More trouble for RIM

Research In Motion's (RIM's) troubles have continued after popular social networking tool Seesmic revealed it was dropping support for the platform, another senior executive left for Samsung and layoffs began at the Canadian firm, writes V3.co.uk.

Social network aggregator Seesmic said it was discontinuing support for the BlackBerry and concentrating on Apple, Android and Windows Phone 7. This is the first major tool of its type to dump the BlackBerry platform.

“We encourage those affected by this change to try out Seesmic for Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7, as well as Seesmic Desktop and Web,” the company blogged.

Mozilla will release version 5 of its Web browser today, moving the Web browser onto a three-month update cycle to match competing browser Google Chrome, says Computing.co.uk.

Mozilla's update cycle received hefty criticism before the unveiling of Firefox 4, after it took 14 months (January 2010 to March 2011) for Firefox 3.6 to become version 4.

It moved the final beta of its browser (beta 7) into release candidate status last Friday in preparation for today's unveiling. Like Firefox 4, version 5 supports Linux distributions, Mac OS X and all current Windows.

Video downloads now make up the bulk of data transfers on mobile networks, with one researcher estimating that users watching videos on Apple's iPhone are generating 58% of mobile data traffic, according to Investor's Business Daily.

Bytemobile, a traffic-management provider, said about 90% of mobile data traffic is generated by 10% of users.

Wireless carriers are struggling to meet the higher demand, with some introducing tiered pricing to bill the heaviest users more.

Google has released a new version of Chrome Frame - the Internet Explorer (IE) plug-in that turns Microsoft's browser into a Google browser - letting users install the plug-in even when they do not have administrator privileges on their machines, states The Register.

The new version runs a “helper process” when IE starts up that can then load the Chrome Frame plug-in when it's requested, and users do not need admin privileges to do so.

“Yay for clever technical hacks that help users circumvent ossified IT bureaucracy,” said one commenter on Hacker News.