The new tab features come by way of a Mozilla project known as Tab Candy, which enables users to group and organize sets of tabs together. In Firefox 4, Tab Candy has been rebranded as Firefox Panorama as it heads for public release.

"'Tab Candy' is the internal name for the development project, and we expect that it will continue to function as such," Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, told InternetNews.com. "It's not really expressive for a consumer audience, though, so we selected a name that helps people understand that the feature gives them a panoramic view of their tabs."

Aza Raskin, the Mozilla developer who created the Tab Candy project, described the feature in a blog post as a way for users to see all their tabs and to quickly locate and switch between them.

"Tab Candy also lets you group tabs to organize your work flow. You can create a group for your vacation, work, recipes, games and social sites -- however it makes sense to you to group tabs," Raskin wrote. "When you switch to a grouped tab only the relevant tabs are shown in the tab bar, which helps you focus on what you want." ...

WOFF will enable Web developers to use a broad set of fonts that will be supported across all major browsers. The WOFF 1.0 standard has not yet been finalized, but according to the W3C, it is nearing completion.

"The W3C WebFonts Working Group does not expect to make any significant groundbreaking changes to the current WOFF 1.0 spec, but the development and review process will likely result in incremental changes and additional clarification made in the spec to improve its content quality," Vladimir Levantovsky, chairman of the W3C WebFonts Working Group and senior technology strategist at Monotype Imaging, told InternetNews.com.

Levantovsky noted that the development of the WOFF Recommendation follows the process that the W3C set up to ensure high technical quality while allowing time for review.

Moving forward, the W3C will be publishing additional materials and tools to help validate WOFF prior to the complete standard becoming official. ...

SpiderFX has become so popular that President and Founder William Craig has decided to release a scaled down version. SpiderFX Lite pulls together informational tools that are extremely valuable when learning to optimize a website to achieve better rankings. What started as a final project in graduate school for Craig at the University of Pittsburgh has developed into a tool WebpageFX uses to crawl websites on a regular basis. When it all began back in 2000 the tool simply indexed web pages -- now it serves as a unique selling point for WebpageFX.

"Due to popular demand and the success of (SpiderFX) we decided to create a scaled down version free to the public to offer valuable tips for anyone hoping to enhance their website," Craig said. "SpiderFX allows our clients to receive 30% more in return-on-investment because it takes WebpageFX a fraction of the time to generate and acquire valuable data including the analysis of page authority, domain authority, external links and social media all in one place," he adds....

Called the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 4, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has shipped a series of pre-beta releases of IE9 since March in an effort to get webmasters, site developers and designers to buy in early to the testing process.

Microsoft said the previous three platform previews were downloaded a total of 2.5 million times.

"Developers have had an earlier (and more frequently updated) look at the platform [and] with that early engagement, developer feedback has had a bigger impact than before," Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for IE, said in a post to Microsoft's IEBlog Wednesday.

Microsoft COO Kevin Turner told analysts gathered at the company's headquarters last week for its annual financial analysts meeting that the public beta of IE9 will begin in September.

The company released IE8 in March 2009. In that release, Microsoft attempted to bring IE into closer alignment with existing Web standards in response to repeated criticisms that earlier versions lacked such compliance. ...

Beyond being able to provide the immediate utility of abbreviating a lengthy URL, URL shortening services are able to provide users with a number of other useful features, such as clickthrough statistics, referrer details, and even information about link diffusion such as who else has mentioned it on Twitter....

The new release adds several new features and patches a number of bugs.

"With this release, we've introduced four brand new extensions and we've fixed many of the bugs that were reported in the previous version," Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) spokesperson Sean Laberee said in a post to the Microsoft Visual Studio blog Sunday.

"The number one feature request by far has been the ability to turn off the individual extensions in the Productivity Power Tools [so] in this release, we've added an extension which adds a category to Tools Options which allows you to toggle the extensions on/off and provides a single place to find the options for a particular extension," the post continued....

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 - code-named "CRM5" - includes stronger integration with Microsoft Outlook and Office, new visualization and collaboration features, and a more prominent role for partners.

Microsoft made the announcement at its Worldwide Partner Conference today. The software giant also said that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will be available in 40 markets and 41 languages by the end of the year.

The company will launch Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace in September, promising an easier way for partners to market and distribute solutions to Microsoft Dynamics customers. Customers will be able to search for applications and solution extensions from Microsoft and its partners for their CRM and ERP implementations. Dynamics Marketplace will be integrated within CRM 2011 so customers can search for applications from within their CRM environments.

As part of the October launch of the Microsoft Partner Network, companies registered in the network can receive 250 seats of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online at no charge for internal use.

CRM 2011 will "take full advantage of native Outlook functionality, including previews and conditional formatting," Microsoft said, while a new contextual CRM Ribbon for Outlook and browser clients will offer consistent Microsoft Office navigation....

Cayenne provides object relational mapping (ORM) as well as caching and persistence features for Java applications. With the new release, the Apache project is enhancing performance and making the framework easier to use.

"Cayenne is used in a number of production installations in many kinds of applications -- really any type of Java application that needs a robust database access," Apache Cayenne Vice President Andrus Adamchik told InternetNews.com.

Among the big sites that use Cayenne is NHL.com, the online home of the National Hockey League.

From a performance standpoint, Adamchik explained that concurrency has been improved greatly in Cayenne 3 over the Cayenne 2 release, which first debuted in 2006....

The latest platform preview adds support for HTML5 audio, video, and canvas tags along with support for ECMAScript, according to a post on Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) IEblog Wednesday afternoon by Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer.

