Mozilla has posted the second release candidate of its Firefox 3 web browser this morning. The software is currently only available through the organization’s FTP server.

Microsoft today said that it will be rolling out the second beta of Internet Explorer later this summer and make the software available in 20 languages. Meanwhile, it appears that the Mozilla team has hit roadblocks, which prompted the developers to delay its next-gen browser. There will be at least one more release candidate before Firefox 3 final can be downloaded.

Adobe today released a new version of its document management software Acrobat. Flash movies are now natively supported and can be embedded into PDF documents and viewed through a new version of the free Acrobat Reader. Perhaps even more significant is Adobe’s continued push into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment, introducing a fancy interface for a simple online word processor, a screen sharing applications as well as a file sharing platform.

A new web page that popped up on Mozilla’s site today suggests that the launch of Mozilla 3 is imminent. The developers announced that they will soon be announcing the availability date of the software and are rallying users to take Firefox 3 into the Guinness Book of World Records – as the most downloaded software within 24 hours.

Apple has released a hefty 420 MB update for its current operating system. Leopard 10.5.3 delivers a myriad of improvements, patches as well as general stability and reliability enhancements.

He may be stepping down from day to day duties at Microsoft, but Bill Gates can still hold a crowd.  Gates and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took center stage at the Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital Conference last night in Carlsbad California and fielded tough questions along with demoing an upcoming touch-sensitive version of Windows, but it was Ballmer who did most of the talking.  He emphasized that Vista is not a failure and that Microsoft was still pursuing some type of partnership with Yahoo.

Microsoft squashed hopes that the next version of Windows will come with a completely new kernel – a new kernel that had been discussed and presented as “micro kernel”. The foundation new operating system, apparently due for launch in early 2010, will be an evolutionary step over the Windows Server 2008 kernel, which is based on the Windows Vista kernel, an executive said in an interview.

GPU acceleration is one of the most significant trends in today hardware industry, opening the doors to an entirely new class of software. It appears that the next Photoshop will be one of the first mainstream applications that will tap into the GPU for a speed up. And, at least from what we have seen during a first demonstration, the progress is simply stunning.

Microsoft announced that it will extend the file format range supported by its Office 2007 package. ODF 1.1, PDF 1.5 and XPS will be added with the next service pack, but the integration of Microsoft’s own and recently standardized Office Open XML will be delayed until Office 14.

Back when we first saw the capabilities of Nvidia’s CUDA technology and Tesla acceleration cards, it was clear to us that the company had all the tools necessary to change the way we use computers today – the enormous computing horsepower of graphics cards open up possibilities we have talked about for some time, but didn’t think were possible in the foreseeable future. The company now challenges developers for the first time to exploit the hidden potential graphics cards in a mainstream application.

It’s time to start your downloading as Mozilla has released a brand new pre-release version of the upcoming Firefox 3 browser.  Release Candidate 1 is available for Macs, Linux and of course Windows machines in an amazing 45 languages.

Analyst Opinion - Living in Silicon Valley has its advantages.  One of them is that every once in a while a company like Netscape or Google pops up which threatens to change dramatically the way we do certain things.  I ran into such a company recently. It is called Apture and it could have the technology to change the way how we hyperlink and or embed pictures or graphs into Internet content.

Microsoft has unveiled its first Service Pack for the Mac version of Office 2008, adding new features and security enhancements to the Apple-specific release of the productivity software suite.  A couple of the bugs that pertain to all Office products were that text boxes and certain shapes would periodically mess up a file, and when copying an Office 2008 file into an Office 2004 program the software would freeze.  Service Pack 1 patches these issues.

Mountain View (CA) – Mozilla announced on Saturday that it has put the finishing touches on the Release Candidate 1 code of Firefox 3. The developers are optimistic that RC1 is pretty much the final code of the new browser: If there are no unexpected bugs, RC1 will turn into Firefox 3.