Your Web browser’s private browsing mode, perhaps not as “private” as you would like to see. A new study, coming out of Stanford University’s Security Lab in the Computer Science Department, says that modern browsers’ private browsing mode may be undermined when visiting certain Web sites or by using certain extensions. Nice. → Read More
If you’re anything like me, at any given time you have a dozen to two dozen tabs open across multiple web browser windows. It’s great to have all these webpages open and ready to click on at any second, but it’s a nightmare to try and remember where each is with so many open. I shudder to think how much time I waste on this each day. Luckily, Mozilla is working on a solution.
A new feature called Tab Candy is in the works. It’s still early in testing mode, as Mozilla’s Aza Raskin points out on his blog today, but it looks to be exactly what I need. → Read More
Firefox personas, if you didn’t know, allow you to theme the browser without munging up the placement of buttons or other browser elements. It was originally an extension, but Mozilla baked the features of the Personas extension directly into version 3.6 of the browser. Neat, except that updates to the personas feature were then tied irrevocably to browser updates. And Mozilla has a few restrictions on how personas operate — like, you can only have 8 of them at a time, and you can only get them from the personas showcase. Brand Thunder has just released their own extension called Personas Interactive that leapfrogs Mozilla’s offering. → Read More
One of the greatest things about the Firefox browser is that any developer can expand its features and capabilities with a simple add-on. There are add-ons for everything—Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, feed readers, price comparison, photos, music, and more. Today, every browser supports plug-ins and extensions.
Yesterday, cumulative add-on downloads passed the 2 billion mark. It passed the first billion downloads back in November, 2008. The first billion took three and a half years. The second billion took about 20 months. Many of those are never used again, but a full 150 million add-ons are used every single day at least once. → Read More
It’s a pretty old video, and it has garnered some 230,000 views since its publication in November 2009, but we hadn’t seen it yet and perhaps neither have you.
Try not to grin while watching this demo video on the Office Live Workspace website.
Looks like the person demoing how to add multiple documents to your workspace is keen on using Mozilla Firefox (around the 0:25 mark) to showcase how to download Silverlight, Microsoft also competing in the browser space be damned. → Read More
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it 1,000 times: the best way to stay safe online is to keep your wits about you and not to venture off into the darker corners of the Internet, if you know what I mean. I bring this up because there’s a nasty bit of kit out there that means to attack unsuspecting Mac users. It sorta makes sense from the malware creator’s perspective: Mac users tend to operate under the assumption that they’re immune from malware because A) their numbers are too few to be a juicy target B) their system is inherently more secure. You can debate point B all day long, but as Apple sells more and more Macs you can bet that miscreants will be targeting the platform with increasing frequency. → Read More
Aside from the usual under-the-hood improvements, Safari 5 ships with a new feature called Safari Reader. The concept is simple enough: you’re reading text on a Web site but don’t want to be distracted by terrible page layouts and extraordinarily annoying animated advertisements. You activate Reader, then the browser isolates the text and applies a far more readable formatting to the text. The result is much cleaner text, and text that doesn’t destroy your eyes trying to read. The best part is that you don’t need the new Safari to replicate the same functionality. I speak, of course, about Readablity. → Read More
One of the things rumored to be appearing during Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC today was the next version of Safari, 5. That didn’t happen. But Apple occasionally gives us some quiet surprises, and that appears to be the case today as Safari 5 is in fact being released — at least according to a press release.
While it’s nowhere to be found on Apple’s Safari site yet, nor is it available yet in Software update, the new version is apparently coming today. So what’s in it? Well, like the new iPhone OS, it will have a new option to make Bing the built-in search engine. More significantly, the new version also brings Safari Extensions support — a new feature which will allow you to “customize and enhance the browsing experience.” This will allow the browser, which Apple says is used by 200 million devices worldwide (because they’re counting iPhones and iPads too), to match a key functionality of the rival browsers Chrome and Firefox. → Read More
Quora is a great place to find answers about products from prominent people involved with them. It’s also a great place for those prominent people to disagree, publicly. That’s what’s happening right now in a thread about the future of Firefox.
Someone posted the following question to Quora recently: Will Firefox have double-digit market share in 3 to 5 years? Straightforward enough. Yes, says (outgoing) Mozilla CEO John Lilly. No, says Firefox co-founder Blake Ross. So far, Ross is winning the argument, according to the votes from Quora users. → Read More
Potentially big news in the world of open source software, friends. Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. Well, maybe for Chrome, or maybe for Chromium, the open source project that Chrome is based upon. Therein lies the rub, I do believe. What’s going on is that Ubergizmo, a fine site, hears that Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) is considering adding Chrome (or Chromium—more on that in a second) to Ubuntu Linux Netbook Remix, the next big release of which is due this autumn. What a terribly constructed sentence. Exactly why they’d replace Firefox with Chrome or Chromium isn’t known, but presumably they feel that the new browser on the block performs better on the average netbook than Firefox. No one would be inaccurate in calling Firefox a bit of a memory hog at times. I wouldn’t touch a netbook with a 10-foot pole—netbooks may also be dying, so this may all be moot sooner rather than later—so I have no idea if that’s true or not, that Chrome or Chromium out-performs Firefox on netbooks. I have no horse in that race, as it were. → Read More
Late last month, a number of sites noted that a very early build of Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, was available to download for Android phones. However, that build wasn’t official as it was put together by an individual and optimized for the Droid device. Today, Mozilla has itself put out a pre-Alpha build of Fennec that should work at the very least on Droid and the Nexus One.
