Entries Tagged 'Browsers' ↓

Norway-based Opera has released the newest version of its Web browser today, promising faster speeds, a streamlined and lightweight user interface and several new extensions.

Opera has reconfigured its "Speed Dial" extension. Instead of static thumbnails of frequently-visited sites, now, when you open a new tab, you can embed websites that will update automatically, such as for weather or stock quotes. Opera has also partnered with several startup applications that give the browser a unique flavor in comparison to the competition.

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Opera's extension partners for version 11.5 include Read It Later, Webdoc, The Hype Machine and StockTwits. Each embeds into the Speed Dial and updates automatically to provide functionality within the browser. Opera has a new password synchronization system through Opera Link that will allow users to port passwords for sites between Opera desktop and mobile browsers.

"We're excited about the work that has gone into Opera 11.50," said Jan Standal, VP of desktop products, in a press release. "Before we challenge Lady Gaga though, we've got to surpass the Tom Selleck moustache fan page on Facebook and the number of forum posts Opera fan Tamil has written. We think Speed Dial extensions are amazing enough to do the trick, but we didn't stop there."

Opera claims to have 185 million users. In terms of browser market share, the company is a distant fifth to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari (in that order). Hence, the company likes to have a little fun. The Opera company homepage has a live counter of how many times version 11.5 has been downloaded with interesting milestones revealed when it reaches a new point. The first was 1,908 downloads, correlated to the most people on stilts at one time. It took Opera almost five hours to pass the working population of the Death Star at 1.2 million and is closing in on its next milestone.

Opera says that it has fixed ""thousands of bugs and upgraded to our newest core rendering engine." It also tweaked the "software graphics engine with faster CSS and SCG rendering" which the company promises makes this version of Opera as stable as it has ever been.

For developers, Opera has new core HTML5 support including Session History and Navigation and the W3C File API.

In a strictly empirical observation, Opera 11.5 is the fastest browser currently running on my computer. Opening new tabs and windows does not have a lag, Speed Dial loads and updates almost automatically and Gmail is seamless (which I could not say was the case with Firefox 4 or 5). Scrolling with my MacBook trackpad is almost too fast, I have found myself zooming past things I want to read and having to track back. It will take a couple weeks of use, but Opera might have finally pushed its way into my cycle of browsers.

Just three months after the hugely successful release of Firefox 4, Mozilla has released the newest version of its browser, Firefox 5. There's little fanfare today, unlike with the previous releases of Mozilla's browser. That's because much like the rapid release cycle of Google's Chrome browser, Mozilla has moved to a faster development cycle for Firefox.

This latest version boasts over one thousand improvements to the browser's security and performance, but the changes - at least to most users - probably won't be that noticeable. It also includes a number of updates to make it easier for developers to build Firefox add-ons and Web apps.

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Browser-Based Privacy

But one of the most interesting additions to this version of Firefox is that now the Do Not Track feature is available across multiple platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux and now Android.

The Do Not Track feature was developed by Mozilla as a response to FTC inquiries about consumers' privacy online. This feature will let users set a preference, broadcasting their desire to opt out of ad-based tracking. It will be signaled via a Do Not Track HTTP header with every page view or click they make. According to Global Privacy and Public Policy Leader at Mozilla, Alex Fowler, "We believe the header-based approach has the potential to be better for the web in the long run because it is a clearer and more universal opt-out mechanism than cookies or blacklists."

Firefox isn't the only browser that's working to address consumers' concerns about their privacy, as all the major browsers are all examining how best to handle this. But Firefox says it's the first to make sure this feature works across platforms. It's also moved the opt-out button to the Preferences tab, making it easier for users to find.

Web Development Tools

Mozilla says that Firefox 5 has better support for HTML5 standards (although as PC World points out, the browser performs no better than version 5 on HTML5test.com. )

Mozilla has also released a new Firefox Add-on SDK for Windows, Mac and Linux as well as a Firefox Add-on Builder Beta - both tools aiming to help developers build Firefox add-ons that work across platforms. The new browser also supports the CSS Animations standards and addresses some of the recently security concerns about WebGL.

