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Recently the Acid 3 test was released. This is a web browser test to determine the power of the browser.

FireFox landed on a 4th and 5th place while Internet explorer landed towards the bottom of the list.

Test results can be seen here.

Official Acid Tests Site is here.

Microsoft has signed a deal with Nokia to bring its Silverlight platform to mobile phones. BBC Technology reports that the Silverlight integration will first appear in Nokia’s S60 platform, a smart phone standard that currently holds a 53% market share.

Silverlight is a browser plugin that allows development of rich internet applications, similar to the popular Adobe Flash. Like Flash, Silverlight is designed to work across platforms and media without any preference towards Microsoft’s Windows-based products. Though Adobe already has agreements with 18 of the 20 device manufacturers worldwide, Microsoft looks to break their stranglehold on the market.

Microsoft announced that they are lowering the prices on several consumer editions of Windows Vista. FiringSquad reports that Vista Home Premium’s price will now be $129, down from $159, and the Vista Ultimate Edition will drop from $299 to $219.

Microsoft’s press release implies that Vista sales have been strong through the sale of new PCs, but less than stellar when it comes to individual consumer purchases. They hope this price drop will encourage more XP users to upgrade.

Expect retailers to update their prices in the weeks before Microsoft releases the Vista Service Pack 1 in mid-March.

Last night FreeBSD announced, their next generation of FreeBSD 7 is now finished and ready for download.

It includes a long list of enhancements and fixes. It now better supports multi-CPU-systems, enhanced ULE-Scheduler, read XFS-file-system, enhanced support for 802.11, and many more.

FreeBSD 7.0 supports seven processor-technologies; Alpha, AMD64, i386, ia64, pc98, Power-PC and sparc64.

Download and read the release notes here.