Love the Metro look of Windows 8 but hate using Internet Explorer? Interested Windows 8 users can now download the Nightly build of Mozilla’s “Metro Firefox” to make it their preferred Web browser. The launch came last night when Mozilla’s Director of Community Development, Asa Dotzler, blogged that the “stable” version of Firefox would be available for testing. “There’s plenty of work still to do,” he notes. “If you are on the Firefox Nightly channel and you have a Windows 8 device, your Wednesday Firefox update should deliver a Metro Firefox tile to the far right end of your Windows Start screen.”
We should also note that this new Firefox is only supported by Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro, and not Windows RT (sorry, Surface RT users). As commenters have noted on the Mozilla blog, the update does come ridden with bugs and display errors. After all, this is a Nightly build which means an update is issued each night, hence all the shortcuts and features may not be readily available just yet. If you aren’t interested in preliminary versions, you may want to stay a tad more patient. With the testing edition unveiled, it shouldn’t be too long before a complete Metro Firefox gets delivered.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.