The Download Blog

We all know the mathematical adage detailing how many words a picture is worth. The principal applies equally to search results. Search for anything in Google, Bing, and Yahoo and see how long it takes your eyes and brain to max out on all the written input. (The concept of text fatigue also applies to blog posts, which is why we've included a nice, large picture near the top of ours.)

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

If you browse the Web with Firefox (Windows | Mac), the free extension SearchPreview (Windows | Mac) breaks up text blocks by inserting thumbnail images of the site's homepage to the left of the text, where your eye naturally goes. If you're unsure which of the many returned links you really want, a glance at the thumbnails could settle the dispute.

If the thumbnail image scenario sounds familiar, that's because until recently SearchPreview has been known as GooglePreview. An upgrade to version 4.0 added support for Microsoft's Bing search engine and repositioned the product with a name change.

As you use SearchPreview, you may notice some results tagged as SearchPreview's sponsored links. These are the developer's way of recouping costs, but you can disable the sponsored results from the Options menu of the add-ons manager.

With Windows 7 having been finalized, I realized that my main work set-up was utterly lacking in the unfinished software department.

Clearly, that couldn't stand. So, last week, I installed the technical preview of Office 2010 on the Windows 7 machine I have been using every day. For the foreseeable future, I'll be trying to see how the new applications stack up in handling my day-to-day work.

As for my early impression, I think my colleague Rafe Needleman said it best in a tweet he wrote earlier this week, while tying out the new Office.

"I wish Outlook/Office 2010 tech preview would do something weird and dumb so I could write about it. Sadly, it just works."

Microsoft has a tradition of internal testing of its products, which it dubs "dogfooding." Here at Beyond Binary, we like to do a bit of dogfooding ourselves, despite the fact we have two cats and no canines.

Although I have installed all of the main Office applications--Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote, I really only use Word and Outlook on a daily basis.

The most noticeable change for me is in Outlook, particularly its new conversation threading feature. Although the concept is familiar to anyone who has used Gmail, it is quite powerful to see the notion applied to the hundreds of e-mail messages that land in my in-box on any given day.

I have a few minor quibbles. Office 2010 is good at bunching together e-mails even if the subject line changes, but its grouping has some false positives in joining disparate conversations just because the subject lines are the same. For instance, it tends to put all of my messages with the subject "Hey there" together, even though that's a standard subject line for me. Similarly, it puts all of my "(no subject)" e-mails together.

That said, I really like the feature overall. It definitely saves me time and makes finding those earlier messages in a thread much simpler.

On the Word front, there are features I am interested in trying out, but few that I have noticed in my casual use. Of course, my use of Word is somewhat atypical. I basically am only looking for a text editor with really good save capabilities. The first thing I do is turn off the smart quotes, hyperlinking, autocorrect, and all of the other features that help distinguish Word from, say, WordPad.

I wrote earlier about one feature I am excited about--paste preview--which helps one see what the different paste options will look like before you commit. That's helpful because usually what I want is the "paste unformatted" option (see above section where what I really need is a text editor), but every now and then I am looking to preserve more of the formatting and it is nice to see what I will get ahead of time.

As a photo nerd, I am also keen on playing around with the artistic effects that Microsoft added to Word. In the past, I needed Photoshop, or at least a program like Photoshop Elements, to do things like turn a photo into a watercolor painting. But now one can do that straight from Word.

Let's see, what else? I'm not a huge fan of the Ribbon, but given that it is here to stay, it is nice to see it has made its way into all of Outlook, as well as to OneNote.

Microsoft Office 2010 technical preview (screenshots)

I'm more fond of the Backstage view, which is new to Office 2010. Essentially a replacement for the file menu, the backstage view offers a more contextual and visual way to do tasks like opening recent documents, creating new ones or printing the document you are working in.

But the thing that I am most interested in, the browser-based versions of Office, I will have to wait a little bit longer for. Although Microsoft released the technical preview of the desktop versions in July, we're still waiting on the Web apps. The official word is they should be out in test form "later this summer."

