Last Thursday we wrote about Firefox’s launch of its newest version, 3.6.4. This version separated the browser itself from the plug-ins that ride it. So if a plug-in were lagging, or otherwise going haywire, it wouldn’t crash the whole screen. These improvements are restricted to Linux and Windows until Version 4.0, which will include Mac. Today, Mozilla has announced a further upgrade , to version 3.6.6. Sponsor With 3.6.6, the time-out has been increased, according to Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner. ‘Following the release of Firefox 3.6.4 we heard from some users, mainly those using older computers, that they sometimes expect longer periods of non-responsiveness from plug-ins, especially with games. For these users the default timeout of 10 seconds was too short. To address this, we increased the amount of time Firefox waits for a plug-in to respond before terminating it from 10 to 45 seconds.” This update is automatic and does not require a second upload. Discuss

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A familiar character has entered the stage for Salesforce.com. Attorney David Boies is bringing his celebrated fame back again to take on Microsoft, the company he defeated ten years ago in the U.S. Justice Department’s landmark anti-trust case against the software giant. Salesforce.com filed suit today , claiming that Microsoft is violating patents across its .Net environment and Sharepoint. Salesforce.com claims Microsoft should have known about the risk of infringement, claiming the violations are patently obvious. Sponsor The lawsuit is in response to Microsoft’s own patent infringement case filed last month against Salesforce.com. That suit centers on Salesforce.com customer relationship management software. Salesforce.com is depending on Boies, 69, one of the more celebrated attorneys of modern times. He represented Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election recount against George Bush. In the midst of that turmoil, Time ran a long profile about Boies. He’s a guy who you get the sense fits with the tech celebrity status of Marc Benioff, the chairman and chief executive officer of Salesforce.com. Benioff is obviously enamored with Boies. He tweeted today as much today: Boies is a celebrity in his own world as much as Benioff is in tech circles. Boies is also not cheap. A Time magazine profile of Boies, back in 2000, said Boies charged $750 an hour. Considering inflation, it’s conceivable that Boies is charging Salesforce.com more than $1,000 per hour. Time paints Boies as a character who at the time represented a new breed of superstar lawyer: “Calmly walking his audience through the intricacies of the case, Boies introduced Americans to a previously undiscovered species of superstar lawyer. He showed none of the self-regarding intellectual pretension of an Alan Dershowitz or the preening, macho strut of a Johnnie Cochran. Unlike his Democratic colleague Warren Christopher, he did not whine. Unlike his Republican opponent James Baker, he did not bully. Instead he explained–lucidly and persuasively. Those who have been listening for even a year knew that this was characteristic Boies. During the long Microsoft epic, months before he won the devastating verdict against the company last April, they had heard him discuss the company’s monopoly. “This is not about creative legal arguments,” he said at one point. “It’s not about creative economic arguments. It is about common sense. It is about facts, and it is about what the real world demonstrates.’ ” Now, in face of that, consider the magnitude of lawsuits such as these. The Microsoft case looks like they actually have a legitimate case against Salesforce.com. Is hiring such a well-known attorney a defensive measure or part of the offensive battle for Salesforce.com? Benioff’s tweet is interesting. He says Boies will represent him in his fight against Microsoft. It’s not exactly an offensive pose. We have to wonder. There’s a sense that the battles ahead could determine the fate of both companies. Salesforce.com is constantly pushing its “no software,” message. It’s targeted right at the software giants of the world, particularly Microsoft. As for Microsoft, it makes no qualms about its own intentions to pursue the cloud computing services market with Windows Azure. So we have Microsoft with Ballmer and Salesforce.com with Benioff. And an attorney whose style we already see reflected in the opening salvos of the suit: …the”risk of infringement was either known or so obvious that it should have been known by Microsoft.” That’s a pretty clear statement. The question is will that clarity work this time as much as it has in the past? Discuss