While IE9 hasn't even begun official beta testing yet, Microsoft's central focus on the next version of its browser so far is standards compatibility, which is likely to make life easier for Web site builders and designers when the product is finally released.

"With today's update to the platform preview, we have also updated the IE Testing Center, adding another 118 test cases which we are contributing to the appropriate web standards working groups at the W3C. In addition, we have written 1309 JavaScript test cases and are making those all available to the web development community," Hachamovitch's post said.

That includes scoring 83 out of 100 points on the Acid3 standards compatibility test -- up from 68 in PP2, which shipped in early May. In order to actually pass the set of tests embodied in Acid3, however, IE9 needs to score 100 out of 100, so the browser still has a ways to go.

Microsoft released PP1 in mid-March at the company's MIX10 Conference in Las Vegas. The company released IE8, the current version of IE, in March, 2009.

It hasn't even made it to beta test yet, but IE9 has already come in for its share of controversy....

Adobe's popular Flash format is widely used to display video and animated pages on the Web, but Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has refused to accept the software for its iPhone and iPad products over what CEO Steve Jobs has said are persistent security and performance concerns. Jobs has also repeatedly claimed Adobe hasn't moved quickly enough to deliver an acceptable version of Flash for mobile devices.

With booming iPhone and iPad (three million sold in 80 days since its debut) sales, the lack of Flash support doesn't seem to be costing Apple any sales. In dismissing Flash, Jobs said Apple is betting on the emerging HTML 5 Web content standard for bringing new media applications to portable devices.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is also a strong backer of HTML 5, but said Flash is a better solution for now in many use cases.

Graphics chip maker Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) said it's banking on Flash to bring high definition and other rich media content to new devices based on its Tegra processor....

With the RoR 3 release, the open source development framework is being overhauled to provide more modularity and greater power compared to the current RoR 2 framework.

"We just spent a year and a half refactoring the whole thing, so there is a huge amount of internal improvement which mostly manifests itself as improvements in plugins," Yehuda Katz, a member of the Ruby on Rails core team and Rails framework architect at Engine Yard, told InternetNews.com.

Katz added that the framework overall was improved, with better dependency management and API improvements. Katz explained that the first year of the Rails 3 effort was largely consumed with refactoring the Rails codebase.

"When I say refactoring, what I mean is the traditional definition, which is making changes to the code without changing the functionality," Katz said. "We've made huge changes to the Rails internals without changing for the most part, how users are expecting to use the framework."

Katz noted that Rails has always been flexible, allowing developers to do whatever they want. With Rails 3, Katz said that the core development team looked at the whole ecosystem to see what people were really doing. The next step was then to expose better, more explicit and supportable ways to do those things that everyone is doing. ...

The Eclipse Foundation study compiled responses from 1,696 developers and provides insights into current open source development practices. Among the findings in the Eclipse report is that developers are increasingly turning to Linux as a platform for both deployment and development.

For the 2010 report, 32.7 percent of survey respondents reported that they used Linux as their development operating system. The 2010 figure is an increase over the 2009 study when 26.9 percent of respondents identified Linux as their development platform operating system of choice. Overall, Windows remains the top development platform in Eclipse's study at 58.3 percent, which is a decline from the 64.3 percent reported for 2009.

Among the respondents that use Linux for development, Ubuntu was the leading distribution at 18.3 percent followed by Fedora at only 4.7 percent. The increasing use of Linux by Eclipse developers isn't necessarily the result of a drive by Eclipse towards the Linux desktop.

"I actually think it is more a sign that Linux is gaining adoption on the desktop," Ian Skerrett, director of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. "Eclipse is improving the Linux tools experience, but I don't think this drives the decision on which operating system developers use on their desktop." ...

Microsoft announced the CTP during a keynote speech by Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Division at the giant technology conference Computex being held in Taiwan.

Microsoft has more than one platform that it promotes for embedded use, including Windows 7 Embedded. However, a full-sized version of embeddable Windows may have too large a memory footprint for a given device, or may simply not be appropriate for a particular application. That's where Windows Embedded Compact 7 comes in.

"Windows Embedded Compact 7 is the next generation of Microsoft's widely-used Windows Embedded CE platform, which provides OEMs with the tools and technologies to deliver specialized devices," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.

The new version provides links to "corporate e-mail, calendar, and contacts over enterprise networks through Microsoft AirSync and Microsoft Exchange," according to a statement from the company....

According to a poll conducted by analyst firm Redmonk and sponsored by dynamic language vendor ActiveState, over half of the developers surveyed have deployment plans for cloud applications within the next 12 months. Those cloud deployments are likely to be a hybrid of both public and private cloud platforms, according to 37 percent of respondents.

In terms of the languages used by developers, nearly 80 percent noted that they were using JavaScript, while both Python and Perl came in at 47 percent, PHP at 42 percent and Ruby at 31 percent.

"This confirms a lot of our basic hunches that dynamic languages are just increasing their usage in standard programming applications and especially in newer development such as the cloud application space," Jeff Hobbs, director of engineering at ActiveState, told InternetNews.com.

While many developers are headed to the cloud, that's not a conclusion that Hobbs expects that all dynamic language developers will take, however. He noted that nearly 43 percent of respondents had no plans yet for cloud development in the next 24 months.

"You think about the development cycle that a large enterprise has -- they can go anywhere from one year to three- to five-year cycles," Hobbs said. "Our question was asked with a two-year timeframe. So if you have people that have just released applications, it might still be three to five years before they can assess the value of the advantages that might be presented in the cloud." ...