The Camino team has announced the availability of Camino 2 Alpha 1, the native Mac OS X Gecko-based based browser.

Among its major improvements is the update to the most recent Gecko 1.9 rendering engine (the same used in Firefox 3) with all the performance enhancements.

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Flock has released the second major iteration of its eponymous Firefox-based browser, Flock.

Following its web services integration orientation, it adds support for MySpace accounts so you can track MySpace friends from Flock’s people sidebar.

There’s also better support for media enclosures commonly found in podcast and video podcast web feeds.

For the first time, there are a couple of fancy themes (MyBlue and Dublin) available for download (Mac and Windows only)at its add-ons repository.

But perhaps the most significant improvement for Flock users is that it is now based on the current Firefox 3.0.x code base which brings along all the many performance improvements it introduced last June.

Flock 2 is available in English only at this time, for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.

Microsoft has released the final version of Silverlight, its proprietary rich internet application platform that, according to Microsoft, is already present in about one fourth of all desktop computers.

It’s a 4.6 MB download available for Windows and Mac OS X from Microsoft Silverlight web site.

Just on the heels of Silverlight release, Adobe has released the final version of Flash Player 10 which introduces new 3D effects, advanced audio processing, more text layout control options and the possibility to use visual effects created with Adobe Pixel Bender, among other enhancements.

Adobe Flash Player 10 is available as a 1.8 MB download for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

More details at eWeek.

Ajaxian founders, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, are joining the Mozilla Corporation as full time employees to lead the new Developer Tools Labs, a project similar to Mozilla Labs that will focus on researching and developing “tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.”, said Mozilla’s Chris Beard in a blog post.

Dion, a former Google employee who describes the transition as “leaving one premier league football team for another”, said about the new group’s mission: “We are going to be experimenting, and thinking about how to make developers lives better in different ways, so we aren’t expecting to see traditional tools come out of this group. Also, we don’t want to do this alone. We want to involve the entire community which is one reason that we are so excited to kick off this work at Mozilla.”

On his personal blog, Ben commented: “I have immense respect for the crew at Moz; I couldn’t be more thrilled that they’ve invited us to join them and for the opportunity at hand.”

They have put up a two minutes video explaining their thoughts on the project.

I am very pleased to learn Mozilla is making tools a priority and taking some serious steps towards it. As I commented in the Summit earlier this year and on Mitchell’s Proposed 2010 goals, I believe Mozilla has done a pretty good job pulling the open web from the consumer side, with the goal of making the web an accessible medium no matter what language, device, operating system, browser, disability or any other user characteristic may be there. While there’s still a lot of work to be done, Mozilla is in good shape to start pushing the open web from the producer side: web developers.

While MathML, SVG, SMIL, Ogg Theora, Vorbis, XForms, ARIA, and lots of other standards address many web publishers’ needs, the tools available are not efficient enough, and Mozilla should pick this need.

It doesn’t have to start from scratch. Last year, Active State open sourced its Mozilla-based IDE (integrated development environment) as Open Komodo; and most recently, Disruptive Innovation’s Daniel Glazman has been teasing on a revamped Mozilla-based web editor called Blue Griffon, to succeed now defunct Nvu (a Windows build was made available today).

And it doesn’t even have to build the tools on its own. Mozilla has sponsored open source projects in the past including SQLite, Cairo, Miro, and could extend this giving to help making a decent Theora/Vorbis encoder, or making Inkscape more usable, just to mention a few projects that help enable an open web.

We’ll have to wait for details on what will be done but this could be a memorable day for the web.

A bug, found in yesterday’s Firefox 3.0.2 update, that prevents access to saved passwords that include international characters either in the web address the password is saved for, the login, or the password itself, has prompted planning for a quick Firefox update.

Mike Beltzner, Firefox lead, explains in a post to the mozilla.dev.planning group:

The symptom is that users who have password data stores with non-ASCII data saved as something other than UTF-8 (more common for people who have saved passwords on IDN domains or non en-US domains) will not be able to access their saved passwords or create any new saved passwords. There is no permanent dataloss, the saved data is just inaccessible. While this doesn’t affect all Firefox users, it is a significant regression and has triggered a fast-release Firefox 3.0.3 which will contain a single fix for this issue.

A fix is ready, and as soons as QA gives the go ahead, it will be available as Firefox 3.0.3 for users to update, most likely, some time next week.

In one of the most important announcements in recent years for the web browsers market, Google has announced that it is working on a new open source browser, called Google Chrome.

And from the creative way of announcing it in comic book form to a very nice feature mashup, Google means business with Chrome, announced for release later today in beta form.

Here’s a summary of what we can expect from Google Chrome:

- It is based on WebKit, the open source web engine that powers Safari. Google is also using WebKit for all web browser related operations of Android, its mobile devices platform.

- Tabs get a much more independent implementation: each will feature its own location bar (the omnibox, see below) and navigation buttons (a la Opera), but most importantly, they get their own process which means if one of them crashes it doesn’t take down the whole browser. It is easy to think a larger memory footprint as a consequence but Google notes that a second benefit is that when closing a tab or moving away to a different web site, it is easier to discard all used memory, preventing (or at least reducing) memory fragmentation which helps reduce the memory consumption. Internet Explorer 8 betas already implement the isolated tab crash aspect, but I’m not sure about the memory benefits.

- A task manager will allow users to know how much memory, CPU, and bandwidth is using each tab to easily spot the culprit of a slowdown.

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Mozilla Labs has announced the winners of the latest Mozilla contest, Extend Firefox 3, which awards the best new and updated extensions for Firefox 3, as well as a the best in the music category, sponsored by Last.fm.

Not surprisingly, among the winners is Pencil, developed by Duong Thanh An, a very capable extension that provides a complete environment for designing user interfaces in easy drag-and-drop fashion.

Another winner is HandyTags, by Remy Szymkowiak, which suggests tags for a web page based on your past used tag, author tags, delicious users’ and those suggested by its own keyword engine, and present them as buttons for one click tagging.

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