Some critical security and stability updates have been made available for my favorite Internet browser, Firefox, as well as my favorite e-mail client, Thunderbird.

As part of Mozilla Corporation's ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 1.5.0.9, Firefox 2.0.0.1, and Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from getfirefox.com & getthunderbird.com.

We strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. This update is available immediately in 41 languages including Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Hungarian, and more.

BusinessWeek published an interesting article titiled, Did MySpace Really Beat Yahoo? The article discusses the difficulty to confirm which site actually has more traffic, MySpace or Yahoo.

I'm currently testing a development version of Mozilla's Firefox 3 (codenamed Gran Paradiso). The contents of the release notes for Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 may surprise a few users.

Currently Firefox 3 is scheduled to be officially released in May 2007. When Firefox 3 is finally released it is expected to no longer support older versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. Support for Apple's Mac OS X 10.2 will also be dropped. For the Mac platform, Mozilla is recommending users run Firefox using OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

Several new features for the Alpha 1 version of Gran Paradiso include:

• Cairo is now being used as the default graphics library, affecting all graphic and text rendering
• Cocoa Widgets are now used in OS X builds
• An updated threading model
• Changes to how DOM events are dispatched (see bug 234455)
• Changes to how web pages are painted
• New SVG elements and filters, and improved SVG specification compliance

Many of the new features are a result of changes in the Firefox rendering (layout) engine, Gecko. For this alpha version, Gecko 1.9 Alpha 1 is being used under the browser's hood.

A few weeks ago, Federal Computer Week, had an article about the role Web 2.0 may have in the federal government. Is there a place for wikis and other tool now included in most modern content management systems in the federal government?

The article hints that Web 2.0 may have place more behind the scenes then in public view.

The final version of SMF 1.1 is out. That's right, as far as 1.1 goes, no more release candidates for this forum software.

SMF is by far one of the easiest Web applications to install and upgrade that I have come across. In fact I upgraded my WebCMS Forum within 24 hours of the release and haven't looked backed. Though, I'm giving a week or two for some burn in time before I upgrade a client's site.

Instead of listing all the new features since 1.0, below are the major changes since SMF 1.1 RC3 was released. Release candidates in SMF are typically stable and introduce new features. In fact most open source projects would actually have given the RCs new version numbers.

On a recent visit to Drupal's forum I found another post with both Joomla and Drupal in the subject line. Making comparisons between Joomla and Drupal are very common these days as they are currently considered the top two open source content management systems (CMS) out there. The forum post written by Steve Burge contains a link that takes you to a comparison table he did between Joomla and Drupal.

A new "bugfix" for TYPO3 has been released. Some of the major fixes in TYPO3 4.0.3 are for:

• Internet Explorer 7 compatibility
• Some minor fixes to the Extension Manager
• Some small tweaks for PHP5 were made
• Some fixes for the Tools>User Admin Module “SU” mode
• A security enhancement prevents image access through thumbs.php.

The original TYPO3 announcement including links to release notes and downloads is available at TYPO3.org.

Brad Baker posted on the Joomla! Developer Network an article discussing how one can can contribute to their open source community. While Mr. Baker's article are focused on Joomla!, I think his comments could apply to any open source project. I especially like how he concludes his article.