The Browser Battles Rage On

The browser battles continue as analysts eye whose market share is rising and whose is falling: Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari. Although (like it or not) Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser, Firefox is at risk of losing its spot as the number two browser to Chrome.

Previous Firefox releases have been flashy events, and the recent Firefox 4 has already become the most popular version of the Firefox browser in usage (in other words, unlike IE users, Firefox folks actually update to the latest version). There's little buzz this time around, although it isn't clear if that will do much to hinder (or help) Firefox adoption.

Mozilla is working on technology that will allow PDF documents to be rendered within the browser, rather than utilizing a browser plug-in or an external app to open them. On his blog, Mozilla researcher Andreas Gal has described the project to build a PDF reader in HTML5 and JavaScript.

Typically, PDFs are rendered in a browser with a plugin - either with Adobe's own PDF reader or with another provider's renderer. These plugins often cannot take full advantage of PDF features. Furthermore, as Gal points out, there is quite a large trusted code base, something that's forced the Google Chrome browser to have sandbox the PDF renderer in order to avoid code injection attacks. An HTML5 version would be make this more secure, as would the open source nature of the project.

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Gal says that Mozilla has been working on pdf.js for about a month. (You can find the GitHub repo here.) The work has been in the open, but on the down low if you will. "We were waiting on the completion of some major features (Type1 fonts, gradients, etc.) before communicating pdf.js more broadly." There's still work to be done on the project, according to Gal, and the plan is to use pdf.js to render PDFs "natively" within Firefox.

"It's important to note that we're not trying to promote PDF to a first-class web citizen like HTML5 is," writes Gal. "Instead we hope that a browser-native PDF renderer written on the web platform allows web technologies to subsume PDF." But with the ubiquity of the PDF, it's great news - particularly for the mobile Web - that it may soon be easier to view PDFs natively in the browser.

Mozilla is always experimenting with how content is searched and discovered in Firefox. The Prospector series within Mozilla Labs has released a new experimental feature today called Predictive NewTab to supplement the fixed list of top sites presented to users when they open a new browser tab in Firefox.

The idea is to use semantic data of browser history and tagged bookmarks to give users recommendations of where on the Web to visit when they open a new tab. It should make the "speed dial" list of sites users frequently visit faster and more relevant to what you were browsing in the tab you are navigating away from.

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In a blog post announcing the experimental Firefox extension, Mozilla uses the example of navigating from away from Pandora with a new tab.

"After opening a new tab from Pandora, Firefox searches both your bookmarks and history for similar websites that you may be interested in based on what you were recently browsing," Mozilla's Abhinav Sharma wrote." This is currently displayed along with some experimental statistics such as score (which is how similar the tags are), frecency (which is a measure of frequency and recency) and others. A hub is a page out algorithms and heuristics believe is a good candidate for being a "home page" or otherwise important page in a website, and BM Engine is an indicator of whether the search result came from a bookmark tag. The results are ranked by no individual one of these but instead a combination."

Predictive NewTab works best if a user has a large number of "well-tagged bookmarks." It will work without bookmarks as well, but Firefox will have less reference material to recommendations from.

Mozilla says that Predictive NewTab is an early-stage experiment and not a polished product designed to help advance history search within Firefox, develop better methods for telling what pages are important to a user and to introduce a "painless way for users to provide feedback to the browser."

Other experimental features that Mozilla has been working on include the AwesomeBar HD that helps provide categorical search within the browser bar and Home Dash, a Prospector initiative designed to navigate Firefox without and URL bar altogether.

RockMelt, the "social Web browser" built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google's Chrome browser, has now partnered with Facebook on a new version, RockMelt Beta 3, out today. The updated software includes over 30 new features, including improved Facebook Chat and notifications, and a smart feature that knows when you're on Facebook.com. When Facebook.com is detected, RockMelt will deliver a more streamlined appearance where certain Facebook features are removed from the website and displayed within the Web browser itself.

