If you’re  waiting for the arrival of Firefox 3.1, you may want to sit tight. While the 3.1b2 is now available in the nightly builds, you probably don’t need to make the jump just yet – unless you’re looking for speedier javascript processing.

Here are some rich features of firefox 3.1 beta2

• Improvements to awesomebar
• Security error page polish and fixups
• Clear private data improvements
• Updates to strata
• Private Browsing Mode
• Plugin installation experience
• Changes to search plugin update format

The changes that are included are a good start, and bode well for the final release of 3.1.A quick comparison on acid3.acidtests.org revealed a score of 90 in 3.1b2 versus a 71 in 3.0.3 – a gain of about about 27%. Not too shabby!

The improved ctrl+tab switching looks and functions well, and the new TraceMonkey javascript engine provides a nice performance boost. You’ll have to activate it yourself by opening about:config and setting the javascript.options.jit.content boolean to true.

So stay tuned to the nightly builds on Mozilla’s FTP server for the latest releases.

Over the last few days I’ve been playing with the beta of Stackoverflow.The concept behind Stack Overflow is that it is a focused arena where developers can help each other, with a digg-like voting scheme to try to bubble the good stuff to the surface. The homepage at Stack Overflow certainly reminds us of digg, but hopefully the level of discourse is not similar.

In case you are unaware, Stackoverflow is a joint venture between Jeff Atwood ofCoding Horror and Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame.  It’s basically a question and answers site for software developers.
Stack Overflow has been criticized for solving a problem that does not exist, and for having a questionable reputation system. Developers looking for answers typically turn to Google, so why the need for a new site? I think Stack Overflow could turn into a bit of a nexus for developers looking for quick answers.

TheInternet Movie Database(IMDB) is a massive, extremely popular website detailing all aspects of many movies and television shows, has finally added what the site has curiously been missing all along: video footage of full-length movies and TV show.

There are a few things that I really like about the new service. While many videos are slapped up on the site using an embeddable player from Hulu, IMDB is the first site I’ve seen that lets you watch these embedded videos in full screen. And it’s nice being able to find videos right next to the images and other media that pop up when you’re searching for information about a movie or TV show.

For years, the Internet Movie Database has been the go-to spot for information about movies, TV shows, actors, directors, and all sorts of other information related to the entertainment industry. But over the last few years as online video started to take over the web, there was one thing conspicuously absent from IMDB: video. Now that’s all changed, as IMDB’s parent comkpany Amazon has rolled out a major update which lets users watch over 6,000 videos from sources like Hulu, CBS, and independent filmmakers.

The Amazon-owned site will now offer 6,000 movies and TV shows free of charge from Hulu, CBS, Sony Pictures Television, and hundreds of independent filmmakers. The content will rotate (much as it does on Hulu), depending on the content-owners’ wishes. IMDB will host and stream some of the video itself, but appears to be using embeddable players from Hulu and CBS where possible.

“IMDb’s mission has always been to be the world’s most comprehensive, user-friendly destination for all movie, TV and celebrity-related information, products and services,” said Col Needham, founder and managing director of IMDB, adding that “We’re excited to offer our users a simple online experience to watch full-length movies and TV episodes for free […] Our goal is to show our users every movie and TV show on the internet for free.”

The site’s interface is also a letdown when it comes to sorting through items with multiple pieces of content, like a television show. After visiting the webpage for Arrested Development (easily one of the best shows in recent memory), I found that episodes were listed out of order with poor descriptions.

And figuring out what you can actually watch will likely confuse many first time visitors. After browsing to the webpage for “Superman”, I was presented with a greyed-out “Watch It” button, which was accompanied by a link to Amazon’s Video On Demand service. Unsure of why I couldn’t click “Watch It”, I promptly looked to see if I was missing a codec or needed to sign into the site. Turns out this is just a bad design choice on IMDB’s part – if you can watch a video the button will be gold, you can’t watch it if it’s grey (why not just say “You can’t watch this here”?).

For now, the service is only available in the United States, as there are several licensing issues that must be handled. IMDB’s visitors will be able to watch classic shows such as Charlie’s Angels, Star Trek, Bewitched and Beverly Hills 90210. Also, new releases like Knight Rider and 30 Rock will be available before their debut on television.

The move should have been considered a very long time ago, as it provides huge financial possibilities, but as the saying goes, it is never too late to do the right thing. From this point on it all depends on how Amazon will promote the service and also on the quality of its content.

IMDB is one of my favorite sites on the web – I’ve spent countless hours browsing through movie trivia, forums, and top 100 lists. It’s nice to see that the database is finally incorporating video, but it could be doing so much more than links to Hulu embeds. Instead of including video as footnotes to database pages, the IMDB should create a consumer-friendly content portal, leveraging its database to serve as a powerful recommendation and review engine.

A number of Web services claim to provide you with tons of information about your favorite Web sites, including the names of the people behind it and traffic information. But none of them are nearly as complete as Quarkbase. The free information it provides is so complete, it’s enough to make a blog owner a little nervous.

Quarkbase is a very useful tool to find out a huge variety of information on any website. It mashes up over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering  information on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people etc. One of the best things about it is that it’s free and doesn’t have any advertisements.If you’re interested in your own blog or personal Website, you can use the QuarkBase to make sure your domain registration information is accurate, find out how often links from your site have been published on services such as Del.icio.us and Digg, and even see some traffic information from Alexa.

Just enter the name or URL of the website you want to look up, and it’ll show you the various stats. If it’s been entered for the first time in the Quarkbase search box, the results take some time to show up. Quarkbase will show you a screenshot of the webpage, along with a summary, traffic rank, famous in countries, associated people, blog rank from Technorati, tags, language, delicious links, blogging tool, framework, contact info, hosting info and many more. It’ll also show you the backlinks from major social sharing websites like StumbleUpon and Digg as well as any backlinks from Wikipedia. Thanks to Quarkbase, we found out that we have been actually linked on Wikipedia!

You’ll also be shown the most popular posts of last week and all times, along with the amount of Delicious Bookmarks, Diggs, Twitturly twitts and reach, Reddit points and comments as well as StumbleUpon comments that they got. This is a great way of summarizing the amount of traffic you’re getting from various social sharing websites and gives you a quick glance of where you are more popular.

Feeds are also shown with their subscriber count ( we have 52706 on Quarkbase at the moment, although we have 53404 at the moment! ). The blog reactions from Technorati are also shown in the Spotlight section as well as the mention of your website’s URLs on Twitter. In the end comes a detailed view of development and hosting information.

In addition to basic information about the type of site, some summary information about the owner/publisher, its traffic rank, the language of the site, and the countries that host the site’s readers, Quarkbase provides a wealth of information on the topic of the site and popular links and posts. The service provides the site’s creation date and when the domain expires, contact information for the owner (pulled from the domain registration), and technical information around the site framework and type of Web server running behind the scenes.A wealth of information is at your disposal with Quarkbase and it’s a must bookmark if you have your own websites. Specially, if you’re a blogger!