Mozilla on Wednesday released the Firefox 4 public beta, the latest iteration of the free, open-source Web browser.

With Firefox 4 Beta, Mozilla introduces a brand new interface. It takes cues from Google Chrome and other browsers by placing the tabs on top by default (in Windows only; it’ll come to Mac OS and Linux later on), and hiding the menubar (instead, a new Firefox button provides access to commonly used commands).

While the bookmarks layout has changed, the functionality is the same; to access your bookmarks just click on the star and select from the drop down menu.

If you like to keep numerous tabs open at a time, Firefox now lets you search for the tab you want right from the Awesome Bar. This is a great alternative to cycling through all your tabs with keyboard shortcuts or your mouse.

To access the switch tabs function, just place your cursor in the Awesome Bar (that’s the URL entry field for you Firefox newbies), and start typing name of the site or page you want to access. The Awesome Bar will start showing you a few options for past and current sites. One of the top options should be the tab you’re looking for, and will be marked as “Switch to tab”. Just select that option, hit enter, and Firefox will switch to the tab for you.

The new release comes several days after Mozilla released the first pre-release code for Firefox 4, and the updated version brings a number of changes designed to enhance the browser’s usability and security.

Like other new browsers, Firefox 4 Beta provides some crash protection features: If a browser plugin crashes, it’ll just bring down the plugin instead of causing the entire browser to crash.

The obvious change is the browser’s look. Like Chrome and Opera, tabs are now located at the top of the browser (Windows only), and a new add-on manager is included to make it easier to find plugins.

Under the hood, Firefox 4 beta 1 heightens security, offers crash protection, supports technologies that are vying to become new Web standards (HTML5 and WebM), and contains other bells and whistles.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) today announced the launch of Healthcare.gov, a new website that will provide consumers in Connecticut and across the country with a “one-stop shop” for information about the many health insurance coverage options available to them.

HealthCare.gov allows users to input their personal information—for instance, New York residency, under-26 age bracket—and browse and compare available coverage plans. Let’s play around with this. So, for our fictive 22-year-old New York resident, option No. 1 suggests attempting to seek (or keep) coverage through a parent’s plan for the next four years. Check, and check. But what if you’re a senior who has a medical condition but is not sufficiently covered by Medicare? Option No. 1, in that case: use Medicaid to help pay for Medicare.

“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act not only helps ensure that all Americans have access to stable, secure, and affordable health care coverage, but also gives them the tools and information they need to make informed choices about their health care coverage,” said Dodd. “We have turned the tables on the insurance companies and finally made the health insurance market a buyer’s market. Now, consumers in Connecticut can log on to Healthcare.gov, answer a few simple questions about their health care coverage needs, and find clear, easy-to-understand information about their insurance options.”

Anyway, aesthetically, the site is clean, lucid, and easy to navigate. If you disagree, click one of the little yellow “Was This Page Helpful?” feedback boxes scattered throughout the site and say so. “Tell us what you like, what you don’t, what’s missing, and what we can do to improve. We’re listening. This is your site, not ours,” wrote Todd Park, the chief technology officer of HealthCare.gov in the site’s introduction. Even if you click “yes,” to the question of whether or not the page was helpful, you’re asked how it could get even better.

According to the White House, visitors to Healthcare.gov can find the following:

* Approximately 500 pages of content
* Data for more than 1,000 insurance carriers and 5,561 open products (2,030 in the individual health insurance market and 3,531 in the small employer health insurance market)
* Information on every Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program in the country
* Information on the Pre-Existing Condition Plan in every state.
* Billions of choices. Visitors can answer a few basic questions, and the site’s insurance finder automatically sorts through a huge catalog of public and private coverage options to help them identify the ones that are right for them (with billions of potential personal scenarios supported).

Dodd played a key role in writing and passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law by President Obama in March. Dodd led the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee’s consideration of health care reform legislation and worked closely with President Obama and leaders from the House and Senate on the final legislation.

Anyway, aesthetically, the site is clean, lucid, and easy to navigate. If you disagree, click one of the little yellow “Was This Page Helpful?” feedback boxes scattered throughout the site and say so. “Tell us what you like, what you don’t, what’s missing, and what we can do to improve. We’re listening. This is your site, not ours,” wrote Todd Park, the chief technology officer of HealthCare.gov in the site’s introduction. Even if you click “yes,” to the question of whether or not the page was helpful, you’re asked how it could get even better.

Google is working to make their homepage looks good. And recently, they changed their homepage by setting a customizable background image–just like Microsoft’s Bing.

