Mozilla Labs

An effort to manage the frustrating onslaught of e-mail messages that threatens to bury users is the driving force behind the Mozilla Labs Raindrop project, introduced this week. "We're hoping to give users the ability to see the important messages out of the messages that are sent to them," said Rafael Ebron, director of marketing for Mozilla Messaging.

He stressed that Raindrop is in the early phases of development and much of the project still is conceptual. The organization, he said, has posted the source code for download and is seeking feedback on a variety of design issues.

Mozilla Labs has unleashed its first beta release of Prism -- an experimental program that enables users to break out Web applications from the browser and run them directly from the desktop, even if the browser crashes or stalls.

Through Prism, Mozilla Labs aims to harness the increasing power and ubiquity of Web applications and put them to work directly on the desktop in their own separate windows like normal applications. The organization said this will reduce browser loading, leading to improved browser performance and stability.

The second beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is now available for download by developers and consumers alike on Windows-based PCs running Vista, XP, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

Microsoft's next-generation browser for 32-bit and 64-bit computing platforms is currently available in English, Japanese, Chinese and German, with additional languages coming soon, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's IE8 development team.

"While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the Web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2," Hachamovitch said.

Like cars, buildings and airplanes, browsers can have concept models. That's the idea behind Aurora, a new "concept browser" from the Mozilla Foundation.

Emanating from the Mozilla Labs initiative, where users are encouraged to offer new browser ideas, the concept is available in video visualizations. In the videos, Aurora envisions a variety of new interaction models that push the concepts of collaboration, real-world interaction, and context.

Data as User Objects