Yesterday, after several weeks of delay due to continued heavy crash counts, Mozilla released public beta 7 of its Firefox 4 browser, with at least three more public beta cycles planned before the end of the year. Beta 7 is the first public release to contain the device Mozilla calls JaegerMonkey, which hybridizes the optimized TraceMonkey engine introduced in Firefox 3.5 with a new just-in-time native code compiler.

The organization touted Beta 7 as being three to five times faster than the stable Firefox 3.6.12 in executing well-known benchmark suites, including the organization's new Kraken suite, and Google's V8 test battery. In a newly revised series of tests conducted this morning by Ingenus LLC, there were limited instances of 300% acceleration, but not across the board. Firefox 4 Beta 7 posted speed scores that were 2.38 times those of Firefox 3.6.12 overall.

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[Editor's Note: The survey below requires JavaScript. If you have disabled JavaScript or can't see the embedded survey, please use this link. You can choose up to two answers.]

In January, I posted "Microsoft Office is obsolete, or soon will be," which generated heated comment debate and accusations of linkbaiting. Never. I'm always serious about this stuff, and I tend to be right. Today, Gartner added a little oomph to my assertion, claiming that within four years, 20 percent of business users will replace e-mail with social networking services. Really? I think Gartner is being a wee bit conservative.

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Ping, the social music service introduced as a part of iTunes 10 in September, can now be linked with Twitter, the popular microblogging service announced Thursday.

Starting today, Ping users can connect their iTunes Ping account to their Twitter account and share their listening activity in their Twitter feed. Tweets sent from Ping include the album and artist information, album cover, song preview, and a link to the iTunes store to buy the music mentioned.

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Mozilla Wednesday released a significant update to the beta of its Firefox 4 browser. The update adds a new JavaScript JIT compiler, going by the name of JägerMonkey, and improves the browser's support for hardware acceleration, OpenType fonts, and WebGL 3D graphics (the technology used to create an HTML5 version of Quake II back in April.)

Additionally, the latest beta includes a stable add-ons API, so developers can finally update their add-ons to Firefox 4.

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RIM's PlayBook will be introduced in the spring of next year and at a price point below $500, its co-CEO Jim Balsillie confirmed to several news outlets on Wednesday. It seems clear RIM intends to compete with Apple's iPad in one of tech's fastest growing sectors by pricing it close to the now top-selling tablet.

RIM's tablet plans surfaced in the first part of this year, when Betanews was able to confirm details on the device at that time through company sources. RIM itself unveiled the device in September, naming it the PlayBook.

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For years, Industry researchers have been saying that the drop in price for pocketable technology will cause more people to switch from simple "voice and text" phones to sophisticated smartphones. Now, after four years of smartphone sales growth in the neighborhood of 30-50% per annum (source: IDC, Gartner, ABI research) an explosion in smartphone sales is now taking place. However, in emerging markets, it's a different story.

Market analysts at Gartner Inc. today published their worldwide mobile phone sales numbers for the third quarter of 2010; and smartphones, which includes BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Symbian, and Windows Phone devices, has grown 96% since the third quarter of 2009. These results sync very closely with the shipment figures published by IDC last week, which tracked an 89.5% annual growth in the number of smartphone shipped to retailers.

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Sprint said Wednesday that it would begin offering an iPod touch case that would allow users to connect to the carrier's 3G network on November 14. Manufactured by ZTE, the "Peel" would include built in Wi-Fi, which would allow not only the iPod touch to connect but also another wireless device.

The Peel will retail for $79.99 and require a $29.99 per month data plan, which is a month-to-month agreement. 1GB of data would be included. The device is the second announced for the iOS platform: in April, the company touted a 4G "case" for the iPad.

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For the last 72 hours, reviews of a new browser called RockMelt have been turning up all over my feeds, and now that the initial hype of the limited beta is dying down, I thought I'd unlock my tongue and talk about it.