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Biggest New Features: Notifications, Messages, Friend Requests Built-in, Plus Better Chat

According to RockMelt, one of the biggest feature requests was for tools to manage Facebook friend requests, messages and notifications right in the browser. This is now a notable new addition in RockMelt 3, where all three can be found at the top-left corner, similar to Facebook's own website. You can also confirm friend requests and compose messages within the browser.

Facebook Chat has been improved too, with a revamp of  the "Friend Edge" - the feature which displays your friend list alongside the browser window. Now this Friend Edge offers an expandable view where you can see your friends' full names and pictures or even search the list by name. You can also scroll through the list or move the list to the other side of the browser, if you prefer.

Special Version of Facebook.com Designed for RockMelt

One of the more interesting new features is the new version of Facebook.com which displays when you visit the website from RockMelt. Built with Facebook's help, this new, simplified website removes all redundancies, such as the Friend Requests, Messages, Notifications and friend lists, which are just displayed in RockMelt.

Other Features

In total, there are 31 new features in the update, including the following:

• Brand New Friend Edge
• Expandable View with names and favorite status
• Scrollable Friend Edge
• Swappable Friend Edge and App Edge
• Friend search in Friend Edge
• Chat status can now be changed to online / offline even easier
• Option to hide offline friends
• Improved context menu when right-clicking friends
• Unified View of Friends: Favorite Friends and Other Friends now shown together
• Drag-and-drop to remove or add friends to Favorites
• Confirm and reject Friend Requests added
• View and reply to Messages added
• See Notifications and the associated item of interest (status updates, links, or photos)
• Universal chat experience from RockMelt – no more duplicate chat windows and friend lists
• Initiating chats on Facebook.com will open chats in RockMelt
• Universal Friend Requests, Messages and Notifications right in RockMelt – no more duplicates on Facebook.com
• New Facebook App with Photo Album Viewer
• Quick access to your own Facebook Profile
• Better Chat with Previous chat history now shown when chatting with friends, improved notification when chats are received and a simplified chat window
• Easy status updater
• One-click Quiet Mode button
• Twitter: Option for growl and taskbar notifications for incoming tweets
• (Mac) Scrollable App Edge so you can get updates from even more Apps
• (Mac) Share Improvements
• Quick image picker - just click on the embedded image to see all the ones that can be selected
• Link titles and descriptions can now be edited

Facebook's Involvement?

Facebook's involvement with RockMelt however, begins and ends with this collaboration. The company has no plans to help distribute the Web browser to its end users, Ethan Beard, director of platform partnerships told The New York Times. That means that RockMelt will rely on word-of-mouth and its own marketing to spread to new users, which will be a challenge. Many don't even know what a Web browser is, as Google sadly discovered, much less how to download a new one.

It's also unclear if RockMelt is truly solving a problem here. Is Facebook actually a better experience as a Web browser than as a website? Or is it more of a distraction? Does it do anything better than the website itself, or does it just do it differently?

Despite its high-profile backers - RockMelt was funded by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen - it's not the first company to attempt a "social" Web browsing experience. Flock, a one-time up-and-comer in this same space recently failed, and support for both its Firefox and Chrome-based versions was shut down in April of this year.  While Flock had a number of other challenges, too, one was simply that it failed to convince users that social networking needed to be integrated with the browser itself. Whether RockMelt will go the same route is yet to be seen.

Google released a new version of its Web browser Google Chrome to its stable channel today, the main channel favored by many, if not most, of Chrome's 160 million users. The updated version offers improvements in security and stability, says Google, most of which will function behind-the-scenes for a better browsing experience.

However, improvements to the browser's graphics capabilities will be more noticeable to users. With added support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, Web applications using 3D effects will be "snazzier," Google says. So, what does that mean?

