OStatic

Microsoft search to be powered by open source. The company's new Kumo search technology is filled with open source.

What you should expect from Fedora 11. Here's a screenshot-driven tour of it, scheduled for release on May 26th.

Beyond Firefox: 10 other great Linux browsers. Have you tried Midori, Seamonkey, and Arora?

Novell throws support behind Moblin Linux for Intel Atom netbooks, devices. Eschewing its own SUSE Linux, Novell will back Intel's Moblin Linux for netbooks and smartphones.?

There are many reasons to love the open source approach. The events chronicled in an article on NetworkWorld surrounding an exploit affecting Firefox outlines, quite elegantly, how open code outwardly appears risky, and -- well, wide open -- and how that same quality generates faster fixes and stronger applications.

A security researcher discovered that Firefox is vulnerable to remote memory corruption, enabling attackers to execute malicious (or at least very much unauthorized) code within the context of the browser. While security researchers spend countless hours searching out bugs and vulnerabilities, it's not usually the case that the offending attack finds its way into the public eye. Yesterday, however, this little exploit was published on several security sites. The vulnerability affects Firefox versions 3.0 through 3.0.7, on all platforms. In less than 24 hours, developers issued a patch for the vulnerability, to be included in next week's 3.0.8 release.

Songbird, Mozilla's cross-platform media player, got a nice update this week. Aside from a few great performance enhancements like reduced CPU usage during playback, a smaller Mac download size, and configurable library caching, this point release has some dandy new features as well.

Last month, I took a brief tour of the pre-release Songbird music player. Songbird is a cross-platform media player based on Mozilla code. This week, the Songbird project released the finalized 1.0 version of the player.

The pre-release versions of Songbird featured iPod support, Last.fm scrobbling, SHOUTcast radio, plugin extensions, and a localized concert discovery service. The 1.0 release adds one more feature to its default list -- MashTape -- and turns an ambitious eye toward the future.