Of course the big news wasn’t this week; that’d be ridiculous. No, the big news is next week at Apple’s yearly musical event, held this year on Wednesday, September 1st at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Meanwhile, it wasn’t all crickets around here at the Mac|Life, heck no. We even chased down a staffer in a remote controlled helicopter. Of course there’s a video after the jump

For those of you who prefer to rock an Android handset over Apple’s brand of smartphone sexy, prepare to be giddy: Mozilla has announced the immediate availability of Fennec ( Firefox ) alpha for Android , bringing with it improved performance and responsiveness that even occasional on-the-go users are sure to enjoy. The alpha version of the software marks Mozilla’s second update to Fennec for Android since April and brings us one step closer to the much anticipated beta version of the software. In an interview with the folks at TechRadar , Mozilla’s representatives stated that a full, bona fide version of Firefox would be available to Android users in the later this year. Currently, the browser’s developers are hard at work crossing their eyes and dotting some tees as they pay close attention to some of the finer details of the software, including how it handles video, zooming and scrolling. While we wait for that release, there’s no reason why Android loving road warriors can’t add some awesome to their browsing experience right now

The MPEG LA licensing group has announced that their H.264 video codec standard would be going royalty free in perpetuity for free-to-end-user use. Why does this matter to us? Well, if you’re using an iPhone or iPad, you’re using the H.264 video codec. If you buy video off iTunes, you’re using H.264. If you’re using Safari on iOS or Mac OS for that matter, you’re using H.264 because it’s the only HTML 5 video standard Apple supports

Yikes! First Apple’s own Snow Leopard cut support for PowerPC processors, and now it’s highly possibly that Firefox will follow suit. Firefox director Mike Beltzner himself has proclaimed that he’s gathering data on the number of PowerPC users use Firefox, but it’s unlikely that they will be supported anymore. There are two reasons for the cut: Firefox 4 should be adding out-of-process plug-ins which help prevent crashes, and a new JavaScript compiler that’s similar to the one in Chrome and Safari. Beltzner says the new release will be faster and offer better performance, and that they may still develop a new version of Firefox speciflcally for PowerPCs. But, if they do, it may not even be called Firefox anymore.

Mozilla has released the fourth beta of its latest Firefox browser claimingimproved responsiveness syncing and tabbed browsing functionality.

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Firefox Home for IPhone PC World Although Opera Mini has made it onto the iPhone , another prominent Safari competitor-Mozilla's Firefox-is still missing in action … and more

Granted Firefox can have its ups and downs.

We’re pretty certain this week you rushed to iTunes to download the security-patch-update-only for iOS 4, you know, the one that renders jailbreak.me unworkable. Sure you did. Since Mobile Safari handles PDF files so wonderfully in the first place (cough cough, GoodReader), you open them up all the time and needed to be safe against bad script action. Right