YARO

It’s the end of the world as we know it. Well, not really, but once they receive their final payment from Facebook, the US Patent and Trademark Office will allow the company to trademark the word “face”. According to TechCrunch, “the U.S. Patent And Trademark Office has sent the social networking site a Notice of Allowance, which means they have agreed to grant the “Face” trademark to Facebook.

All Facebook needs to do is pay the issue fee within three months of today and the “Face” trademark will be issued and be published in the official USPTO gazette and everything.”

While it’s bizarre that a company should have the right to trademark a common-use word, it isn’t as bad as it seems. In this case, the USPTO is limiting the scope of the trademark only to “telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users in the field of general interest and concerning social and entertainment subject matter, none primarily featuring or relating to motoring or to cars.”

What that means is that other companies in the social networking sphere would be wise to not include “face” in their names. Others, however, are in the clear.

The folks at Firefox have been busy since June working on their latest release of the award-winning browser. The latest beta release (Version 4, r7) has been showing much improvement. As LifeHacker reports:

Mozilla has let loose the JaegerMonkey engine, enabled hardware graphics acceleration on Windows and Mac, and integrated Sync and the awesome Panorama/”Tab Candy”.

Mozilla says their JaegerMonkey compiler, combined with their other improvements, leaves Firefox 4 with a seriously impressive engine for rendering web pages and interpreting webapps and games. Their chart of three benchmark tests, including their own, shows what looks like some serious improvements, at least over their previous releases (and we can’t wait to put them to the test):

While those are impressive numbers indeed, the beta release of the browser still lags behind some other strong contenders in the rendering speed race. In particular, various tests have shown that Opera, Chrome, and Safari beat FF:

While there is some disparity between the results — it’s surprising that Opera 10.6 does very well on the Peacekeeper test (and in my previous SunSpider tests) but not so well on Dromaeo — it’s clear that although the beta of Firefox 4 shows a definite improvement, it’s still lagging behind the other browsers, particularly Chrome, which was the fastest on both tests.