The new options let you control which sites are allowed the use of certain content like Cookies, Images, JavaScript, Plugins and Popups. You can create allow and deny settings on a per-site basis allowing you increased control over your web-browsing experience.

There’s also a hotlink to Adobe Flash Player’s Storage Settings where you can set the maximum disk space allowed for Flash content. You can also view websites which are storing Flash data on your computer along with the data they store.

Together these new features add a lot of Value to an already superb browsing experience. Of course these new features might not attract the average user, but in corporate and more restricted environments, like schools and libraries, fine control over the content are a must have.

After weeks of waiting, Firefox 3.6 has finally reached the Beta milestone. The latest version of the browser has many newer features and performance improvements compared to Firefox 3.5 which was also recently updated to 3.5.4.

Lets just hope that Firefox 3.6 has better handling of those persistent memory leaks which have plagued Firefox 3.5. Some newer features include:

• Support for Windows 7 Aero Peak.
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

You can download the latest beta version from the following link.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta

You might be wondering why I’m posting so much Microsoft stuff lately. It primarily because they’re coming up with so much innovation this year that its really hard to pass up on anything. And if they’re able to market even half of these research projects, we’d be well on our way into the digital interactive world we saw in futuristic movies like Minority Report.

Long Zheng originally shared this video on his blog but I had some issues streaming it so I downloaded and uploaded it to YouTube. The Video shows off a prototype of a futuristic wall we can have in our homes and offices. It uses technologies like interactive wall displays, Microsoft Surface and Project Natal.

You can interact with objects on screen via the Surface table or with your voice and gestures. The system also has a digital assistant which features voice recognition and advanced A.I., something which was also demoed in the Milo demo for Natal. I guess Microsoft were really serious when they said Natal would also be available for the PC. You can also hold up objects to the system and have them automatically scanned.

Another useful feature is interactive collaboration with coworkers around the world, plus Bing Maps 3D and Virtual Earth integration. You can actually view 3D models of places which change perspective as you move in front of them. Technologies like Microsoft Photosynth can be of use here as well.

The video clearly shows that the possibilities are endless and we already have the technology to make this happen, which includes OLEDs, Natal and Surface. Here is an older video which shows off Microsoft’s perspective of 2019. See how much of this tech can you relate to in there.

The latest piece of innovation is actually a concept of a futuristic virtual keyboard – slightly like the stuff we find on touchscreen devices like the iPhone etc. The problem with having virtual keyboards on these devices is that its very difficult to type on them. This is mainly because of two reasons.

The first is that virtual keyboards are usually small, and their layout isn’t like the standard physical keyboards, which means we have to look at the keys before hitting them. The other reason is that they don’t provide tactile feedback like you get when you press a button. Of course you can’t really solve this problem on a virtual keyboard, but engineers at Microsoft might have found a way to address the first issue.

The solution is virtual keyboard that aligns the keys dynamically based on the position of your palm or fingers, so you’ll always have the same frame of reference as you’d have on physical keyboards – meaning you don’t have to look at keys before pressing them because you’d be aware of their position subconsciously.

To make things more interesting, you can pop up the keyboard anywhere on the screen by certain gestures like placing your fingers on it. And you can also hide it in a similar fashion. The keyboard can also be split into two parts (as seen in the diagram), so you don’t have to position your hands close to each other. Pretty neat stuff.

Original Photo by Gizmodo. I just did the overlays.

There’s one final thing puzzling me though. Where do Microsoft intend to use this tech? It certainly won’t fit on small cell phone screens easily. The only logical applications I can thing of are at places like the Surface, or they’re new in-research tablet Courier. It would be really easy to place a split keyboard onto the two screens of the device, not to mention the comfort of using it. It may also find its way into future versions of Windows, to be used in Windows touch input.

I guess the only thing we can do is wait here and things would start to unroll on their own once Microsoft officially announces the Courier.

[WMPowerUser via Giz]

Firefox may not have been quick enough to adapt the Jumplists feature in Windows 7 like Google Chrome, but there’s one piece of functionality the development team is really interested in – Windows 7 Multitouch.

I stumbled upon a video (embedded below) of how Firefox handles Multitouch in various scenarios you may encounter in a web app. A couple of demos are shown with some common testing samples which highlight the features of the new Multitouch API for DOM being built into Gecko. These includes simple games, cropping an image and the regular pinch and zoom to resize.

One thing you could notice in this Minefield build compiled on August 17 is that it still doesn’t show any traces of the mockups we had seen, which left me in doubt whether the new UI would ever show up before Firefox 4.

Anyways here is the video and yeah do share your comments on how you think Multitouch would help you in a desktop browser.