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3D CSS

With 3D CSS, which is now available in Google Chrome, the browser has access to the computer's hardware to speed up the experience of viewing 3D effects. To see what this looks like in action, Google offers a link to a Chrome experiment called "Shaun of the Sheep." This cute cartoon (which works only in Chrome), demonstrates how 3D CSS lets you rotate a video, scale it up and down, turn the reflection on and off and activate a rotating carousel of videos.

In addition to 3D CSS Transforms, the experiment also takes advantage of hardware-accelerated HTML5 and the new audio-video format, WebM, open-sourced by Google last year.

More Security Tools

Also new in this release are enhancements to Google's Safe Browsing technology, which has now been improved to warn you before you download certain malicious files. Chrome has improved this detection process so that it can detected the malicious files without having ever seen what URL you visited. More details on that process are described here.

Bye-bye, Flash Cookies!

Google's close relationship with Adobe has allowed it to integrate Flash LSO (local shared objects) deletion right into the Web browser, so you can better manage your online privacy. These objects, often referred to as "Flash cookies" are similar to their "browser cookies" counterparts, in that they contain information used to customize your Web browsing experience, or hold data like your login info for a website. Unfortunately, Flash cookies are harder to delete than regular cookies - until now, Chrome users were only able to manage or delete cookies using this online tool. Now, you'll be able to delete the cookies from your browser Settings. Just click on the Wrench, go to Tools, Clear Browsing Data and select "Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data."

And More...

You can also launch your Chrome Web apps by name within the Omnibox in Chrome 12, the Settings pages have been updated, there's improved screen reader support and finally, you can say farewell to Google Gears. The Gears plugin will no longer be supported in this or any future releases of Google Chrome to provide offline access to Web applications. Those duties will be taken over by HTML5 going forward, starting with Gmail Offline, expected by Q3 2011.

Google released a new version of its Web browser Google Chrome to its stable channel today, the main channel favored by many, if not most, of Chrome's 160 million users. The updated version offers improvements in security and stability, says Google, most of which will function behind-the-scenes for a better browsing experience.

However, improvements to the browser's graphics capabilities will be more noticeable to users. With added support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, Web applications using 3D effects will be "snazzier," Google says. So, what does that mean?

Sponsor

3D CSS

With 3D CSS, which is now available in Google Chrome, the browser has access to the computer's hardware to speed up the experience of viewing 3D effects. To see what this looks like in action, Google offers a link to a Chrome experiment called "Shaun of the Sheep." This cute cartoon (which works only in Chrome), demonstrates how 3D CSS lets you rotate a video, scale it up and down, turn the reflection on and off and activate a rotating carousel of videos.

In addition to 3D CSS Transforms, the experiment also takes advantage of hardware-accelerated HTML5 and the new audio-video format, WebM, open-sourced by Google last year.

More Security Tools

Also new in this release are enhancements to Google's Safe Browsing technology, which has now been improved to warn you before you download certain malicious files. Chrome has improved this detection process so that it can detected the malicious files without having ever seen what URL you visited. More details on that process are described here.

Bye-bye, Flash Cookies!

Google's close relationship with Adobe has allowed it to integrate Flash LSO (local shared objects) deletion right into the Web browser, so you can better manage your online privacy. These objects, often referred to as "Flash cookies" are similar to their "browser cookies" counterparts, in that they contain information used to customize your Web browsing experience, or hold data like your login info for a website. Unfortunately, Flash cookies are harder to delete than regular cookies - until now, Chrome users were only able to manage or delete cookies using this online tool. Now, you'll be able to delete the cookies from your browser Settings. Just click on the Wrench, go to Tools, Clear Browsing Data and select "Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data."

And More...

You can also launch your Chrome Web apps by name within the Omnibox in Chrome 12, the Settings pages have been updated, there's improved screen reader support and finally, you can say farewell to Google Gears. The Gears plugin will no longer be supported in this or any future releases of Google Chrome to provide offline access to Web applications. Those duties will be taken over by HTML5 going forward, starting with Gmail Offline, expected by Q3 2011.

