** English

openSUSE 11 has been released, and as usual I had to try it using virtualization first. And as with some other recent distros, VPC crashes during installation. However, as with some other recent distros, these startup options help:

noreplace-paravirt i8042.noloop clock=pit

So if you have issues getting the new openSUSE version installed, these options might do the trick. At least they worked for me.

Right after yesterday's Firefox 3 release, some readers wrote me that the browser would immediately crash (a really bad crash, without error reporting kicking in, the browser just vanishes) when they visited a Silverlight powered site. I could reproduce that on one of my machines and was investigating this further, when I stumbled upon Tim Heuer's excellent post on the long history of Silverlight/Firefox 3 hubbub. He concludes that Silverlight 2 beta 2 has solved the issue, but what's about the only Silverlight version marked as stable, 1.0? In my case a simple uninstallation of Silverlight, followed by reinstalling the plugin did the trick. Unfortunately I did not write down my previous plugin version number, but I now have version 1.0.30401.0. If you have an older version, you may want to update.
Of course that doesn't help web master too much, but maybe this post can help some users to keep their new shiny browser alive when consuming Silverlight content.

Firefox 3 has been released a few hours ago (congratulations!), and I already got two mails with complaints that Firebug (v1.05) is not compatible with this version. That's actually true, but versions 1.1+ are. Just don't mind that the version numbers sound like beta, but I wouldn't be too surprised if version 1.2 would be put on Firebug's homepage soon.
Update (Jun 18): Updated download link; addons.mozilla.org seems to have the most recent releases.

Just a quick note that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been released. It includes a commercial go-live license, if you are brave enough and forget what happened to Atlas' go-live license Microsoft published the Beta 2 runtime and VS 2008 tools downloads, including a new Blend 2 preview release. There is also a list of breaking changes between beta 1 and beta 2. As you would expect, news on Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date will follow shortly.