Fennec Alpha 4 for Windows Mobile

Mozilla announced today the release of the fourth alpha flavor of their mobile browser for handsets powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, namely Fennec. According to the company, the mobile solution is based on the same browser engine as the desktop Firefox 3.6, though it features great changes under the hood, and with intensive optimizations for mobile phones.

The release notes of Fennec Alpha 4 for Windows Mobile include:
> Improved interactions with the software keyboard
> Fixed painting artifacts from panning
> Faster .exe installer option
> More responsive "fuzzy" zoom
> Option to become default browser
> Opening downloads from download manager fixed
> Password echoing
> Improved panning/scrolling performance
> Improved start-up time
> Numerous bug fixes
> Improved painting performance
> Improved UI polish
> Improved kinetic panning with directional locking
> Ability to scroll frames
> Improved zooming support

The application has been designed to work with all Windows Mobile Professional 6.0 or higher handsets, and can work great on phones that include 256Mb of RAM or greater, ARMv6 800MHz, and 32Mb of free storage. According to the company, the application has been tested on HTC Touch Pro, Samsung Omnia II, and the Acer neoTouch devices.

Windows 7 PCs May Freeze When a Blu-ray Disc Is Inserted

You have a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Explorer may stop responding when you insert a recordable Blu-ray disc (BD-R) into the Blu-ray drive on this computer, the software giant explained. “This problem may occur after you install the universal drive format (UDF) file system driver (Udfs.sys) update.”
In the first half of December 2009, Microsoft released an update for the Universal Disk Format (UDF) file system driver (Udfs.sys) for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2. The refresh in question was designed to resolve a variety of issues related to Windows 7’s Udfs.sys. Apparently, while it indeed dealt with the problems associated with Udfs.sys, the update also managed to introduce new problems, causing Windows 7 computers to freeze when a recordable Blu-ray Disc is inserted in the BD-R drive.