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Mozilla just wrapped up its Extend Firefox 3 contest and, after reviewing over 100 entries, its team of judges has announced the winners for Best Add-ons, Best Updated Add-on, and Best Music Add-on. In the Best New Add-on category, the winners were Pencil by Dương Thành An, Tagmarks by Felipe Tassario Gomes, and HandyTag by Rémi Szymkowiak, while the Best Music Add-on category was won by Fire.fm from Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños.

The contest was meant to showcase extensions that made use of the new capabilities Mozilla introduced in Firefox 3 and managed to combine this with excellent usability and the use of open standards.
Grand Prize Winners

pencil_firefox.jpgPencil, one of the three Grand Prize winners, is an easy to use tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming, which makes uses of Firefox’s SVG support for rendering and scripting. It’s obviously not the most exciting of applications, but it works as advertised and is a great tool for anybody who needs to draw up a GUI prototype quickly.

tagmarks_firefox.pngThe second Grand Prize winner, Tagmarks, adds a set of icons to your URL bar that allows you to easily add tags to your bookmarks or to quickly bookmark and tag a page at the same time. Out of all the plugins in the contest, this one is probably the most immediately useful. Adding tags to a bookmark can be useful, but few people make use of this capability. Tagmarks also allows you to safe your links to Delicious in addition to your local bookmarks.

The third Grand Prize winner is also a tagging extension: HandyTag. HandyTag suggests tags for your bookmarks based on the tags you have already used, tags given by Delicious users, and tags HandyTag’s keyword extractor suggests.
Fire.fm

firefox_firefm.pngFire.fm, the best new music add-on, gives you easy access to your stations on our favorite streaming music site, Last.fm. Fire.fm works exactly as advertised and provides a nice way to play music through Last.fm without having to keep a browser window open. You can also easily access your favorite stations by just typing in a few letters into the URL bar.

 

DDR3 memory promises a power consumption reduction of 30% compared to current commercial DDR2 modules due to DDR3’s 1.5 V supply voltage, compared to DDR2’s 1.8 V or DDR’s 2.5 V. The 1.5 V supply voltage works well with the 90 nanometer fabrication technology used for most DDR3 chips. Some manufacturers further propose using “dual-gate” transistors to reduce leakage of current.^[1]

According to JEDEC^[2] the maximum recommended voltage is 1.575 volts and should be considered the absolute maximum when memory stability is the foremost consideration, such as in servers or other mission critical devices. In addition, JEDEC states that memory modules must withstand up to 1.975 volts before incurring permanent damage, although they are not required to function correctly at that level.

The main benefit of DDR3 comes from the higher bandwidth made possible by DDR3’s 8 bit deep prefetch buffer, in contrast to DDR2’s 4 bit prefetch buffer or DDR’s 2 bit buffer.

DDR3 modules can transfer data at the effective clock rate of 800–1600 MHz using both rising and falling edges of a 400–800 MHz I/O clock. In comparison, DDR2’s current range of effective data transfer rate is 400–800 MHz using a 200–400 MHz I/O clock, and DDR’s range is 200–400 MHz based on a 100–200 MHz I/O clock. To date, the graphics card market has been the driver of such bandwidth requirements, where fast data transfer between framebuffers is required.

DDR3 prototypes were announced in early 2005. Products in the form of motherboards are appearing on the market as of mid-2007^[3] based on Intel’s P35 “Bearlake” chipset and memory DIMMs at speeds up to DDR3-1600 (PC3-12800).^[4] AMD’s roadmap indicates their own adoption of DDR3 in 2008.

DDR3 DIMMs have 240 pins, the same number as DDR2, and are the same size, but are electrically incompatible and have a different key notch location.^[5] DDR3 SO-DIMMs have 204 pins.^[6]

   Wikipedia.

 

A fresh take on the browser

At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends - all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff - the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning - Google Chrome is far from done. We’ve released this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and we’ll continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

But enough from us. The best test of Google Chrome is to try it yourself.

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