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Earlier this morning, Google released a new stable version of Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular browser. This new release for Windows, Mac and Linux is the first stable version of Chrome to be distributed with a built-in version of Adobe’s widely used Flash Player. Just two days ago, Google enabled the built-in version of Flash in the beta channel versions of Chrome, where it had already been available earlier this year, though Google then disabled this feature after a while. Sponsor Even though Google is a strong backer of the open HTML5 and CSS3 standard, which can replicate a lot of Flash features, the company is also acutely aware that a lot of users and web developers still rely on Flash. When we talked to Bran Rakowski, Google’s product manager and director for Chrome, last month, he noted that Google thinks that by coupling Flash to the browser, Google can ensure that users will run a very recent and secure version of Flash. Don’t Like Flash in Chrome? Just Disable It. If you don’t want to use Flash in Chrome, you can just type ” about:plugins ” in the address bar in Chrome and disable the plugin. Google’s update mechanism ensures that the browser stays up to date, without any intervention from the user. In addition to this, Google can also test the specific version of Flash it distributes with the browser and ensure that it is stable. With its new crash protection feature in Firefox, Mozilla is also working hard to ensure that crashing Flash content can’t take the whole browser down and Apple and Opera offer a similar feature in their browsers. As CNET’s Stephen Shankland rightly notes , Adobe is also working hard to keep Flash relevant and with the latest version of the Flash Player (10.1), Adobe is also trying to gain a foothold on mobile devices. Google’s own Android operating system is one of the first to support mobile Flash. Discuss

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Apple has released its latest iPhone operating system, iOS 4.0, and just as quickly, the hacker community has managed to jailbreak it. For the uninitiated, “jailbreaking” refers to the ability to unlock a device in order to install unapproved, third-party applications. Given both AT&T and Apple’s restrictions regarding the iPhone, this process is a must for many Apple device owners. Jailbreaking allows for a plethora of new features, including turning the phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot , being able to fully customize the phone down to its icons and forcing Wi-Fi only apps to run over 3G. For those whose older devices don’t support all of iOS 4’s new features, jailbreaking offers some viable alternatives.

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Quirky Boston-based startup Baydin won this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad competition with their interesting take on e-mail search: Unsearch. Unsearch, now in closed alpha, is an Outlook plugin that analyzes individual e-mail messages as they’re read, and provides relevant search results next to the message. Imagine Gmail, but with related attachments and e-mail conversations instead of ads. Sponsor The ZapThink report the company commissioned notes that Outlook add-ons can be a dicey business proposition. “If Microsoft likes what a partner is doing and thinks they can do better themselves, then they’ll simply incorporate the partner’s functionality into their software and put the partner out of business.” We asked Baydin CEO Alexander Moore how the company hopes to avoid commoditization. Moore thinks the company has some secret sauce that’s difficult to clone. Although driven in part by Microsoft’s Windows Desktop Search API, Unsearch does its own filtering of search results returned by the API. “We have two layers of proprietary technology sandwiched around Microsoft’s tech,” says Moore. First, Unsearch analyzes the e-mail and extracts keywords. Then, it runs the keywords through the search API and runs a set of proprietary algorithms on the search results to filter and reorder them. It then displays those processed results. The only piece of software Baydin has released publicly is Boomerang, a simple piece of productivity software that allows users to move a message out of their inboxes until a pre-scheduled time. Moore admits that Boomerang would be easier to replicate than unsearch, but notes that it’s actually just one piece part of a larger forthcoming project. “We decided to go ahead and release it as a standalone product when we realized that there were a lot of people who needed that specific feature right now,” he says. Baydin could be seen as competing with Xobni . According to the company’s web site, the word “Baydin” is Burmese for “foretelling the future through magic.” The company has strong ties to Burma: one of the founders ethnically Burmese, the other is in a long-term romantic relationship with someone from Burma. The company promises to donate 5% of its profits towards educational efforts in Burma. Baydin won the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad competition in Boston last week. The other finalists were Doodle , InnovationCast and MindQuilt . Last year’s winner was CubeTree . Baydin presented the following video at the Enterprise 2.0, which includes a history of the financial crisis that could be charitably called “incomplete”: Discuss

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