If I were Microsoft, I'd work to get a Web-based Office out there pronto.

Updated June 26 at 3:45 p.m. PDT: Mozilla stated in an e-mail today that it expects Firefox 3.5 to go public on the morning of Tuesday, June 30, almost missing its self-imposed deadline of "the end of June."

Despite hoping that Firefox 3.5 would receive only one release candidate, Mozilla has now published Firefox 3.5 RC 3 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Details on what's changed between RC 2 and RC 3 are light, with Mozilla saying only that the changes are based on user feedback. Given the history of Firefox updates, it's likely that these were stability- and security-based improvements.

Readers can also peruse older CNET Firefox 3.5 coverage, or check out the official Firefox 3.5 RC 3 release notes.

Fans of Firefox's beta builds can now download Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The latest build contains bug fixes although, according to Mozilla's Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, these were minor stability issues corrected after the release of the first release candidate.

Belzner also addressed some confusion among the 800,000 or so beta users about Firefox's beta-naming conventions. When the beta moves into release candidate mode, he said, it takes on the name of the final version because if no further problems are found the RC build will simply become the public version.

In an interview with CNET earlier this week, Beltzner said that he expects Firefox 3.5 to be released to the public before the end of June. Although that gives Mozilla a week and a half from today, releasing two release candidates in one week could indicate that the final version could come as early as the beginning of next week.

If you've been using the Firefox 3.5 beta, you now get to upgrade to the release candidate for Firefox 3.5. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, The noticeable changes to the release candidate from beta 4 and the b99 pre-release version are not readily apparent. Generally, you can expect the release candidate to be more stable than its beta predecessors, although if you're using an add-on such as Nightly Tester Tools or MR Tech to force incompatible add-ons to work in the beta you may be compromising your stability somewhat.

Firefox 3.5 natively supports HTML5 and embedded Ogg video content.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The upgrades to Firefox 3.5 have been well-documented by now. Private browsing, geolocation, faster performance than Firefox 3 for both loading pages and running JavaScript, local storage for better offline support, and native video for Ogg/Vorbis. If you're running the release candidate or one of its beta predecessors, you can check out Daily Motion to see how the non-Flash based video playback performs.

More improvements include support for HTML5 tags such as < audio > and < video >, native JSON support, support for Web workers so browser-based apps can run in the background, support for CSS and SVG standards, the ability to erase browsing traces by site or by time, personas for easier theme management, and downloadable fonts. The release candidate is also available in more than 70 language localizations.

Because of the 800,000 or so testers that Mozilla says have been using the beta versions, Firefox director Mike Beltzner said that he expects this to be the sole release candidate before version 3.5 goes public at the end of June.

Annoyingly, Firefox 3.5 RC1 doesn't list itself as a release candidate in the program's About box, but in half a day of testing no problems have arisen.

On the same day that Apple released the public version of Safari 4 for Windows and Mac, Mozilla published an update to its Firefox 3.5 beta. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, they're not calling this a beta version, but it's not a release candidate, either.

Within the next 24 hours, the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 will auto-update to what Mozilla is calling a "preview" version. Users can also force the update by going to the Help menu, then Check for Updates. At the time of writing, it doesn't appear that users can download the 3.5 Preview version directly.

In a press release, Mozilla said that Firefox 3.5 Preview will leverage the more than 800,000 users of the 3.5 beta to further test changes made to the browser, indicating that it feels the browser is fine for daily use but might still contain significant problems.

The update makes a large number of bug-fixes for stability, tweaks the Mozilla JavaScript engine TraceMonkey, and improves support for the baked-in Ogg-based open audio and video standards. Overall, it sounds like this should be called beta 5, although the "preview" moniker will likely get good buzz and Microsoft proved with the Windows 7 beta that utilizing your fan base to find potential problems isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Firefox's slight change to the tab buttons: gray instead of green.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

I also noticed that there's a minor interface change in the Preview. Tab management buttons are now gray on gray, changed from the green on gray.

