Today Netflix, Inc, the nation's most popular online DVD rental service, announced the first Netflix ready device in a series of more to come. The Netflix Player by Roku, as they're calling it, is availabel immediately and will provide over 10,000 movies to Netflix subscribers instantly to their TVs.

This is clearly a product that is aimed at the AppleTV which allows users to rent and download movies from its popular iTunes Store. The immediate clear difference between the two products is the large number of offerings (10,000 with Netflix, and less than 1000 movies from iTunes) and the cost of the two devices. Roku is offering their device for $99 whereas the AppleTV starts at $229. Naturally, I would be the first to agree with anyone that says you are getting a lot more from the AppleTV than you would be from the Roku device, such as home networking capabilities, network music and photo sharing, as well as the Apple name, support, and design. However, I'm thrilled to see this product as it is really the first of its kind to offer a low-cost option for online streams of movies and TV without the need for any kind of individual physical medium such as DVDs or Blu-Ray discs.

Another notable difference is that the Roku device claims the content is "near" DVD-quality, compared to that of Apple's soon-to-be-released HD versions of their movies.

I've been telling folks and friends that I think we have seen the end of physical format wars and that the future is online downloadable content. For you will no longer have to rebuild your entire collection with the latest high-quality tape/disc. This announcement from Netlfix was the next step we needed to push our home entertainment choices into the next century more quickly.

I just read in the news that Firefox 3.0 Beta was released today. I have been keeping an eye on this release for quite some time as it will contain some improvements that I, as a Mac user, have been wanting and asking for for a long time.

The foremost reason why I have been watching this release is the simple fact that pre-3.0 versions of Firefox have just been plain out ugly amongst the gorgeous Aqua façade of Mac OS X. Such things like any form widgets: buttons, textboxes, select boxes, etc. These widgets were great boxy and very Netscape 1.0ish in my opinion. This issue was due to the very fact that the version of Firefox for the Mac, did not use the native Cocoa framework to display widgets on a webpage.

I believe about a year ago, it was finally announced that Firefox 3.0 was going to be using the native Cocoa library on OS X to display any kind of page widget. This immediately made me extremely happy.

In addition to the page widgets, the application in it's entirety still looked out of place. I think this had to do with the clear division of the toolbar and the buttons below the toolbar.

For about six months now, I have been running Firefox (Minefield) 3.0a to keep an eye on any changes. It was still fairly slow and lacked some other things but it did have the native page widgets. I never liked it enough to switched it to my default browser and continued to stick with Safari--especially when Safari 3.0b came out.

Well, I just now downloaded Firefox 3.0 Beta from Mozilla's website and I must say, I am presently impressed with the work they have accomplished thus far. The page widgets look great, there is a new unified toolbar at the top, and its seems to be pretty responsive and fast.

I will attempt to use it as my default browser for as long as possible. Now that the user interface things have been added, my main comparison will be speed. I truly feel that Safari has Firefox beat on that one.