But recently, reports said that because of this huge change of Google’s homepage, the world of art has changed too. Thanks to Google, more and more people are now searching or viewing stunning arts and photographs from different artists like Jeff Koons and Dale Chihuly. Dale Chihuly has been featured on Google Editor’s Pick for his best known artwork, the giant half inflated metallic modeling balloons. Jeff Koons is also at the Editor’s Pick with his stunning photos.

If you haven’t heard of Jeff Koons yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. Hailing from Dover, the New York City resident took the art scene by storm with his giant reproductions of normal objects, such as a balloon animal or a heart.

The brightly colored images have brought him national acclaim, and he was recently honored during the Pennsylvania Governor’s Awards for the Arts in New York.

Check out www.google.com and get a glimpse of some of his creations. Don’t miss Paris’ 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race Saturday and Sunday, in which Koons created a multicolored design for a BMW M3 GT2.

Google’s logos, first introduced in 1999, have brought a smile to people’s faces with their colors, artistry, and unique designs. Logos have promoted everything from major holidays to the anniversary of inventions to famous birthdays.

As of now, Jeff Koons and Dale Chihuly can be declared as the most viewed artists of all time, thanks to Google

From one Apple mobile device rumor to another; MacRumors are reporting that several of their sources have talked about the iPhone landing on carrier Sprint in September 2010. The tips follow on from rumblings heard by other sources, but so far nobody has taken any of the speculation especially seriously.

According to the report, Apple has reportedly put in an order for ten million units, which will undoubtedly contribute positively to Pegatron’s revenues in August-September of this year.

According to The Tech Update, a Best Buy employee sent their editors an email that CONFIRMS (in all caps no less, so it must be true) that Sprint will carry the iPhone this summer. He also expects in-store displays to confirm the change within “…a week or two.” From the email:

“…our mobile manager speculates that Apple wanted to drop AT&T due to their poor service but managed to opt-out of the rest of their contract in exchange for the iPad service deal.”

The “evidence” in this case points to an email which could have come from any old schmoe, really. The fact is none of us know what will happen with the iPhone in the US. Here’s what we can assume: First, Apple entered into a contract with AT&T. Eventually, that contract will end and when it does, both parties will assess their experience. At that time, a change may or may not be made.

The information purportedly originates from sources within the organization, but as always, we must remind you to take this information with a grain of salt. DigiTimes, like many other publications, don’t exactly have a perfect track record when it comes to this type of news.

Redmond Pie indicates it was the recipient of communications relating to an iPhone post on an unnamed site. Allegedly, a Best Buy employee emailed the site with an explanation that, indeed, the iPhone would be sold for use on the Sprint network very soon. His comments, as originally published by Redmond Pie, included the comments: “I work in an electronics store that has a mobile phone store within it. I can confirm that Sprint will be carrying the iPhone beginning in June. They’ve begun to grease the wheels for advertising. There is no news in regards to a Verizon version however.”

In turn, the site responded, asking for whom the person worked and if they could provide evidence to back up their claim. The source responded, “Best Buy in a Pennsylvania store….Can’t present evidence as it breaks our privacy policy to our clients.” The source also added, “It’s coming though. We expect the shelf display within a week or two.”

The new Android 2.2 mobile OS will be the first to support full Adobe Flash 10.1, and Adobe sent us a Google Nexus One loaded with the new software to check it out. The good news is that Flash basically works, finally bringing the full Web to smartphones. Android 2.2 also includes some useful features, such as the ability to store applications on roomy SD cards rather than in cramped internal memory.

At last, full Flash support has finally arrived on Android. Overall, the whole experience is quite good, but I encountered a couple of issues in my hands-on. Video playback looked excellent on the Nexus One’s screen. I watched a couple of trailers on the Warner Brothers’ site and was impressed with how smooth the playback was.

Flash support brings some big gaming potential to the Android platform.

Of course, not all sites were so fast. While the kid’s educational site Ecoda Zoo looked gorgeous on the Nexus One, it moved painfully slow.

Interestingly enough, there’s a shortcut on one of the homescreens to a page with recommended Flash-enabled sites and games including South Park Studios, BBC, Sony Pictures, Armor Games and more. TechCrunch dug up the lists for both the Nexus One and the Droid and pointed out that the two are different. In fact, the list for the Droid is much shorter than the Nexus One’s.

Flash is about much more than video, though; it also powers interactive games, menus, and animations. Most Flash sites are optimized for mouse clicks, not finger taps. So Flash gaming was very hit or miss, because games are often very dependent on complex mouse movements that the mobile client didn’t perfectly translate into finger movements. Some games with very simple interfaces worked great, such as Assembler and Fly Away Rabbit. Many others did not, such as Demolition City and Moto Rush. A full listing of Flash-enabled sites for games that are optimized for the Nexus One can be found at Adobe.

