PaulSpoerry.com

Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple’s Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2.

Firefox 3 is slated for full release in June of this year. Unless there’s some major unforeseen bugs I cannot see them missing that time frame for release. If you’re already using Firefox 3, be sure to type about:robots into the address bar to discover a fun little Easter egg. For a detailed list of what Firefox 3 has to offer, check out its release notes.

Download RC1 now

I love the concept of UAC. I’m sure it’ll make the OS more secure for people like my mom. For power users, you’ll soon want to just shut the damned thing off. I know it has good intentions but it just gets in the way sometimes. I was always under the impression that UAC was either on or off, and that if you turned it off you lost some of the security built into IE7. Turns out the folks over at TweakVista have written up an article on how to disable UAC, but only for the administrator accounts. That’s pretty slick, now it won’t get in my way, but it will prompt my wife/kid/mother/etc and help keep them safe.

Follow these steps to disable UAC only for administrators:

1. Click on the Start button and type in secpol.msc and hit Enter.
2. Expand Local Policies and then Security Options.
3. Scroll to the bottom and locate “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode”.
4. Right click on this setting and select Properties.
5. Set the value to Elevate without prompting.
6. Reboot.

As soon as you do this, the security center will start barking at you that UAC is disabled. I guess they intend to annoy you one way or another. You can of course disable the security center alerts as well. Click on the alert in the system tray, then click Change the way Security Center alerts me and select ”I do not want notification messages from Security Center”.