Starting August 1, Google Apps will only support functionality for the newest versions of the major Web browsers.

Google says that such as desktop Gmail notifications and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs "require advanced browsers that support HTML5." The move fits within Google's plan to bring all computer-based functionality to the Web, with its Chrome browser and operating system the tip of the spear.

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On August 1, Google Apps will cease functionality for Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 3. Google Chrome 11 is the newest version of Google's browser and unlike the others, Chrome updates to new versions automatically.

In theory, supporting just the last two releases of the four major browsers should make it easier to earn Google Apps Certification, a program Google announced in February. Google gave administrators the ability to opt out of automatically receiving the newest updates in March, a move that is beneficial for enterprises that often are not able to move fast enough to maintain security and cross-business functionality.

Also in March, Google launched a "What's New" page for Google Apps to let users stay up to date on the latest releases. New releases are added to the schedule one week before they go live.

Among other Google Apps updates this year is the ability to delegate administrative tasks to users. That helps company IT departments share the responsibility of performing certain tasks across the enterprise. Google also made changes to its service level agreements in January to eliminate planned downtime for apps.

Firefox 4 is gaining in the global browser wars. It has eclipsed version 3.6 for the first time and now is the third most-used browser in the world, behind Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome 11, according to StatCounter Global.

If you put add all versions of all the browsers together, IE is still the global leader with 43.9%, of which 4.6% is IE 9. Firefox is second with 29.3%. Chrome has experienced the most growth, going from 8.6% in 2010 to 19.4% in 2011. Yet, given the different stats you see from different sources, the precise numbers in the browser market are hard to determine. See the charts below.

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Firefox has added almost 10% to its global market share since 2008, when it broke the 20% barrier, according to Mozilla. We asked last year if Firefox was going to lose market share to Chrome. Based on the StatCounter Global statistics, that is not the case. Yet, if you look at NetMarketShare, Firefox only has 21.71% of the market (down from 24.59%) while Chrome has grown from 6.73% to 12.52%. See the opposing charts below.

StatCounter Global Data

NeMarketShare Data

In the U.S., IE has 47% of the market while Firefox weighs in at 15% and Chrome at 15%. That would correlate with data we reported from Quantcast in February 2010 that said U.S. users are less likely to use Chrome or Firefox.

The StatCounter report says that Firefox version 4 has had considerable adoption since its release in March. That's impressive considering Firefox requires users to manually update browser versions whereas Chrome automatically updates and Microsoft prompts users to upgrade from IE 8 to IE 9 within Windows Vista and Windows 7.

StatCounter Global statistics are based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month, 4 billion of which came from the U.S. The data is collected from the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites.

I doubt that Google has plans to bring its Chrome browser to the iPad anytime soon, but for fans of Chrome, there's a new app you might want to consider: iChromy.

The app has some of the look and feel of the Chrome browser. There are tabs at the top of the screen and an omnibox that'll let you perform searches as well as type URLs. There's also a little star on the side of the omnibox, just like Chrome, that lets you bookmark pages.

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You can also save pages to read them offline and send pages to other third-party services, including Facebook, Evernote, Twitter, Instapaper, and Diigo. The latter service is key as this app is actually the creation of the bookmarking service Diigo, and for users of the site, the easy integration with one's saved bookmarks might be reason alone to use the new iPad browser.

iChromy isn't particularly feature-rich, and it's missing some elements that other iPad browsers have, including the ability to set a Web page to your home screen.

But if you're a fan of tabbed browsing, then you might be quite pleased with iChromy. The stability and speed of the app are pretty impressive. In order to avoid memory issues with having multiple tabs open, iChromy reloads tabs dynamically when you need to access them again.

The app is free, but Diigo says future releases of iChromy will have more advanced options that coincide with Diigo's own annotation and highlighting features, which are part of Diigo's premium bookmarking services.