According to Mozilla, we’ll be seeing Firefox 3 sometime in the last quarter of the year. Take that, Microsoft! It’s amusing that a group of volunteers can build an amazing browser (the best on the planet ) that quickly, while a team of paid engineers working for the World’s Biggest Software Company takes five years for a mediocre product that’s still nothing compared to Firefox.

In Firefox 3, we’ll see security improvements, support for off-line web apps, some “identity management tools”, and a revamped bookmarking system known as “Places”. Uh oh, “revamped”? I don’t like the sound of that…

I hope they don’t go polluting the browser with rubbish I don’t need. Why would I want “support for off-line web apps”? I have broadband! I’m pretty much never offline. What they really need to do is make it load faster. As for bookmarks, they work pretty well right now, but they’re kind of…out of hand. I tend to just through everything in the root of the bookmarks folder. I need to get around to sorting through my bookmarks. IT’s hard to find anything without using the search in the Bookmarks Sidebar.

One keyboard to rule them all. The Optimus Maximus keyboard is probably the ultimate keyboard. It’s price tag will be pretty ultimate as well… $1536. I know what your thinking. It’s probably something like “What?! Why the heck would I pay $1536 for a keyboard?” It’s not just any keyboard. Every one of those keys on it is a tiny OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display. Why would you want that? Suppose you’re working in Photoshop, the keys can update to show keyboard shortcuts that you may find useful. Like the “d” key can show an icon representing the “default colors” command. Or if you’re playing a game, wouldn’t it be easier to play if you knew at a glance which key activates your grappling hook? The Optimus Maximus can do all that and more. Want to type in a language like Russian or Japanese? The Optimus can remap the key images so you see the correct characters. $1536 is still a little excessive…especially since the OLEDs may burn out after five years. The Optimus Maximus will be available November 30th.

Hey, I saw a useful thing on Digg today (unbelievable, I know)! CSS Slicing Guide, a website that teaches how to use Photoshop (or other programs) to slice a layout into working CSS code instead of tables.

As you may have noticed, there are tons of sites that still use tables to line up images into a layout. I admit I’ve done it in the past. If you’ve ever used Photoshop/Imageready to slice a layout, you have to admit it’s a lot easier to do it as a table. Hopefully this guide will help improve the state of the web. Personally, I don’t mind the table-based layouts…others do though.

I’m going to have to read the guide thoroughly. Why? I want to improve my slicing techniques for CSS layouts. I’ve gotten pretty good at tables, but I’m not anywhere near as good with the CSS output. I can hand-code CSS layouts fine, put dealing with the output from Imageready isn’t much fun. Then again, it’s not much fun editing the output for table-based layouts either…

I wish Imageready had options to output code that can hold content (of varying lengths, of course) instead of a bunch of stuff that just holds images in place. It’s a big pain to go through all of it and change 3/4 of the code just so it will hold content without breaking up funny.