Binary Digest

Confirming something that we had already seen hints of, Intel has announced that it is looking forward to quad core laptops hitting the scene throughout 2008. Mooly Eden, GM of Intel’s mobile platform group, said that we won’t see these quad cores in business class laptops for a while, even being honest enough to admit that there aren’t enough multi-threaded applications out there to justify it. In practically the same breath, PC World mentions that the chip will target high-level gaming laptops, which is cool because gamers will no doubt lap the new chips up: even if gaming is for the moment a very much single-threaded activity. Architecturally the new chip will have to differ from Intel’s current offerings such as Santa Rosa, so you can probably expect to pay quite a premium until they hit the mainstream. (Not that you didn’t know that already.)

Firefox 2 was indeed a hit in the web browser industry and simply knocked off Internet Explorer off the marks. With new features like automatic RSS feed detection, spell checking and session restore Firefox 2 really won the heart of the people.

Firefox 3 User Interface

But now its time for the hot talks of Firefox 3 and the official mozilla blog has unleashed a set of new features that are currently being considered to be added the family of Firefox 3. None of the features described have any guarantee of making to the final release rather these are all hypothetical and anticipated images that are expected to be included in the final release of Firefox 3.

Firefox 3 Conceptual Features

Here is a list some of the Firefox 3 Conceptual Features which was unleashed on the mozilla blog:

1. Places: Bookmarks, Tagging, History

Firefox 3 is said to have a feature called “Places” which is a whole new infrastructure for storing bookmarks, tags, history and other information about web pages. Users will be able to bookmark their favorite pages more efficiently, tag them and will be allowed to group their saved searches.

2. Automatic Malware Detection

Like Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 will have malware detection technology that will trigger a dialog box as soon as it catches a site that is potentially dangerous for your computer. Google is said to help Firefox in this technology.

3. Content Control UI

The Firefox team is working on developing a better UI for content control and content handling that will allow users to select different actions from a user-friendly user interface.

4. Interactive Microformat Detection

Firefox may contain this feature that will change the mouse cursor for interacting with microformatted content in the context of the Web page.

5. Location Bar Interface Change

The new location bar in Firefox 3 will probably have a new look and feel. The Firefox team is considering to remove favicon from the location bar, and changing the location bar so that everything except “Public Suffix + 2″ is greyed out.

6. Private Browsing Status

Private browsing will allow users to surf privately without any browser sessions being stored locally. Also to indicate private browsing sessions the look of the location bar or even the whole Firefox theme may change away.

These were the features that are currently being considered to be added to Firefox 3. The conceptual mockups of all these features can be seen on the mozilla blog visually. Also there is a list of some new features which are still under development but have no visual mockups.