Developers from Mozilla released the first official beta version of Firefox 3. Although beta 1 is far from a finished product, first reviews suggests that speed and memory improvements in Firefox 3 beta 1 make it worth the upgrade. Firefox 3 includes the new Gecko 1.9 rendering engine which include the open source Cairo rendering framework and features heavily refactored reflow algorithms that improve Firefox layout functionality and resolve some long-standing CSS bugs. Beta 1 features a new bookmark-management system called Places, new downloads panel, new star icon in Location bar with some changes, advanced add-on manager or installing and maintaining third-party plug-ins. Also FF3 comes with improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.Tests made with this Beta 1 showed that Firefox 3 runs significantly faster than FF2, it consume just 60MB of RAM memory and frees CPU usage. Page loads are quicker and Ajax-heavy sites like GMail refresh in breeze. Enough reasons for eager awaiting for final product!
Officials from Internet phone company Skype waited one whole month to publicly release security patch that will remove vulnerability that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Skype. User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page. The vulnerability was patched in the public release of Skype 3.6 for Windows meaning that all versions of Skype for Windows updated or installed as of November 15 include the patch. It is strongly recommended to upgrade your Skype to the latest version.
Microsoft releases important updates for this month. On the list are tree critical and four important updates we should take care of. All of them involve applications including Internet Explorer, DirectX, DirectShow, and Windows Media Format Runtime. Five of these updates could allow remote code execution and another two allows an elevation of privileges. Read more details on 
F-Secure reports that two updates of OpenOffice.org and VLC media player are recommended since some potentially serious vulnerabilities and exploits has been discovered.
Researchers at Symantec’s Security reported that the company had seen an active exploit for the vulnerability in Apple’s QuickTime that could lead to users downloading Trojan software. Exploit code was found on a compromised porn site that redirects users to a site hosting malicious software called “Downloader.” Downloader is a Trojan that causes compromised machines to download other malicious software from the Internet. Symantec rated Downloader as very low risk. No patch is currently available for the vulnerability which affects version 7.x and it is advised to run Web browsers at the highest security settings possible, disable Apple QuickTime as a registered RTSP protocol handler, and filter outgoing activity over common RTSP ports, including TCP port 554 and UDP ports 6970-6999.
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Florida based Devil Mountain Systems got the chance to test new beta version of Windows XP Service Pack 3. As report says new SP3 will boost the general performance of system for 10 percent. Obviously this will be must have update. This is another blow to Vista development of it’s SP1 which won’t offer much in the way of noticeable fixes, and certainly won’t speed things up. If you’ve been disappointed with the performance of Windows Vista don’t expect much from SP1.
