similarly, Parallels Desktop for Mac needs a Windows operating system (or other PC-compatible operating system) in order to operate.

Codeweavers advises that CrossOver Mac's public beta "will give you a taste," but "should be considered an early test release." The developers promise "substantial further improvements" before the production version ships. In other words, unless you're willing to tolerate issues that sometimes pop up with experimental software, "you should skip this and wait for notice of the production release."

The CrossOver Mac public beta is a 60-day version. Users interested in placing a pre-order can, for a reduced price of $39.95.

Samsung achieves 4G wireless target

Samsung has successfully demonstrated an experimental version of so-called 4th generation (4G) wireless technology at the 4G Forum, which is being held at this week at Cheju Island in Korea. 4G isn't so much a specific technology, as a target range of speeds as defined by the Forum. In order to be considered fourth-generation, a system should provide 100Mbps data transfer while moving, and 1Gbps data transfer to a stationary (yet portable) device.

Samsung's demonstration system, which involved terminals installed on a moving bus, was able to achieve the requisite 1Gbps transmission rate while the bus was at rest, and maintained a rate of 100Mbps with the bus moving at 60kph (about 37 miles per hour). The transmission rate was able to be held even during handover between cells.

Samsung also reported that the company's engineers have conducted lab experiments in which a 3.5Gbps transmission was maintained on a vehicle moving at 5kph (or just over three miles per hour). That may not sound like much, but 2.5Gbps had been considered something of a maximum transfer speed for wireless devices.

For comparison purposes, the current bleeding edge of wireless technology appears to be WiMAX. WiMAX has been available in certain proprietary forms for a while, but should begin hitting the streets "for real" around the end of the year. WiMAX promises maximum transmission speeds of around 70Mbps over a wide coverage area, which is excellent, but it pales in comparison to the potential demonstrated by Samsung's bus, which was able to receive 32 HDTV broadcasts, video telephony, and Internet simultaneously.

More Indian languages on Wikipedia

More and more Indians can contribute to the volunteer-edited Wikipedia encyclopedia project, now rated among the top 20 websites globally.

So says Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, founder of the Web-based free content multilingual project.

During a visit to India, Wales noted that volunteer contributions to the Kannada Wikipedia had been growing 22 percent and Bengali 35 percent a month.

"These growth rates are fairly high. Of course, they're growing from a small base. But Kannada already has over 5,000 articles and is still growing. That's really exciting. Bengali too has a growth rate of 35 percent," he said.

"It's not as bad as it was a year ago. We had almost nothing then. Now, languages like Bengali, Kannada, Marathi are in the 3,000-5,000 article range. Hindi, Assamese over 1,000. But Hindi, a very large language, has only 1,500 entries. That's a little surprising," Wales told IANS.

"We still have an enormous amount of work left to do. India has 23 official languages. English has more than 10,000 articles. We aim to have 200,000 articles for every language spoken by a million people," he said.

Currently, Japanese is the only non-European language among the 'big 10' of Wikipedia.

Farsi, Arabic, Korean, Thai, Chinese and Bhasa Indonesia are among those with over 10,000 articles. In the same category are Urdu, Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

Microsoft out with Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2

Microsoft's Windows Media Player hasn't been around as long as Apple's QuickTime, but the Redmond company has been working furiously to make it the biggest, baddest, and above all most dominant media player on the block. Version 7, released in 2000, was the first "bells and whistles" version that offered all sorts of extra goodies such as CD ripping and visualizations. Version 8 arrived with the release of Windows XP a year later, 9 arrived in 2003, and version 10 came along with XP SP1.

Now, Microsoft has released Beta 2 of WMP 11 and is anxious to spread the word as quickly as possible. The new version is available for US customers (international versions will arrive later) and requires Windows XP (Home, Pro, Tablet, or Media Center Edition) and Service Pack 2 (Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005). The download is not available for users running the beta or Release Candidate of Windows Vista, but that is not surprising: Vista comes with WMP 11 already by default.

The new player was designed with user feedback from previous versions in mind. Gone are many of the extraneous curvy user interface elements, in favor of a sleeker design. As in previous versions, various tools are arranged into tabbed sections at the top of the window, such as Now Playing, Library, Rip, Burn, Sync, and making its debut in the default configuration, the online music store URGE.

Microsoft is clearly, one might even say URGEntly, pushing this new download service as a rival to Apple's iTunes Music Store. However, the store, developed in partnership with MTV, lacks the polish of its rival.

Mozilla updates Firefox 2.0 beta

Mozilla has released a new test version of Firefox 2.0, which will be the next major version of its popular open-source browser.

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2, released Thursday at about 3 p.m. Pacific time, features an improved user interface and a limited version of the phishing protection feature that Mozilla is developing for the browser. More information on the Beta 2 release can be found here.

Beta 2 also comes with improved search capabilities, a spellchecker for Web forms, and jazzed-up tabbed browsing capabilities.

This second beta release will probably be the last beta version of Firefox 2.0. Developers are now planning to ship a nearly final "release candidate" edition of the browser on Sept. 19, with the finished product going out the door by the end of October.

Mozilla had been hoping to have Firefox 2.0 finished by September, but that date was pushed back recently to give developers more time to squash the growing list of bugs in the beta code.

Both Mozilla and Microsoft are rushing to finish major updates to their browser software. Late last week Microsoft posted the first release-candidate version of Internet Explorer 7, and it is expecting to ship the final version of the next-generation browser by year's end. The release candidate can be found here.

Research company OneStat.com estimates that about 13 percent of Web surfers now use Firefox. The Netherlands-based company pegs IE users at 83 percent.