The new Apple TV may be the next device you jailbreak, bans on texting while driving aren’t working as well as we might hope, and Forbes looks into how private is your social networking activity in the face of a lawsuit.

• Apple TV Runs iOS, Already Jailbroken
  Apple TV’s just began shipping and already users are reporting its iOS underpins should allow for easy jailbreaking and potentially app installations. [Wired]
• Gingerbread: The confirmed, the unconfirmed and the desired
  We’re just shy of four months since Android updated with Froyo. Here’s a glimpse at what we might get from their next release, codenamed Gingerbread? [DroidDog]
• Firefox Home – looking to the future
  Mozilla lays out a roadmap of what’s in store for its desktop-to-mobile syncing tool, Firefox Home, including BlackBerry and Symbian versions, password syncing, and more. [Mozilla]
• Texting while driving bans don’t work, may actually hurt, study finds
  It’s unfortunate to hear, but despite laws against texting and driving, related incidents have increased since last year. [NetworkWorld]
• Do Your Social Networking Privacy Settings Matter If You Get Sued?
  In part, due to old laws that vaguely cover social media practices today, it seems more likely your Facebook data may be called into question during court cases. [Forbes]

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Windows/Mac/Linux: Firefox Tab Candy is a new tab management feature for Firefox that organizes tabs into groups to help you keep your tabs grouped by task. Not only does it offer incredibly handy features, but it looks beautiful.

Watch the video above, by Mozilla’s excellent interface designer Aza Raskin, for a quick overview. The idea is sort of like the new app folders in iOS 4, or like a better version of OS X’s Exposé—except for it’s all about your browser tabs. You can drag and drop to re-arrange all your tabs into groups, create new groups by simply dragging a web page outside an existing group and dragging another item on top of it, and name all your groups based on what task they’re related to.

Another favorite feature is that Tab Candy effectively collapses different windows inside of one, so when you’re looking at one group, your others are waiting inside the switching interface. Sure you can open a new window if you need multiple Firefox windows open at once, but most of the time you don’t need the extra clutter. Currently Tab Candy has a few hiccups in use, and there’s not much I can see for keyboard friendliness yet, but it’s promising.

I first tested Tab Candy on OS X, where these shortcuts don’t (yet) work, but I gave it a try and the shortcuts do indeed work in Windows. Handy!

Tab Candy isn’t currently available as an extension, but Mozilla is offering an alpha download of Firefox that includes Tab Candy by default (all platforms). We wouldn’t recommend anyone jump to it as their main browser, but if you’re eager to try it out and are comfortable with alpha software, it’s worth a look.

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Among the changes in the official Firefox 3.6 release is a change to where new tabs open from clicked links—to the right of the tab they launched from. Liked it better the old way? Here’s the quick fix.

The Mozilla Links blog points out a few about:config tweaks that Firefox 3.6 users might be intrigued in, especially if the new version handles things a bit differently than you’re used to, and you don’t want to spend time getting used to the new scheme. To set new tab behavior back to its old ways—opening in the right-most slot—enter about:config into your address bar, click that you’ll be careful, then enter browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent into the search bar. Set that value to “False,” and your new tabs will open where they used to.

For more Firefox 3.6 tweaks, visit Mozilla Links’ post, which details tab preview behaviors in detail.

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It’s not officially released, but a gallery-like site for extensions has made itself known into the latest development builds of Google Chrome for Windows and Linux. Take a peek at what’s coming, presumably very soon, in these development screenshots.

The Download Squad blog was the first to notice the new new thing in Chrome—namely, a jigsaw-like page corner in Chrome’s new tab page, next to a message at the bottom that reads “New! Chrome now has bookmark sync and extensions!”, with both the message and the corner piece linking to http://chrome.google.com/extensions

I saw the same link appear in the chrome://extensions page on my copy of Chromium, from a nightly build Ubuntu repository. Clicking that link, however, re-directs you to Google’s home page. But as many are guessing, Chrome/Chromium wouldn’t push out a new link to leave sitting dead for too long, so we’ll keep watching that page to see when a full-fledged gallery pops up.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler dove into Chromium’s Code Reviews section, and finds screenshots and discussions indicating that Chrome’s extensions will be able to add icons to Chrome’s top toolbar, inside the address bar, and in the bottom-right status bar, and that developers will also be allowed to customize items such as Chrome’s new tab page. Right out of the gate, developers are also indicating extensions from Google itself tied to its Maps, News, and a Gmail checker.

Exciting stuff, and even more so if many of Firefox’s developers take notice and bring over some of the same functionality that hardcore Mozilla users could never imagine leaving behind. Top and bottom photos from TechCrunch; new tab page image from Download Squad.

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Firefox 3.5 pulls data from certain file locations for randomized security purposes. Sometimes, though, that can lead to annoying slow start-ups in Windows. You can speed things up by cleaning out certain folder locations.

For whatever reason, having too many temporary, history, or recent document files sitting in your Windows locations slows down Firefox 3.5’s data generation processes, as has been reported as a bug. The Mozilla Links blog recommends cleaning out these folders to move the browser’s work along:

C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\History
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\My Recent Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\*user*\Temp\

On Vista or Windows 7 systems, simply replace “Documents and Settings” with “Users.” Setting up Firefox to automatically clean out your temporary files after browsing, as explained at the link below, helps prevent the accumulation from building again, but users who trade browsing time with Internet Explorer may have to occasionally work this manual method to wipe out those files.

Workaround for Firefox 3.5 slow startups on Windows [Mozilla Links] 

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