Seems very much illogical to me why they would do such a thing. I mean the public channel is still on Version 2 and what’s even more depressing is that it still doesn’t have good developer support for extensions like Firefox has which is still at Version 3.7 according to its latest pre-alpha builds.

I guess the Chromium team just think that they can beat the likes of Firefox by boasting a higher version number (which usually means a bigger feature set) like Internet Explorer or Opera (ouch). Its either that or they increment the major version before adding major new features.

If its the later, we can expect to see some more welcoming additions into the browser, like support for addons. Oh and if you’re wondering, the Bookmark Sync works only when you launch the browser with –enable-sync command line arguments. All you have to do is hit the Wrench icon and select Sync My Bookmarks… from the menu. Log in with your Google account and you’re all set.

It would have been nice if it could sync with Xmarks too. Would become sort of an universal cloud bookmark sync solution.

You can download the latest developer build from here.

One rather good use of the Microsoft’s Multitouch-cable Surface table would be to control you’re living room – which CRISTAL aims to achieve.

Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces – or CRISTAL is a research project by the Media Interactions Lab backed by the Upper University of Austria of Applied Sciences. CRISTAL is a simple interface that allows you to take control of your digital living room by allowing a simple and intuitive touch based interface to your devices.

Like you can dim your lights by dragging on them on the coffee-table display and play movies stored in your HTPC by dragging and dropping them on the HDTV. Just watch the videos after the break to get a better idea.

Not that this isn’t Microsoft’s Surface, but still researches esitmate that it would cost about the same if put in production right now. It would be interesting if this project actually ends up as an application for Microsoft’s Surface instead. It would cut the development costs a lot, though don’t expect something like this to drop in you’re living room in the next five years.

Maybe we ought to use Project Natal to control things till then?

Anyways, here’s another video.

The Jumplist tasks aren’t very different from what you get on Internet Explorer or Firefox with WinFox installed. You can open a New Window or a New Incognito Window for hassle free p0rn. And you also get the usual MRU lists as well – something which I have never personally used myself.

Even though Jumplists is a pretty useful feature, I haven’t run into any third party application making good use of it.

Oh and Google Chrome has only added support for Jumplists yet, not Aero Peek, so don’t get your hopes too high.

Coupled with a ton of other UI updates, Google Chrome 3 is looking out to be one hell of a browser, though it still won’t take Firefox’s place on my machines.

[via itd]

For those who are interested to know about it more, you get a brand new toolbar button in the rich editor. Clicking that butting lets you embed an image in your message by either uploading it from your computer, or by giving a web address. Once inserted in the message, you can do a number of manipulations on the image like resize, scale etc.

And that is pretty much all there is about this lab experiment. One thing you should still keep in mind is that Gmail still doesn’t like images embedded in email so it would disable and hide all the images at the recipient end, until he chooses to view them.

If you want to try out the feature as well, just click on Settings > Labs and look for the Insert Image experiment. This is one of those you might want to turn on for ever.

What is OnLive? Think of it as the TiVo of gaming. You can stream high end games to your low end computer (PC or Mac) or on your TV via a broadband connection, and brag to your friends about how you can play Crysis, maxed out at 720p 60fps. The trick here is Off-site rendering, powerful servers process the game for you and then render it as a video stream and send them over a broadband connection. And all you need to play them is a simple computer or a TV.

The service was unveiled at GDC 09, as a technology preview currently under internal beta testing with plans for a full scale launch later this year. Being developed by Rearden Studios, the service relies on powerful servers that do the processing for you and stream the content over a broadband connection. For high definition gaming, you need to have at least a 5 Mbps connection, while standard definition is available on as low as 1.5Mbps. Rearden developed their own proprietary compression technology that claims to have a compression time of only one millisecond, striking out the possibilities of any major lag.

On top of that, they have specialized algorithms on the client side that are dedicated to keep the ping under one millisecond. The video stream is delivered to your PC or a set-top box in case you want to play it on a TV. The later is as big as a human hand and would cost “less than a Wii”. Multiplayer and social capabilities are said to be modeled after the insanely popular Xbox Live.

The service has already gained attention of the industry and big name publishers like EA, THQ, Ubisoft, Take-Two, Epic and more are already on board. The revenue and subscription model for the service is currently under works as the service gets ready for public beta due in the summers. Overall, if the service gains popularity, it would be beneficial for both the players and the publishers as the former wouldn’t have to spend thousands of dollars just to get the latest rig, and the later would be a little less concerned about piracy.

OnLive would have five data centers spread across the US to minimize the lag, if at all. As for our international users (including me), there is no word on availability, and I don’t see Rearden doing that anytime soon. But hey if it works there, someone might step up and try to pull it off somewhere else.

Thanks to Kotaku for the images.