Mozilla's open-source evangelist, Christopher Blizzard, is also highlighting the new developer features coming in Firefox 3.5 in a new blog.

The Firefox milestone announcement can be read here.

Adobe's BrowserLab is a hosted service that allows Web developers to visualize what their site looks like in different browsers.

(Credit: Adobe)

Adobe on Tuesday said it is offering a free preview of its BrowserLab service, which allows Web developers to quickly see what their site looks like on a number of browsers.

The technology, previously code-named Meer Meer, was shown last year at the company's Max developer conference. Using virtualization, the tool can show how a site will look in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari running on different operating systems. Running BrowserLab requires a Mac or PC with Adobe Flash 10.

"Cross-browser testing has been one of the biggest challenges for Web designers because it is such an arduous and time-intensive task," Adobe's Lea Hickman said in a statement. "Now with Adobe BrowserLab, designers have a simple solution that enables comprehensive browser compatibility testing in just a matter of minutes, leaving Web designers with more time to be creative and deliver the high-impact sites customers are demanding."

Designers can compare a site in two browsers side by side as well as use an "onion skin" mode that shows a site in multiple browsers overlaid one on top of the other.

Adobe said that the preview version would be free, though it plans to charge at some point.

BrowserLab "will move to be a paid service down the line, though we have not announced the timing," Adobe product manager Scott Fegette said in a statement. "Currently the focus is on getting the preview out to users and making sure we're providing the best possible user experience."

Microsoft showed off a similar tool, SuperPreview, at its Mix09 event in Las Vegas earlier this year. Microsoft announced that the latest version of its Expression Web software for Windows would include the feature and show multiple browsers via a cloud-based service. It also made a free standalone version of SuperPreview available to allow users to compare how Web pages render in the three latest versions of Internet Explorer--IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8.

Fegette said that Microsoft's approach requires a large PC-based application.

"All we know is what was announced about SuperPreview a couple months ago at Mix, which at its core appears to be a large, Windows-only desktop application available for download which provides previewing support for locally-installed versions of Internet Explorer 7 and 8 alongside a dedicated IE 6 emulator, with the promise of 'cloud-based access' to alternate operating systems and browsers at an undisclosed point in the future," Fegette said.

BrowserLab's "onion skin" view compares how a Web site looks in multiple browsers with different browsers' views overlaid on one another.

(Credit: Adobe)

Quiz time: What do CustomizeGoogle, GooglePreview, and McAfee SiteAdvisor have in common?

Answer: The ability to improve on Google search in the Firefox browser. For example, does this scenario sound familiar: You accidentally click on a sponsored link and have to return to the main results page to try again?

How about this one: You wasted 10 minutes clicking through search results because you can't remember the link by name, but think you can identify it by sight (so you check them all)? Or worst yet: You stumble on a dangerous link and get bogged down with malware that takes hours or days to fix. Terrible!

Yep, that trio of plug-ins we mentioned helps you avoid the common pitfalls that add up to a lot of wasted time. The best part about the extensions--other than their being free--is that they're compatible with each other, so you won't see any crashes if you choose to install all three. Watch this Insider Secrets video to see how they work.

Navigating your hard drive using Windows Explorer is pretty straightforward. Double-clicking a directory like My Documents brings up a list of items you have in that folder. You're given a couple of options for how you view the contents of a folder, such as arranging by date or by name. You also can view your documents using icons or tiles. The Windows Explorer window shares some of the features of Internet Explorer as well, like Favorites and toolbars. Clearly, this is nothing new to anyone who has used a Windows machine, and like many of you, I have my own ideas of how it could be made better.

We can probably agree that the options available with Explorer are adequate for navigating your hard drive, but a little more information and flexibility would go a long way. I found a few programs that add much more to file navigation, such as tabbed and paned directories for drag-and-drop file transfers and document previews so you know what you're opening before you open it. These Windows Explorer replacements offer tons of information about your files at a glance, like expanded properties and sorting capabilities not available with the default Windows setup. Some also feature much more intuitive methods for moving files around. ... Read more