Betanews readers have proven time and again to be die-hard browser connoisseurs, and after spending a day playing with the beta of Chromium-based RockMelt, I almost didn't want to write about it. The entire browser, from its concept to its code, is pretty contrived.

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Amazon on Tuesday announced it will begin paying 70% royalties to magazine and newspaper publishers who release their periodicals on the Amazon Kindle starting in December. The move follows a similar royalty increase Amazon made in June, when the company began offering a 70% option for books published through its Digital Text Platform (DTP.)

Coincidentally, the company today launched the Beta of the Kindle Publishing for Periodicals tool, which is similar to DTP, but lets publishers add content and preview Kindle formatting prior to making their titles available on the E-reader.

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Google on Tuesday announced yet another upgrade to its search results pages intended to provide more information so that users don't haphazardly click away: Instant Previews. These previews are as simple as a small magnifying glass icon next to a search result, which users can click upon to see a visual snapshot of the linked site. These snapshots may also include search terms highlighted in orange where they appear in the resulting page. That's about it.

It's an understandable concept, and Google said on Tuesday that the feature increased users' satisfaction with search results by about 5% in internal testing.

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Samsung today announced a new Galaxy S smartphone called the Continuum, which adds a secondary "ticker" screen beneath the main one, that can be activated simply by gripping the phone.

Not unlike Barnes & Noble's first generation Nook e-reader, there's a 1.8" almost-always-on touch panel mounted beneath the Continuum's 3.7" Super AMOLED screen. The ticker screen can be used to show RSS updates, incoming and missed messages, be used to launch widgets, or control calling and media player functions while the main screen is turned off.

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Perhaps he knows something you don't.

I've been asking myself the question all weekend, and now I'd like to pose it to you. I ask Betanews readers to respond to the poll below and to answer in comments; please do both. You can choose up to two answers. I wanted to leave an option for your own reasons, but I worry that trolls would be obnoxious. Sorry. If readers respond favorably, I'll do more polls like this. The poll expires on October 16, 2010 at Midnight PT. Embedded poll below requires JavaScript. If you have disabled JavaScript or otherwise can't see the poll, please go to this link.

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U.S. Wireless network operators AT&T and T-Mobile began selling their first three Windows Phone 7 devices today: the Samsung Focus, HTC Surround, and HTC HD7. These are the first of ten Windows Phone 7 launch devices to be made available to United States customers.

Today is an important day in the life of Microsoft's new mobile operating system; it's the first day it steps out into the U.S. smartphone market where Google's Android and Apple's iOS operating systems have been gaining momentum.

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Betanews reader Robert Johnson wants to know the answer to the question, which he asked me on Friday night. His short e-mail "I'm Confused About Microsoft" got me to reflecting again about Microsoft's performance under Steve Ballmer's executive leadership and the stock's moribund consistently sub-$30 over the last 10 years. Microsoft is a hugely profitable company that likely will be for many years, so why won't industry and Wall Street analysts and investors give Microsoft a break?

Before getting to Johnson's e-mail and my response to it, some context: Ballmer ascended to the chief executive's position in January 2000. In October of that year, Microsoft announced fiscal 2001 first quarter income of $2.58 billion from $5.8 billion revenue. An accounting change affected earnings, which were 46 cents a share without it and 40 cents a share with it. By comparison, for fiscal 2010 first quarter, Microsoft reported operating income of $7.12 billion and net income of $5.41 billion, or 62 cents a share, from $16.2 billion revenue. Assuming income in the past means "operating," Microsoft's percentage of income derived from revenue is statistically equivalent for the recent quarter and the one 10 years ago.

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Skyfire, the mobile Web browser that has made a sensation on all the mobile platforms it's launched upon, will be available again in the iOS App Store after "selling out" five hours after it was made available.

Skyfire has been available for more than two years on Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, and Android, and on all platforms it has been heralded as a triumph. Thanks to server-side rendering, recompression, and transcoding of Web content, Skyfire is able to bring content to mobile devices without the need for certain codecs (such as Flash and Silverlight) on the user's phone.

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