With Google Earth 6, you can explore the streets in 3D like never before. Fly from outer space down to the streets with the new Street View and easily navigate your way around. Switch to ground-level view to see the same location in 3D.

Download Google Earth 6.0. Available for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms.

Mozilla has finally released the first beta for Firefox 4, you can now download and test this beta release, the very first of a series of betas that bring many improvements to the popular brown browser. As already reported, Firefox 4 that will be officially released at the end of the year is a major update, much of the Firefox of this browser depends on this release.

Some of the new features and the redesigned user interface have been presented here at kabatology, you should have seen them elsewhere too. Talking about the redesigned interface, Firefox beta for Linux and Firefox beta for Windows are slightly different on the surface. The Linux build as shown on the screenshot above doesn’t yet have the Opera-style menu button that reads ‘Firefox’. You can bring it up by hiding the Menu Bar; View -> Toolbars ->untick Menu Bar.
On both Windows and Linux you can can send “Tabs on Top” and even move the Navigation toolbar to the Tabbar.

Mozilla is particular interested in knowing what you thing of what is supposed to be their best browser so far, so they placed that big ‘Feedback’ button on the top right of the browser so you can tell them whats in Firefox 4 that makes you happy or sad.

What you (Firefox user) certainly expected in Firefox 4 is that it includes uninterrupted browsing, the Crash Protection technology (OOPP) now present in Firefox 3.6.6, native support for Google’s open WebM format for watching “hardware-accelerated, super-smooth, HD-quality HTML5 video on YouTube”.

Other features you should be testing in this beta include; new Add-Ons Manager (about:addons) that opens in a tab and not a window, it will soon be coming to Thunderbird email client. Do you expect a major release without performance improvements? Nay. This version also focuses “on improving responsiveness at start-up and during page loads”.

Web Developers aren’t left out; HTML5 Parser, WebSockets, IndexedDB, Web Console (experimental “Heads Up Display”) and Simpler Add-On Development via Jetpack are some of the goodies packed in Firefox 4 for you. Don’t forget to check-out the full list of Web technologies supported by Firefox 4 beta.

Mozilla via its blog reports that not all of what you find in this beta and in future betas (cause more is still to) is guaranteed to be in Firefox 4. If you want to join the testing community then download the very first beta at Mozilla.com. You can find more information on this release in the Release Notes. What do you think of the new features? Let us know in the comments.
via [Mozilla Blog]

VLC media player 1.1.0 with hard acceleration and WebM support was officially released yesterday for Mac, Linux and Windows OS. The no-install version for Windows platforms, a carbon copy of the original is now available for your portable drives. It takes only 21MB of your drive and can be run on systems with previous versions.

VLC Portable 1.1.0 is a free download released under the Open Source (GPL) license.

The popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has released a preview of its next major update uTorrent 3.0. Falcon 2.1 (encrypted webUI that doesn’t require port forwarding) and standard 2.1 alphas have now been merged into uTorrent 3.0 Alpha for testing and the uTorrent 2.1 development series has been dropped.

Its worth noting that this release has no major features but lots of bug fixes;

2010-06-24: Version 3.0 (build 20228)
– Fix: fixed uTP crash on sockets being closed with uninitialized read buffers
– Fix: default download directory fix for multifile torrents
– Change: rate limit uTP by default
– Fix: Fixed fast-resend bug in selective ack handling in uTP. This could cause too aggressive resends on packet loss
– Change: fix crash when formatting a string with NULL
– Change: make uTP slightly less aggressive on loss
– Change: Mention uTP in settings and reorganize new bandwidth checkbox since they apply to both up and down limits
– Change: Render TCP rates in speed graph when uTP is not throttled
– Change: Moved net.calc_overhead to the Bandwidth settings pane
– Fix: RSS items show a different icon if disabled
– Change: Turn on uTP throttling when scheduler is in “limited” mode
– Fix: Fixed a delayed ack issue in uTP (lowers overhead)
– Fix: RSS items would show when torrent list was empty
– Fix: made magnet links in RSS feeds work
– Change: made uTP packet size increase based on low delay measurements
– Fix: made uTP packet size depend on total send rate, not just uTP send rate
– Change: new advanced settings net.disable_ipv6 that defaults to True on 64bit Windows
– Change: Don’t show add torrent dialog by default.
– Feature: Add checkbox to disable UDP trackers

Too feature-less and to early for you to give it a try, then keep your stable 2.0.2 or try the more stable µTorrent beta 2.0.3 that you can download at uTorrent Download. Download uTorrent 3.0 Alpha for Windows OS.

OpenDNS has launched an easy to setup service called FamilyShield that allows parents, administrators, users to filter web content and keep their computers free from adult web sites. This free service that needs no account to configure, no downloads or software to install works much like how OpenDNS Basic does.

You can setup FamilyShield’s IPs 208.67.222.123, 208.67.220.123 directly on your computer (Mac, Linux and Windows) or mobile phones and start filtering the web, better still, you can configure your router to use FamilyShield’s IPs and protect every device that shares that Internet connection, so users with Xbox, Wii, DS, iPad/iPhone and other smartphones also get protected.

Configure your router to use FamilyShield (Recommended)
First choose your router’s brand Here and a follow the straightforward instructions. If your router is not amongst those mentioned then follow the general router instructions. If you can’t get to configure your router then configure your computer.

Configure your computer to use FamilyShield

Instructions are available Here. Covered OS include Windows(XP, Vista, Windows 7) , Mac
(OS X Leopard, OS X Tiger, OS 9), Unix/Linux (SUSE, Ubuntu) and Wii.

FamilyShield web filter, powered by OpenDNS is constantly updated, 24hrs a day, it comes with built-in security that “automatically blocks phishing and virus-spreading malware websites.
via [OpenDNS Blog]

Flock, what i considered the “social Firefox” as it was built on the Mozilla platform and integrated out of the box many social web elements into the browsing experience (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa etc) is now built on Google Chrome, to be precise on Chromium. The result is a slim speedy web browser that has lost some of its features (Media Bar) but has maintained its social characteristics and supports the majority of Chrome features, including extensions. Its interface even occupies less on-screen real estate by default than Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

Chromium based Flock v.3.0 (beta) is free download for Windows systems (XP, Vista and Windows 7), a Mac version will be out later this summer. Read the Press Release

Google Chrome developers have been working with the web community, you&me, to define a “next generation browser plug-in API” that has now been deployed to improve the way we view and interact with PDF files in Google Chrome. Just like the native Flash Player plug-in introduced to Chrome months ago, a native PDF plug-in has landed on the Dev channel of Chrome.

Integrating plug-ins (Flash Player and PDF) by default address the shortcomings of the current browser plug-in mode, users now download Chrome together with the latest versions of these plug-ins, and no longer have to install them separately, further more, users these plug-ins are automatically updated using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism, eliminating “the need to manually download separate updates”, thus reducing the security risk of using outdated plug-ins.

“To further protect users, PDF functionality will be contained within the security “sandbox” Chrome uses for web page rendering.”

Given that native PDF plug-in does not support all of the advanced PDF features found in Adobe Reader, users who rely on these feature will have the possibility to launch Adobe Reader separately.

If you have Chrome dev, turn on the internal PDF viewer by typing chrome:plugins in the Omnibar. Scroll down to Chrome PDF Viewer and click ‘Enable’, that’s it. Integrated PDF viewing experience is available in the Chrome developer channel for Windows and Mac, Linux support is on the way.

via [Chromium Blog]