With Macromedia Studio 8 shipping and the Flash Professional 8 demo available for download, the first official public release of Flash Player 8 is also now available. You can upgrade your player to version 8.0.22 either via the installer at Macromedia's website, or for an even faster solution, just visit a Flash site that offers the Express Install option (such as Geoff's).

The latest Beta release of Firefox, v1.5 Beta 1 (Deer Park), is now available to download. Updates since the last Beta release (Deer Park Alpha 2) include:

• - Automated update
• - Faster browser navigation
• - Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs
• - Improvements to popup blocking
• - New Clear Private Data feature
• - Answers.com added to the search engine list
• - Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and "Safe Mode" experience.
• - Better accessibility support
• - Report a broken Web site wizard
• - Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer
• - New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6
• - Security enhancements & bug fixes, most notably you can now run Flash Player 8 Public Beta on Deer Park (it crashed in previous versions)

Remember this is a Beta release, so be sure to back up your old Firefox profile. If you have problems with your extensions after installing, check out this thread for help.

Be sure to visit the Firefox 1.5 Beta for Developers page for more information on the release and developing for Firefox.