The guys at Mozilla have released the very first Firefox 3 mockup screen shots.

Looks

In these screenies Firefox has a complete UI overhaul and it looks fantastic! surprisingly it looks a lot like a vista application and more like IE than Firefox. Many are hoeing that this concept will stick around and become the default Firefox 3 theme for vista. Even still I am sure someone out there will create this theme for Firefox 2.

New Features

Private Browsing
Browse the web without cookies, temporary files or history being stored on your computer.

Places
A great new feature that stores bookmarks, history, and other information about Web pages. You will be able to add tags and index your content.

Bookmark Manager
Speaks for itself, basically sort and manage all your bookmarks.

Malware Detection
Firefox will now block sites that have been known to contain Malware, it will show a dialog asking if you want to proceed (see screens)

Mozilla is working alongside Google to develop this feature.

Content Handling
After downloading a file, you can now select the associated program to run that file from within the downloaded files box. 

Microformat Detection
You can now interact with microformat content.

Screenshots

The blacked out address bar lets you know your in private browsing mode:

The new places feature:

Bookmark Manager service:

 The Malware detection engine in action:

Content Handling in action:

The important thing to remember is this is very early stages and this stuff is not final and it also explains why the UI may look a little rough round the edges but if Mozilla go with this, the cool new features and that great UI Firefox 3 should be fantastic in my opinion!

Theres a few articles on the Internet indicating that Vista will not have any Service packs, in there place are smaller updates being shipped via Windows Update. Because Vista is so well done its seems that service packs are not required, mainly because no major changes to the OS are needed. At first i was a little shocked and concerned about this, but after thinking about it i can see why Microsoft is dumping its traditionally methods. Here are some benefits over updates compared to Service packs.

Faster release

updates can be done separately, smaller updates may be released sooner, rather than waiting for the next service pack.

Choice
Unlike Service Packs, You can choose with updates you require canceling out any unnecessary installs.

History

You can look back on what updates you have installed and uninstall any that cause any problems.

So my final thought on this topic is, Windows Update is expanding and doing all the work services packs do, but in many ways better.

After hearing all the fuss about the new ReadyBoost technology incorporated in Windows Vista, i decided i would give it a try. So i went out a got myself a 1gb Flash driver plugged it in and got a message saying “Speed Up My System With ReadyBoost”. Now i wasn’t expecting miracles, in fact i was expecting to see a very minor change. To my amazement i found my system ran a LOT faster! programs ran miles quicker (even the big ones like photoshop) and the biggest boost i saw was the Windows Search witch is rapid now. Now if you want to benefit from this technology you need to buy/use the right pen, with all respect the majority of drives work with ReadyBoost straight up but there are some minimum requirements you need to follow:

PC with a free USB 2.0 port

A USB flash device which is:
- Between 250MB and 4GB in size
- The device must be capable of 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec for random writes