Mozilla is quick to note that this is a pre-Alpha build of the browser, and is only for testing purposes. But that isn’t stopping Mozilla’s Vladimir Vukićević from announcing it on his blog. “There also aren’t yet any automated nightly developer builds or automated updates to this build; it’s even more of a pre-nightly build (even earlier than pre-alpha). But, it’s usable enough that we wanted to get some feedback on it as we continue to develop,” he notes. → Read More
Opera has always been a bit of a curiosity to me. Nearly everyone seems to tout its speed and adherence to web standards — and yet, no one seems to use it. Well, at least not in the United States anyway, and really not that many people worldwide either. Why is that?
Today, Opera announced a new version (10.52) available for OS X. The promise is that it’s ten times faster than the last version I used (10.10). In fact, they’re saying it’s the “world’s fastest browser for Mac.” So I decided to try it out as my primary browser the entire morning. → Read More
Ooh, this is a nasty one, isn’t it? There’s a computer virus out there called Zeus that targets users engaged in online banking. It affects users running Firefox and Internet Explorer—a fair chunk of all Internet users, then. As always, the best policy here is to keep your wits about you as you browse the Internet. → Read More
Mozilla platform engineer Rob Sayre has probably had better ideas.
Hoping Microsoft might allow Firefox on their new Windows Phone 7 Series, Sayre wrote an open letter this morning to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Hola, amigo. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya,” is how it starts.
He then proceeds to make fun of Windows Phone 7 Series, the iPhone, Cocoa Touch, and Unix — all in three concise paragraphs. He notes that Windows Phone 7 Series has a “busted” UI, calls the iPhone’s UI “ugly jelly beans,” and mocks the “allegedly cool” Cocoa Touch “stuff.” → Read More
Back in June, Google launched Sputnik, a suite of tools that runs over 5,000 tests to check a web browser’s JavaScript conformance. Last week, they made the tool a lot easier for anyone to use, with a version that works in the web browser. The results are interesting.
Notably, both the Opera and Safari web browsers beat Google’s own Chrome browser in the test. As you can see in the picture above, Opera is the clear leader, with only 78 failures (the closer to the center, the less errors). Safari came in second with 159 errors, with Chrome in third with 218 errors. Firefox is close behind with 259 errors, while Internet Explorer is the outlier with 463 errors. → Read More
Today’s a very important day in the history of me using the Internet, a history that began in late 1996. Ladies and gentleman, I have completely uninstalled AdBlock. I do believe that makes me a man in the Jewish faith, so I’ll be expecting presents from all of you. → Read More
It was only December when Google officially launched extensions for its Chrome browser. Almost immediately, there were 500 extensions in the gallery as many developers had been working on them for a while. Today, Google is saying that number is now past 3,000. And that’s significant because it’s already pretty close to the browser known for its extensions (which it calls “add-ons”), Firefox.
The exact number of add-ons for Firefox is a bit unclear. If you go by the category counts on the add-on site, there are 11,623. But it’s hard to know for sure if there is any overlap between the categories (I couldn’t find any, but I’m not sure there isn’t). More significantly, if you go by Mozilla’s statistic site where they tout their numbers, they claim to only have around 6,000 add-ons. To quote them, “Over 6,000 free, community contributed Add-ons for Firefox – more than for any other browser“. And in case you think this data is out of date, notes other 2010 milestones, such as the launch of Firefox 3.6. → Read More
Simply put: Google Chrome is amazing. Ever since it was finally released for the Mac late last year, I’ve been blown away by its big things (speed) and little things (search box that is also the URL box). But the true power of Chrome may lie in what third-party developers are able to do with it. This is what helped Firefox rip market share away from Internet Explorer over the past several years. Chrome is still young, but already making impressive gains in share each month as well. And the browser could be about to get even better.
In a post today on the Chromium Blog, software engineer Erik Kay notes the existence of experimental APIs for Chrome. Basically, these are new APIs that aren’t yet ready for prime time development, but are available on the dev builds of Chrome for developers to play with right now. The first two experimental APIs available sound very interesting. One, “experimental processes,” allows third party developers to access Chrome’s process model. This allows for extensions that could monitor CPU processes for individual tabs, for example. But the other is potentially more interesting. “Experimental history” is described as follows: → Read More
After a lengthy legal face-off, Microsoft and European antitrust officials recently agreed on the implementation of a so-called ballot screen that will give European Windows users a chance to download rivals’ browsers – including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera – as possible alternatives to Redmond’s own Internet Explorer (see screenshot above or go here).
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to provide a “ballot screen” to most European customers that will offer links to downloads of browsers offered by the company’s fiercest competitors when it comes to the Web browsing space, starting next week. The browser choice screen was designed to give all listed browsers a random order upon each new visit; antitrust regulators saw this as the right path to take to make European consumers more aware of alternative browsers to IE without favoring one over the other.
But how random is the presentation of the browser on that ballot screen, really? → Read More
Yesterday, browser market share figures came out from Net Applications, and the big news is how Chrome is moving up the ranks at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox, compared to December. But you have to look further back to get a sense of what is really happening.
The various flavors of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, and IE8) together have 62.1 percent market share, down from 68.5 percent last March. That is a 6.4 percent drop in about a year. During the same period Chrome went from 1.6 percent share to 5.2 percent. Firefox and Safari each gained about a percentage point each over the same period to 24.4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively. (Although Firefox is a tiny bit down since November, when it peaked at 24.7 percent). If you add up the gains from those three—Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—that is where most of IE’s share went. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story because if you look at share of individual versions of the different browsers, you can see another dynamic in play. → Read More
