"Mozilla has released its first release candidate, RC1, for Firefox 3.6 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes Personas, which lets people customize the browser's appearance; blocks third-party software from encroaching on its file system turf to increase stability; and perhaps most significantly given the competitive threat from Google Chrome, shortens start-up time and improves responsiveness and JavaScript performance. Firefox 3.6 RC1 is also available from Mozilla's download site."

A few weeks ago, we asked for the OSNews community to help with some questions we were going to ask Aaron Griffin from the Arch Linux team, and the response was glorious and somewhat phenomenal. We added those questions to our own and sent them on over, and then we were surprised by receiving not only Aaron Griffin's responses but answers from various individuals from the team.

Last Friday, January 8, the University of Amsterdam (I'm with the competition) handed out an honorary doctorate to Harvard prof. Lawrence Lessig, known to you all (I may hope!) as one of the founding members of the wildly successful Creative Commons project. During the acceptance ceremony, he held one of his keynote presentations - and one that is required listening material for everyone. And with everyone - I mean everyone.

I followed the hype: Reddit, Slashdot's front page, months of thumbs up on my blog and various video forums by Linux users for OpenShot. Given that I'm longing for a usable Linux video editor since 2003, and given that OpenShot version 1.0 had just been released, I naturally gave it a go, by also downloading its provided dependencies on my Ubuntu Linux 9.10.

We're already nine days into the year 2010, and yet, eComStation 2.0 has not yet been released. The final release should've been released before the end of 2009, but December 31 came, and no release. Luckily, the eComStation team has released a statement, saying that the final release is definitely around the corner.

"Microsoft has filed a second appeal in their XML patent case, claiming the original ruling could be dangerous for future patent cases. Last month, the software giant lost to tiny Canadian company i4i, and removed all infringing custom XML editing abilities from its Office 2003 and 2007 suite. Microsoft also paid USD 290 million in damages."

The libvirt library is a Linux API over the virtualization capabilities of Linux that supports a variety of hypervisors, including Xen and KVM, as well as QEMU and some virtualization products for other operating systems. This article explores libvirt, its use, and its architecture.

"Open source has dramatically reshaped the software development landscape. Yet is it enough to help propel the Web itself forward for the next decade? That's what Mozilla believes. After having been synonymous with open source for over a decade, thanks to its efforts behind the popular Firefox Web browser, Mozilla is now creating a new effort to help shaping the Internet's development using the same sorts of techniques that have made open source a success. The goal of the new Mozilla Drumbeat effort is to go beyond open source code to encourage and nurture projects that help to expand understanding and participation in the open Web. While Drumbeat is today only in its early stages of development, Mozilla is budgeting more than $1 million in funding for the effort - a project that it thinks could help to direct the very future of the Internet."

As inevitable as the tides rolling in: every time a new Windows version is released, someone with too much time on his hands tries to install it on extremely outdated hardware. Sure, it won't be usable by any standard whatsoever, but it's still a fun thing to do. Of course, Windows 7 couldn't lag behind.

Independent game company Wolfire write why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX. The article goes over a brief history and the standard and Microsoft's tactics with DirectX, and what this really means for developers. DirectX keeps games on Windows, and that's not a good thing--over half of the users for one of their games are not on Windows. The fact is that Microsoft will have you believe that DirectX is the better choice for gaming, but OpenGL has always had the best features, first, and in a consistent and transparent way. I'm particularly interested in the last couple of paragraphs where WebGL is mentioned because this is gaining traction with browser vendors and it would go directly against Microsoft's grain for them to implement it in IE--as they should. Will we see yet another generation of Microsoft ignoring the standards and going their own way with a 'WebDirectX'?

Quite a bit of enthusiasm seems to be building for ARM's upcoming processor for netbooks and other lightweight computing devices. The Cortex-A9 is promised to have substantially better performance than the current crop of AMD processors, and a video released by AMD ARM gives a pretty convincing picture that the Cortex-A9 will have comparable performance to the Atom. Watch the video after the jump.

So, today at CES, Palm held its big keynote thing. Palm's CEO, Jon Rubinstein, aided by several others, had a whole lot to talk about for just one hour, and boy, is this good stuff or what. We've got a boatload of stuff to talk about: two new phones exclusive to Verizon, tethering, video support, Flash 10, native application development, the official launch of the completely open app distribution model we've talked about before, and much more.

InfoWorld's Galen Gruman writes that the main potential game-changing attribute of the Nexus One - that Google is selling the device direct - does nothing to move the industry past carrier lock-in. "At first, I wanted to credit Google for making a tentative step in the direction of smartphone freedom. But that step is so tentative and ineffectual that frankly I think it's a cynical fig leaf covering the usual practices," Gruman writes. At issue is a political battle regarding walled gardens in the U.S. cellular market, a fight that will take years to result in any true consumer freedom. "The only way we'll ever get the ability to choose a smartphone and carrier independently is for the platform providers that count - Apple, Google, and RIM - to first develop only multiband 'world' smartphones and then refuse to sell their devices (or in Google's case, use its Android license to forbid the sale of devices) to carriers that block or interfere with device portability."

It would appear that Microsoft will finally take standards compliance in the browser world seriously, after dragging its feet for years. Back in November 2009, the Redmond giant already revealed that Internet Explorer 9 would come with CSS3 and HTML5 support, and now the cup runneth over, as Microsoft has requested to join the W3C's SVG Working Group.