Sep 4, 2006 News Wire

With the plenitude of services being launched to fully customize the page displayed by your browser when you first launch it, this insightful look back at the history of such services may contain some valuable lessons.

Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 is out. Time to start compatibility-testing your sites and reporting any bugs that may affect you.

Version 0.6 of the Mephisto Blogging and Content Management System has been released. The new version includes revamped asset management and search features. Mephisto is written for Ruby on Rails (specifically, Edge Rails).

British Airways integrates its online ticket sales with Google Earth (no, not Google Maps—Google Earth!).

Venerable PHP CMS Drupal is gearing up for a major new release. The final release of Drupal 5.0.0 is at least two months away by current estimates, but development of new features is now frozen. It might be worth taking a fresh look at this powerful tool.

After lagging behind in its AJAX support, Opera has surged ahead, becoming the first browser to implement Server-Side Events (SSE) from the WHATWG Web Applications 1.0 specification—streaming multiple events over a persistent connection.

A preview of new tabbed browsing features in Safari 3, to be included in Mac OS X 10.5, “Leopard”.

Dave Shea reviews the new interface that Yahoo! has deployed for geotagging photos on Flickr. Although the review is mostly positive, he does flag a design issue with interpeting the chronological order of photos displayed on a map.