The Technophilez

Mozilla  is creeping ever closer to dropping the final version of the much-anticipated Firefox 3 Web browser. The latest build is the first Release Candidate for Firefox 3 (RC1), which means it's gone beyond the beta stage and is picking up a couple of last-minute polishes before it's offered up live to the whole world as a completed browser.

Most anyone can download this latest version, but it's still only intended for testing purposes. The biggest potential problem, Mozilla says, is that users shouldn't expect all of their add-ons to work properly with this preview release. Still, there are lots of new features in Firefox 3 RC1 that make it a compelling new version.

In this latest milestone, Mozilla has tweaked the user interface in Linux , Windows Vista, Windows XP and Mac OS X versions, as well as added changes and fixes to the location bar autocomplete feature, bookmark backup and restore, and full page zoom. Plus, Firefox 3 is more secure, compatible and stable, Mozilla said.

San Francisco - A Tuesday deadline has been set in which several leading open-source PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) projects plan to stop supporting older versions of PHP in upcoming releases.

The Go PHP 5 campaign, sponsored by several PHP proponents, is intended to move the PHP developer community fully onto the PHP version 5 platform. Among the projects backing the effort are Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine. These vendors are committing to use PHP 5.2 in releases developed after Tuesday.

Campaign advocates also have issued an invitation to other PHP projects to participate, and so far, about 150 software projects and about 200 Web hosters have committed.

Most PHP Web applications run in PHP 4 and 5. PHP 4 was released in 2000, while PHP 5 became available in 2004.

"We think PHP is absolutely the platform going forward," said Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer at PHP tools vendor Zend Technologies, which is supporting the Go PHP5 effort.

PHP 5 features object orientation, for enterprise application development, and Web services capabilities, de Visser said. But adoption has been slow because of issues like Web hosts that offer PHP 4 by default, Go PHP 5 said.

"No one's moving to PHP 5 because no one wants to be first," said Larry Garfield, a co-founder of the Go PHP 5 project.

Hosts will not upgrade until projects do, but projects will not upgrade until hosts do, thus presenting a chicken-and-egg situation, according to Go PHP 5's July 2007 statement. Go PHP 5 hopes to give Web hosts incentive to upgrade servers to newer versions of PHP.

Additionally, extensions to the PHP 4 platform are ceasing, according to Garfield. There will only be major security issues considered between now and August, and after that, PHP development stops, he said.

PHP 6, meanwhile, is not due for more than a year, de Visser said. It will focus on internationalization, he said.

Sun Microsystems elbowed into the enterprise database market Wednesday with the announcement of a proposed $1 billion acquisition of MySQL, an open-source database software company. The deal, which Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz calls the "most important acquisition in the company's history," makes Sun one of the first major public companies to offer open-source software and puts the company head to head with the three big vendors in the $15 billion database market: IBM, SAP, and its former database partner, Oracle.

Compared to those three goliaths, which provide database software to 86% of the enterprise software market, according to Forrester Research, MySQL offers a simpler and cheaper solution. That makes MySQL an appealing option for small- and medium-sized businesses, says Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna. "Unlike IBM, Oracle and SAP, MySQL has never had 50,000 features, but it does have maybe 10,000 relevant features that are relevant to enterprises," he says. "That cost savings is one of the key reasons that users have looked at open source, and fewer features means it's easier to use and manage."

MySQL's lighter-weight database system may also fit into Sun's ambitions of becoming a major player in "utility computing," a model of information technology infrastructure that pipes in software applications, processing and storage over the Internet rather than from a company's own data centers. "All other databases on the market today were designed for an offline, back-office use," says MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos. "Our relevance grows as enterprises shift to Web-based architecture, and that's what's happening right now."

The Burton Group has published a refreshingly nonpartisan analysis of XML-based document standards and formats, recommending that large organizations use Microsoft's Open XML format over competing standards ODF in most cases.

The report, published on Monday and available for free, tries to cut through the highly charged political environment while recognizing the huge financial stake in document formats.

It concludes that organizations that already use Microsoft's Office should use the Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats which are the default in Office 2007.

The authors also predict that OOXML will gain significant market adoption, which will pose a greater competitive threat to most open-source vendors.

The OpenDocument Format, or ODF, will continue to have a market influence. ODF, which is the default file format of the open-source OpenOffice suite, has steadily seen growing interest from government customers concerned with long-term access to documents.

But Burton Group argues that choosing OpenOffice or ODF is done primarily as an anti-Microsoft move.

"For now ODF should be seen as more of an anti-Microsoft political statement than an objective technology selection," according to the report.

ODF, developed at the U.S. standards group OASIS, is an ISO standard, a significant certification to government customers.

Microsoft is in the process of trying to gain ISO ratification for OOXML, which has been certified a standard at Ecma International, another standards body. An important technical resolution meeting is scheduled to take place in late February, which will influence whether OOXML becomes an ISO standard or not.

KDE programmers released a significantly revamped version of its Linux graphical interfaces software on Friday, incorporating several features that also appear in Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

Among new features in KDE 4.0 are a start menu on steroids called Kickoff, new ways of viewing widgets and applications, a revamped file browser, and a new look to some entertainment applications that I hope will help pioneer a new user interface technology.

Unfortunately for KDE fans, the upgrade to version 4.0 comes at an awkward time, just a few months before Ubuntu's planned release in April of its "Hardy Heron" version of Linux. This will be the second version of Ubuntu for which its backer, Canonical, offers long-term support. Because Canonical wasn't confident that there would be good developer support for the previous KDE 3.5 and expected KDE 4.0 not to be mature enough, Canonical decided to support just GNOME.

But there still are plenty of other Linux distributions, and KDE 4 will work fine on Ubuntu (the version is called Kubuntu) even if commercial support is absent. And let's face it--Linux on the desktop has appealed more to programmers and technically savvy do-it-yourselfers than to mainstream computer users.