The folks over at the Mozilla Project were pleased to announce the release of their latest version of Firefox yesterday.

In fact, they even went for a world record of number of downloads in a day. Firefox has been continually increasing in browser market share over the past few years and is causing Microsoft much more heart burn than say Safari itself. Even causing Microsoft’s IE team to send a cake to the Firefox team congratulating them on the release

Mozilla is confident that their latest version of Firefox will convert even more people to their browser. So, if you’re a Firefox user or just like to try out another browser, head on over to Mozilla and download Firefox 3.0 for your respective Operating System (OS X, Linux, Windows).

If Firefox isn’t for you, be sure to check out 10 ways to enhance your Safari browsing experience.

If you’re a Mac gamer then you’ve probably been following closely EA’s soon to be released game SPORE.  Yes, unlike most games, SPORE will be released for both the Mac and PC simultaneously.

Well, today is a special day for all you interested in getting your hands on anything to do with the SPORE game.   EA has released the SPORE CREATURE CREATOR for both the PC and MAC.  Head over to the spore website to download the creature creator for Mac.

Feel free to create a unique Spore and let us know about your experience in the comments!

If you’re one of those people that continually adjust system settings, make changes in terminal, and try new and experimental software then you’ve probably done something in the past to your OS X installation that has compromised performance or made things stop working completely.

On the other hand, you may have installed the latest updates to OS X and various programs just stopped working. If either of these sound like you, you may find it handy to have a back up OS X 10.5 Leopard install that you can boot to and make adjustments to your system.

Installing OS X Leopard on a USB Flash Drive is much easier than expected. In fact it is almost the exact same experience you had when installing the device on your Mac originally. For a complete install you’ll need at least an 8gb Flash drive or a larger external USB Hard Drive.

To install OS X Leopard 10.5 follow these steps:

1. Insert the OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD into your Mac
2. Open system preferences, start up disks, and restart into the OS X 10.5 Leopard DVD
3. Once your computer restarts into OS X Leopard, continue through the introduction and agreement pages that will be displayed until you get to the screen that asks you to select your installation Volume.
4. You can’t yet select your USB Flash drive, so select Utility from the menu bar and open Disk Utility
   

5. In Disk Utility, select the USB Flash Drive and then Select Partition.
6. From here select 1 Partition and then click Options
   

7. Select GUID Partition Table so that our computer can boot from the device
   

8. Name the Volume and click Apply.
9. Close out Disk Utility and return to the Volume selection screen. Select your Volume and continue the OS X 10.5 Installation.
10. If you’re installing on an 8gb Flash Drive you’ll need to be sure to customize the installation and remove any printer drivers, language and fonts, and anything else so you can reduce your install to fit on the device itself.

Now that you’ve installed OS X 10.5 on your Flash Drive, it should boot up to the device anytime you select it from System Preference >> Start up Disks.

From my experience running OS X 10.5 on a USB Flash Drive always runs a bit slow at first but performance increases significantly after 10 minutes or so.

If you would like to install a bare bone OS X installation on a device smaller than 8gb see this guide designed for OS X 10.4 but works essentially the same for 10.5

If you’ve enjoyed this article, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to discover more ways to optimize your Mac experience.

June has started off strong again for Maciverse with a number of first time visitors.  As always We love to hear feedback and appreciate everyone’s comments.

Below are some of the most read articles at Maciverse over the past few weeks:

1. The Case of the Slow Mac and How to Fix it - Noticed reduced performance in your Mac lately?  Check out this article to see what may be your problem.
2. Does your Mac need Virus Protection? - See what Apple’s official stance on the subject is.
3. Virtualbox, Parallels on a Budget - Want to run Windows on your Mac but don’t want to spend the money… Read up on the Free solution.
4. Add Holidays to iCal - A quick tip on how to quickly add Holidays to your iCal calendars.
5. iPhoto Sharing with Picasa Web - Another way to quickly share your iPhoto pictures with people over the web.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you don’t miss any Maciverse.com article.

If you’re an Intel Mac user and run Boot Camp with Windows on your Apple Computer than you may be interested in being able to quickly restart your computer into the other OS on your system.

Of course, you can always use the long way, navigate to System Preferences, click Startup Disk, then select the Windows partition, click restart, and then restart again.

Or you can create a quick automator task that will let you restart into your Windows partition simply by running the script or launching the application you saved in automator.

To create a Quick Switch Startup Disk script or app add the following step to an Automator Workflow: Run Apple Script.

Remove any text in the Run Apple Script action and copy in the follow text:

do shell script “bless -mount /Volumes/yourWindowsVolume/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges
do shell script “shutdown -r now” password “yourPassword” with administrator privileges

Replace the text “yourWindowsVolume” with the volume name of your Windows partition and save the workflow as either a script menu plugin or an application.

From here, restarting into Windows is as easy as launching the app or selecting the script from Script Menu in the menu bar.

**Note: you can add the Script Menu to the Menu bar by:

1. Open AppleScript Utility from your Applications folder
2. Check “Show Script Menu in Menu Bar”