As the Facebook-ignited campaign “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” arrived today, Pakistan expanded its Internet ban to include YouTube.

“Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” took off within days of Norris’ April post and a subsequent appearance on “The Dave Ross Show” she says she also regrets. Thousands of images have already appeared on at least two related Facebook pages she did not create that boasted upwards of 71,000 members Thursday afternoon and features not discussion or debate but streams of verbal and visual vitriol.

Depiction of any prophet is prohibited in Islam, a cultural tenet that led to riots, religious tension and even deaths after European papers published cartoons featuring Islam’s chief prophet in 2006.

A Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) says the decision to block YouTube was made after government monitors discovered that references to the primary “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” Facebook page–which now has more than 80,000 “supporters”–were growing on the video-sharing site.

The page, which Jon Wellington told Comic Riffs he started in a “whimsical and nonjudgmental spirit” last month, quickly became a forum for a hate-laced war of word and image, as both pro-Muslim and anti-Muslim posters often spewed vitriol.

The campaign also spawned an “Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” page, which as of Thursday has nearly 100,000 supporters who “like” the page. Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist whose posterlike illustration titled “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” last month spawned the protest, has herself joined the “Against” page.

“I will not be drawing Mohammed on May 20,” Norris told Comic Riffs on Wednesday. “I joined ‘Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’ and folks from there write to me. I never even set up a place where people could send images to. Other people started Facebook pages for this day but I never did.”

Islam is the majority religion in Pakistan. Some Muslims consider any depiction of Muhammad to be blasphemous.

“We are an Islamic republic, so we are monitoring the Muslim content,” said the PTA spokesman, Khurran Mehran.

The Post’s Brulliard reports that Wikipedia also seems to be blocked today in Pakistan–though it wasn’t immediately known whether this was because the government banned access. The cellphone company Mobilink said access from smartphones to Facebook, YouTube and other sites with “blasphemous content” were also blocked.

Symantec Corp. said late Wednesday that it will buy VeriSign’s identity and authentication business for about $1.28 billion in cash. The deal includes a majority stake in VeriSign Japan. Symantec expects the deal to dilute its 2011 adjusted earnings by 9 cents a share but add to earnings for the September 2011 quarter. In a separate statement, VeriSign said while Symantec is likely to offer jobs to most of its employees, once the deal is closed, VeriSign may have to eliminate some positions that are not moved to Symantec. The transaction is expected to finalize in 60 to 90 days.

“With the anonymity of the Internet and the evolving threat landscape, people and organizations are struggling to maintain confidence in the security of their interactions, information and identities online. At the same time, people’s personal and professional lives have converged and they want to use their various digital devices to access information wherever they are without jeopardizing their privacy,” said Enrique Salem, president and CEO, Symantec. “IT is faced with the challenge of giving users the appropriate access, while ensuring that corporate data is not at risk. We believe the solution to this dilemma lies in the ubiquity of identity-based security. With the combined products and reach from Symantec and VeriSign, we are poised to drive the adoption of identity security as the means to provide simple and secure access to anything from anywhere, to prevent identity fraud and to make online experiences more user-friendly and hassle-free.”

“This transaction allows VeriSign to focus on the growing Internet infrastructure services business, where we expect to build on our expertise and record of success as the longtime operator of the .com and .net domain infrastructures. Following the close of this transaction, VeriSign will have a strong balance sheet, growth opportunities and a continuing commitment to deliver value to our customers and shareholders,” said Mark McLaughlin, VeriSign president and CEO. “The market for security and authentication services is rapidly changing in favor of large distribution channels, extensive product sets and integrated service delivery. We believe Symantec’s leading position as the premier end-to-end security provider will enable them to better serve our authentication customers and accelerate market growth.”

“For 15 years, VeriSign has pioneered the SSL and related authentication services business,” said Jim Bidzos, VeriSign founder and executive chairman. “Today, Symantec is the best company to drive this business forward, and we believe this transaction will benefit our employees, customers and shareholders.”

After a fairly long wait, the Twitter for iPhone app is finally here. Yes, it is the same Tweetie 2 app that we all know and love and is now rebranded as ‘Twitter for iPhone’ after Twitter acquired Tweetie, which was originally developed by Loren Brichter (@atebits on Twitter).

Ever since the announcement that Twitter was acquiring Loren Brichter’s company Atebits and its flagship program Tweetie to create an official iPhone application, everyone’s been waiting to see the result. Wait no longer: Twitter for iPhone is now available on the U.S. store.

