Desktop software

Laying fallow since the June debut of Chrome 6 in the developer's build, the beta build of Chrome received a major update on Wednesday when Google revised the beta up to version 6. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Google Chrome beta 6.0.472.33 introduces to the beta build users many features that have been available to the developer's build users including changes to the interface, synchronization improvements, and a faster version of Google's V8 JavaScript engine.

Users familiar with Google Chrome dev (Windows | Mac | Linux) will find the beta lacking mostly minor and under-the--hood … Read more

Adobe Systems issued a release candidate for Lightroom 3.2 on Tuesday that fixes dozens of bugs, lets users publish photos to Facebook, adds automated optical corrections for dozens of lenses, and supports Pentax's new medium-format digital camera among other models.

Accompanying the software is a corresponding release candidate for Camera Raw 6.2, the Photoshop module that uses the same engine as Lightroom for converting raw files into more broadly supported, compact formats such as JPEG. Adobe skipped the Lightroom 3.1 number to synchronize the two related packages' release numbers.

If you want to fetch the software, … Read more

Google now offers an extension for Chrome that automates the process of adding the secure Google search site as a search engine to the Chrome 6.x branch. Google SSL Web Search is an extension, still in beta, that works with Chrome 6.0.419.0 and later on Windows and Linux computers.

First released in June 2010, installing the extension opens up a configuration window with a single button that will open Chrome's "add search engine" window. Here, you can set a keyword to speed up your use of Google SSL Web search. There are also … Read more

One of the best features in the Thunderbird remix called Postbox was the deep and fluid integration of social networking contacts into the desktop e-mail client. Thunderbird itself has begun to get a taste of that power with Thunderbird Contacts, a version of Mozilla Contacts, a Firefox add-on that made the browser more socially aware.

Thunderbird Contacts is so new that Mozilla is still switching between that name and "Contacts for Thunderbird" in its blog post announcing the add-on. Whatever it's called, it pulls your cloud-stored contact info from numerous sites into Thunderbird, and then merges the … Read more

The fourth and final developer's preview of Internet Explorer 9 was released on Wednesday, with significant updates to standards compliance and rendering speed, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft said in a blog post that the developer's previews had been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, indicating that despite Internet Explorer's plummeting market share over the past few years, developer interest in seeing it improve remains high.

The vast and dramatic improvements made to Internet Explorer 9 are readily apparent, even in this stripped-down preview version. Hardware accelerated HTML5 support is a major and multifaceted component of IE9, … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A new JavaScript engine, HTML5, tabs on top, and a new add-on framework are not the only improvements that users can expect in Firefox 4. At Black Hat on Wednesday, a trio of security representatives from Mozilla detailed how the company plans to push the browser to be more secure for users while nudging developers toward safer coding practices.

One of the biggest fixes that's been implemented in the Firefox 4 beta (Windows | Mac | Linux) repairs a hole that affects all browsers, a decade-old vulnerability that was mentioned in the documentation for CSS2. The exploit is a CSS … Read more

It's a major time-killer to sift through your three dozen open tabs, looking for a needle in a tab-stack. So it's a good thing that Mozilla has given tabs some long-overdue love in the second Firefox 4 beta with App Tabs.

Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, App Tabs are perfect for Web apps. The feature makes your must-use tabs easy to find and makes it harder to close them. Check out this tutorial to see how to use them and how they compare with the similar feature from Google Chrome, Pin Tab.

Nintendo reported its first quarterly loss in two years amid sluggish consumer demand and the effects of the rising yen.

For the first quarter, ended June 30, the gaming company took a net loss of 25.2 billion yen ($289 million), compared with a profit of 42.3 billion yen in the year-ago quarter. Sales dove 25.6 percent to 188.6 billion yen versus 253.4 billion yen in the prior year's first quarter.

Nintendo attributed the downfall to a variety of a factors.

For the quarter, the company sold only 3.15 million units of its DS … Read more

Mozilla's second Firefox 4 beta debuted on Tuesday, with interface and feature improvements for Windows and Mac users, and under-the-hood changes that include faster browser launch times. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 2 doesn't make any radical visual changes to the browser, but it does introduce a couple of new features and support for new developer tools.

The only interface change made this time around was to give Mac users the tabs on top look by default. Windows users received that feature in the first beta. This can still be reverted under Preferences. Linux … Read more