OStatic

A recent blog entry by Michael Arrington has stirred up some discussion around the web. Basically, it's a plea that someone design and build a $200 open-source web tablet: minimal specs, Linux, booting right into Firefox, that you can just pick up and use to browse the web with.

It may seem as if the Firefox 3 release cycle went on forever, especially if you hopped on board with the earliest betas. Many of us are still catching our breath after the version 3 release, waiting for add-ons to be updated and tweaking our preferences. But don't rest too long: Firefox 3.1 is right around the corner.

Google Browser Sync was a reasonably popular Firefox 2.0 add-on from Google Labs. Like Mozilla's Weave (which is still having some early teething pains), Browser Sync was designed for people using Firefox on more than one machine, keeping bookmarks, history, and saved passwords the same on those machines. But you'll notice the past tense: for whatever reason, Google decided not to update Browser Sync for Firefox 3.0, and discontinued the project last month.

Today's official release of Firefox 3 was widely anticipated. The Mozilla folks spent considerable time promoting Download Day - we covered it, as well as a host of other outlets up to and including Time magazine. Unfortunately, someone apparently didn't do enough load planning: as of right now, around an hour after the software was released, all of the official download sites seem to be down from sheer overload.

One of the latest reports from Forrester, Enterprise Desktop and Web 2.0/SAAS Platform Trends, 2007 is starting to make its way around media outlets on the web. The Forrester folks tracked software trends in major categories across 50,000 users month-by-month, and now their conclusions are out. Depending on how you look at it, they're either good or bad for open source.