Mozilla has pushed out a Firefox developer preview that runs Adobe Flash and other plug-ins as a separate process, hoping to prevent crashing plug-ins from crashing the browser proper.

Mozilla’s new developer preview is the second “pre-release” version of the open source outfit’s Gecko 1.9.3 rendering engine. Today’s official Firefox offering - version 3.6 - uses Gecko 1.9.2.

Mozilla is brewing a new extension to the Firefox JavaScript engine, hoping to fix a flaw in its setup that occasionally sends the open source browser back to 2007.

Dubbed JaegerMonkey, the new extension will operate alongside the much-ballyhooed TraceMonkey - an extension that debuted with Firefox 3.5 in June of last year - interpreting JavaScript code unsuited to “tracing.” With Mozilla’s current setup, code that can’t be optimized with TraceMonkey is kicked back to an aging interpreter that runs JavaScript at speeds reminiscent of the dark ages before Firefox 3.5 or Google Chrome.

The JaegerMonkey project is only about two months old - and it’s a ways from testing in a Firefox beta build - but a blog post from Mozilla programmer David Anderson says it’s already providing a 30 per cent performance boost over that old interpreter on x86 machines.

Alarm bells have started ringing inside the former Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris community over the project’s potential future with database giant Oracle.

OpenSolaris developers have complained they’ve been “completely ignored” by Oracle despite reaching out, with their questions over the project’s future going unanswered.

Project member Peter Tribble blogged here following an open letter to Oracle by OpenSolaris developer and evangelist Ben Rockwood pleading for information about what’s in store for Solaris on February 2.

Rockwood’s appeal came days after Oracle’s high-profile strategy announcement in January that outlined the company’s product plans with Sun, that failed to mention OpenSolaris bar one reference on a slide.

Oracle and former Sun executives instead focused their Solaris talk on the paid version of the Unix operating system that spawned the free and open OpenSolaris project, and its future in joint server, storage, and relational database Exadata appliance.

OpenOffice 3.2 is available for download.

Improvements in the latest release of the open source office suite include faster start-ups, improved compatibility with other office programs, and several new features (with special attention to the Calc spreadsheet program.)

At the same time, the OpenOffice.org team is celebrating its tenth anniversary and a claimed total 300 million downloads of the office software since its initial launch. They say that just over a year since its launch, OpenOffice 3 has logged over one third of those downloads from the central server alone.

According to the OpenOffice team, 3.2’s Calc and Writer components have reduced their start-up time by 46 per cent from version 3.0.

Version 3.2 also boasts improved compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standards as well as the ability to open password-protected Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

Two experimental add-ons, Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader and all versions of Master Filer were found to contain Trojan code aimed at Windows users. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Master Filer contained Win32.Bifrose.32.Bifrose Trojan. Both add-ons have been disabled on AMO.

Impact to users

If a user installs one of these infected add-ons, the trojan would be executed when Firefox starts and the host computer would be infected by the trojan. Uninstalling these add-ons does not remove the trojan from a user’s system. Users with either of these add-ons should uninstall them immediately. Since uninstalling these extensions does not remove the trojan from a user’s system, an antivirus program should be used to scan and remove any infections.

Facebook is expected to unveil changes to PHP, the language that helped make the social networking site a success - along with millions of other web sites.

SD Times has outed the planned change here. Facebook wouldn’t provide details when contacted by The Reg but said it would make more details available Tuesday morning, Pacific time.

The changes have been described as either a re-write of the PHP runtime or a compiler for PHP.

A change to PHP would be Facebook’s latest donation to the language, which has also had contributions from Microsoft and the former Sun Microsystems over the years.

A celebrated Android hacker has released software that greatly enhances Google’s Nexus One smartphone, endowing it for the first time with the same coveted multitouch features that grace Apple’s iPhone.

Operating under the moniker Cyanogen, the hacker released the updates on Wednesday. The hack came as Google formally made the Nexus One operating system, Android version 2.1, open source, paving the way for much more advanced modifications of the phone.

Introduced and trademarked by Apple, multitouch gives users the ability to use two or more fingers directly on a device screen to enlarge images and carry out similar actions. While it’s been on the iPhone since day one, certain aspects of the technology were noticeably absent from official releases of Android devices. Google axed the feature at the request of Apple, an unnamed person has told Venture Beat.

Michael Widenius, the creator of the MySQL database, said he is turning his vocal campaign against Oracle’s planned takeover of Sun Microsystems to China and Russia because the European Commission appears set to clear the deal.

The Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service last week continued its review of the $7 billion deal, asking for input from interested parties, and the Chinese Ministry of Commerce has yet to approve the deal.

“They are powerful, self-confident and open-source-friendly countries and they have every right and opportunity to do a better job on this than the EU,” Widenius said in a statement.

Reports that the Linux netbook is dead or dying are incorrect, at least globally, according to an analyst firm.

Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.

That number contradicts third-party market figures, trumpeted by Microsoft, that showed Linux shipping on as few as 4% of U.S. netbooks.

“Just because you live in the United States, don’t assume that everything is on Windows,” Orr said.

Orr said Ubuntu is a popular choice on netbooks, though he declined to confirm that with any hard statistics.

The EFF is reaching out for help after a company called Volomedia got the Patent Office to grant them exclusive rights to ‘a method for providing episodic media’ that could threaten the community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners.

‘It’s a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years,’ writes Rebecca Jeschke. ‘Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners.’ To bust this patent, EFF is looking for additional ‘prior art’ — evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use (PDF) before November 19, 2003. ‘In particular, we’re looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes

Google has released a new programming language. named Go, as open source under a BSD license. The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop. Ars Technica’s writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in: “For example, there is a shorthand syntax for variable assignment that supports simple type inference. It also has anonymous function syntax that lets you use real closures.

There are some Python-like features too, including array slices and a map type with constructor syntax that looks like Python’s dictionary concept. … One of the distinguishing characteristics of Go is its unusual type system. It eschews some typical object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance. You can define struct types and then create methods for operating on them. You can also define interfaces, much like you can in Java. In Go, however, you don’t manually specify which interface a class implements. … Parallelism is emphasized in Go’s design. The language introduces the concept of ‘goroutines’ which are executed concurrently. … The language provides a ‘channel’ mechanism that can be used to safely pass data in and out of goroutines.”

Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications.

The SDK comes complete with samples and tools to develop Facebook applications in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, and WinForms. It also features the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples.

There are currently other libraries available that allow Facebook developers to develop with other technologies, such as JavaScript, PHP, ActionScript, and the iPhone. There are a variety of others as well, which can be seen here, but these are the ones that Facebook officially provides support for.