Broadband Advisor

Firefox 3.1 may only be a point release -- from 3.0 to 3.1 -- but its just-released Beta 2 version is a good indication that the final release will be a must-have upgrade for anyone using Firefox.

YouTube appears poised for an image makeover, with a pair of announcements this week promising less sex and more symphony. YouTube's new Symphony Orchestra will accomplish the latter, offering classical musicians worldwide a chance to perform in an "online orchestra" packed with some of the industry's biggest names. As for the former, a set of new standards will attempt to keep adult-oriented content away -- or at least make it slightly harder to find.

This week saw the battle of the Web 2.0 conferences, with 70 entrepreneurs presenting their ideas at Demo Fall 2008 in San Diego and 50 more making their pitch at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Some of the ideas are little more than a glimmer in a coder's eye, but others are already doing business, are in private beta, or are soon to launch. Here's a selection of our favourites.

You know the old cliche, a picture is worth a thousand words? Turns out that pictures have been deeply undervalued: A single photo can cost you your reputation, your job, even your freedom -- if you post it online.

Google's Chrome is a stripped-down, no-nonsense browser. Unlike Firefox, there isn't an array of add-ons available to change its behavior. So at first glance, you might think there's not a lot you can do to hack Chrome or bend it to your will.

Google's just-released Chrome takes the same approach to browser design that Google takes to its home page -- stripped-down, fast and functional, with very few bells and whistles.

The US Air Force is using Web 2.0 technologies to better support its missions despite wariness about security, a civilian technology official of the service said last week.

Yahoo's Flickr unit reported yesterday that the latest update to the photo sharing Web site went live with 9 changes made by three of its developers. The "deployment" was the 36th new release in a week where 627 changes were made by 21 developers.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

Given the short history of mashups in the enterprise, IT departments likely don't entirely understand the technology's role in the business. Organizations can fall victim to mashup mistakes given the markedly different approach necessary to deploy and maintain them across the organization.

Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now, so get with the program: It's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and I'll show you how to hack them all.