The app, simply called Twitter, became available in the U.S. on Wednesday after scattered reports the previous day regarding the app’s availability in other countries. According to Twitter, this update and rebranding isn’t just a name change–”we’ve added a bunch of new stuff.” Sadly, one of the features not added was an iPad-specific version; you’ll have to continue using it in super-sized fashion.

While the new app has kept most of Tweetie’s overall appearance, the search page has been completely revamped. Searching tweets and users has been simplified into one screen, and you now have the option to search phrases in and around your location.

While the new app has kept most of Tweetie’s overall appearance, the search page has been completely revamped. Searching tweets and users has been simplified into one screen, and you now have the option to search phrases in and around your location.

Twitter’s Top Tweets has also made it to the Search page, featuring a side-scrollable box where you can read the latest featured tweets from celebrities and thinkers. Further down on the page, users can browse trends and see suggested users.

There are a couple of few miscellaneous fixes, too: changing tweet rendering in the app to match the way it looks on Twitter.com, and the addition of a Retweet button on the main actions bar.

For those without a Twitter account, searching, browsing users, trending information, and top tweets are still available within the app at the launch screen. If they like what they see, users can sign up within the account itself, and even pick who to follow through the Suggested Users list.

Twitter for iPhone is, as promised, completely free of charge. In comparison, Tweetie 2 was priced at $2.99 on the US Store. We wouldn’t be surprised that Twitter for iPhone becomes the Top App on the App Store the way Opera Mini did a while back. As far as the other Twitter apps on the Store are concerned, they are all but doomed now.

Current Tweetie users can upgrade to 3.0 by checking the update section of the App Store, while new users can download the free application directly from iTunes. Twitter is compatible with all iPhone OS devices running 3.0 or later.

Google will close an online store that it set up to sell its Nexus One phoneand rely on traditional retailers instead.

The search giant has admitted that sales of the Android-based handset were slower than expected, and that it will teaming up with local network partners to sell the phone through their high street shops and online stores instead.

“As with every innovation, some parts worked better than others,” acknowledged Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google, on the company’s blog. “While the global adoption of the Android platform has exceeded our expectations, the web store has not. It’s remained a niche channel for early adopters, but it’s clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to choose from.”

The Nexus One will now be sold through partner channels, such as Vodafone stores in the UK. The Nexus One web portal will instead become a site showcasing the Google Android platform, and the full range of devices running the open-source operating system.

“Innovation requires constant iteration,” wrote Rubin. “We believe that these changes will help get more phones to more people more quickly, which is good for the entire Android ecosystem: users, partners and Google itself.”

Google hasn’t disclosed how many Nexus One units it has sold so far.

Nexus One is just one of many different smart phones that rely on Google’s free Android operating system.

The alternatives also are proving to be an obstacle for the Nexus One.

Two major carriers, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, recently decided not to support the Nexus One because they prefer other Android-powered phones.

Before the Nexus One launched, analysts wondered if Google would shock the wireless world by subsidizing smartphones on its own. Instead of owing two years to a specific carrier, your debt would be to Google and its advertising. But when Google announced a $529 unsubsidized price for the Nexus One, or $179 with a two-year T-Mobile contract, it was business as usual.

The next version of Google’s mobile operating system is expected to be launched at Google I/O next week, but details of Froyo, as Android 2.2 is known, are emerging early.

Adobe and Google have already confirmed Android 2.2 supports Flash 10.1, and rumors hold that Froyo will also reduce fragmentation.

TechCrunch is reporting today that Android 2.2 “Froyo” will feature built-in USB tethering and Wi-Fi hot-spot capability. This is exciting news for Android users as it could potentially provide all phones with one of the great selling features of the forthcoming HTC Evo 4G from Sprint.

For those unfamiliar, mobile hot spots allow users to share their Internet connection with other devices such as laptops and portable gaming consoles. USB tethering is also rising in popularity, as many Android owners want to share their 3G connections with a Netbook while on the go.

As carriers begin rolling out newer, faster technologies, interest in tethering and mobile hot spots will continue to increase. It’s not known whether this new Wi-Fi/hot-spot feature is something that could be disabled by carriers.

That said, I can’t imagine too many wireless providers getting excited over this unless they have the ability control it. AT&T opted to disable the option to download and install applications from outside of the Android Market with their Motorola Backflip. It would not surprise me in the least to see carriers want to restrict this on their handsets if at all possible.

As we learned Wednesday, Sprint will be charging an extra $29.99 a month for mobile hot-spot service on the Evo 4G when it goes on sale next month. Imagine the revenue that would be lost if Google circumvents Sprint and makes this a standard feature of Android. Yes, Android scores big in the public eye, but it doesn’t do much to help the relationships built within the Open Handset Alliance.