Firefox browser available today

Mozilla Foundation`s Firefox browser will be available for free download today after 19 months of development, news.com reports.

With more than 8 million downloads of its preview versions, Firefox is expected to be hugely successful, says Mozilla president Mitchell Baker

The Firefox release - available for download from today - will feature minor performance alterations, bug fixes and a new default start-up page, but will generally be a similar product to the preview versions.

Microsoft remains ubiquitous in the browser market, with Internet explorer controlling over 90%, but Firefox says it hopes to gain 10% of the market by the end of 2005.

"Being an alternative browser in today`s market is a challenge, but people have begun to realise that the browser you get with your computer can be a beginning point and not an endpoint."

Computer Associates (CA) has unveiled its anti-spyware range aimed at both corporate and individual consumers.

According to news.com, the eTrust PestPatrol Anti-Spyware r5 product is available in three separate packages, aimed at small to medium businesses, enterprise companies and consumers respectively.

The PestPatrol interface has been redesigned in the consumer package to make it more accessible to non-IT users, while the corporate offering now includes improved reporting capabilities, faster spyware scanning tools and expanded customer support.

CA eTrust security management VP Sam Curry says the company has identified more than 1 200 new strains of spyware over the last eight months, indicating that the threat of spyware is increasing.

Storage vendors are learning from the server world of grid computing and building modular array systems that can grow processing power and capacity.

According to Computerworld, a number of international players are putting grid storage plans in place. IBM enterprise storage systems GM Tom Hawk says the computing giant is "heavily invested" in grid storage as part of an overall grid computing strategy that uses virtualisation technology to knit together disparate storage, network and server systems.

HP has also announced plans to build on its StorageWorks grid products - which aggregate CPU and capacity under a single console view - to address file serving, archiving and storage management.

At present, the most popular systems are smaller grid storage products that use low-cost parallel or Serial ATA disks.