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Mozilla this week made available the first beta of Thunderbird 3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Codenamed “Lanikai,” the latest release introduces a few changes to the open-source email client, many of which take place under the hood. Built on top of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform (the same engine powering Firefox 3.6), Mozilla says you can expect improvements in stability and memory, fixes to improve upgrading from Thunderbird 2, fixes for auto complete, tabs, and activity manager, and several design improvements and corrections to the interface. As with any beta software, you should expect a few bugs, and there are a handful of known issues in Thunderbird 3. Kaspersky’s Anti-Spam extension is disabled, for instance, and you may run into some SMTP issues

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Firefox 3.6 has recorded over 100 million downloads during the past 50 days, according to a new post  by Melissa Shapiro on Mozilla’s official blog . Now, Mozilla wants Firefox loyalists still holding onto older versions of the browser to make the leap to the latest version. To this end, people running older versions will begin seeing a pop-up message to inform them about the latest version and urge them to update. They will have to pick either one of the three options available to them: Ask Later, No Thanks, or Get the New Version. Mozilla also tried to address a widespread apprehension that already installed Firefox add-ons and Firefox 3.6 may prove to be incongruous.

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The ‘Interactive’ part of the annual South by South West conference in Austin, Texas kicks off this Friday. Known as SXSWi, and running through until Tuesday 16 March, the event brings together web designers, developers, content creators and more, to share ideas, network, announce new products and services, and then hang out in the evenings over barbeque and beer. The conference features around 200 panels and evening events covering subjects such as social media, interface design, real-time web and much more. The evenings see parties such as the Bigg Digg Shindigg, events hosted by Microsoft, Mozilla and Mashable, and a tonne of film showings, since the SXSW Film Conference and Festival runs at the same time

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As part of a regulatory requirement imposed by the European Union, Microsoft has implemented a browser ballot for European Windows users, and as expected, the ballot has given rise to alternative browsers. According to Mozilla, more than 50,000 people had downloaded Firefox as a direct result of the choice screen Microsoft is forced to show. “It’s definitely being taken up, so consumers are paying attention and taking advantage of the choice being offered to them,” said Thomas Vinje, legal counsel to the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a lobbying group based in Brussels whose members include Opera.

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The Mozilla Foundation has outlined its long-term mission for developing the online web experience and user control of the internet over the next century, claiming that Firefox is just the start. Mozilla Foundation head Mitchell Baker told the Register recently that the open source group’s mission was “to build certain qualities into the human experience of the internet” and that while Firefox was “important for the immediate future” Mozilla has “barely started in user control.” According to executive director Mark Surman is leading a Mozilla project called Drumbeat , which uses a new set of independent programs in open-web technologies like HTML 5 “where students’ work is rated and scored using a peer-rating system designed to go beyond the standard Microsoft or Cisco certifications.” Humanising technology Surman outlined Drumbeat’s objectives as follows: “Clearly, the goal is to get out to a new circle of people who care about the web already but who don’t have a way to participate. “We don’t know what the market will be 100 years from now, but we do know that a dramatic increase in levels of ownership and participation in the web will be critical.” Surman wants to see university courses in HTML 5, Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript and courses that promote Mozilla’s Canvas .

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Mozilla today made its Mozilla Developer Preview available for anyone who wants to play around with it. This marks the second pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.3 platform. The biggest news with this latest release is the out-of-process plugin support. Plugins, such as Flash and Silverlight, now run in a separate process similar to Chrome, so if a plugin goes belly up, it won’t crash the browser along with it.

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Oh, BarTab.  I wish I had heard of you before I switched over to Google Chrome.  As a frequent browser-but-not-bookmarker, I’d often load up my Mozilla Firefox browser with upwards of sixty tabs per new session.  Yes, sixty.  I’d use tabs instead of bookmarks to keep track of, “stuff you should check out later,” only I wouldn’t actually get around to clearing through this backlog of open links until days later.  I’m a procrastinator for new content, what can I say. You can just imagine the performance impacts this habit had on my typical browsing session.  It didn’t bother me that much, performance-wise, on my tricked-out desktop PC.  You can bet that my poor laptop wanted to fall over and die at the thought of having to pull up a huge list of pages each time I clicked on the little Firefox icon in the corner of my screen.  And regardless of whether my computer could handle the many, many tabs or not, there was still the issue of Firefox having to actually load the content of these pages before I could go about more browsing.  Little is more frustrating than having to wait five minutes just to check out a link that a friend sent along because Firefox has to take care of 60 other pages first.  Ugh. So how, then, does BarTab fix this issue?  Why is it a must-have add-on for your Web browsing?  It’s an easy solution to a common problem.  BarTab loads up your saved tabs in your new browsing sessions just like Firefox normally does.  The critical difference is that these tabs exist as ghost reminders of what you were previously looking at.  The page itself doesn’t actually load in the background, but the reminder tab is still there.  It’s the best of both worlds: You get the ability to surf through your tabs as you see fit, and BarTab will only load up the corresponding pages when you click on said tabs. So go ahead.  Push your typical saved browsing session to 100 tabs or more.  With BarTab, your browser is cut off from degrading your overall system or browsing performance!

Listen up Mac fans – if you wish to continue running Mozilla’s Firefox browser, you may want to considering upgrading your OS, at least if you’re still rolling along on Mac OS X 10.4. Going forward, Mozilla will no longer support Tiger with upcoming Firefox releases. “We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X, and 10.4 support has been a hindrance,” Josh Aas, one of Mozilla’s Mac experts, said in a mailing list post. “We are planning to make the decision to remove 10.4 support final and remove the code from the tree

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The wait is over. Mozilla has released the much awaited Firefox 3.6 final to its FTP servers and is ready to download now. The final version of Firefox 3.6 comes with several improvements and features. You can now download Firefox 3.6 from the link mentioned below.

The full story can be found on Into Windows

Grown tired of your current browser? You may want to consider giving Firefox 3.6 a try now that the open-source browser has been made available in Release Candidate form. And if you’re worried about being left behind with an unfinished product, don’t be. “[Firefox 3.6 RC1] may update itself periodically and will eventually be identical to the final release,” Mozilla stated in the RC’s release notes.

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