At its WWDC developer conference today, Apple announced the next version of Safari which will launch with OS X Mavericks. The new version, Apple’s Craig Federighi, will feature significantly improved JavaScript performance which Apple says will beat Chrome and Firefox. Safari will now also support OS X’s new Power Nap feature, which will significantly reduce the browser’s power… → Read More
It’s sure been an interesting week for this of us who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday I got an email from Mozilla, asking if I had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written… → Read More
The news that Opera is shutting down the development of its own browser rendering engine and moving to the open source WebKit engine cause quite a stir earlier this week. With WebKit powering the built-in browsers of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, it’s already the de-facto standard engine for the mobile and it has the potential to do the same on the desktop. Worldwide, Chrome now holds a … → Read More
Apple and Google still represent the bulk of reviewed commits contributing to the ongoing development of WebKit, the open source web browser engine that powers Safari and Chrome, among others. Google accounts for the bulk of commits, having overtaken Apple in that regard back in 2009 (though Apple still does much more with fewer authors actually writing code), but the more interesting story here… → Read More
Twelephone is a new service for making calls right from your Twitter account. The service is one of the first to use the new WebRTC standard, which allows for real-time communication in the Chrome browser via JavaScript APIs. The enterprise will serve as Twelephone’s business model. The idea: a customer with a problem with a product or service gets reached through Twitter. The consumer gets… → Read More
I noticed some odd behavior in mobile Safari on iOS 6, and while I thought it to be just a minor quibble on my part, it turns out that it’s actually something of a notable bug, now affecting web developers targeting the platform. The problem I noticed is that little, spinning loading indicator (or whatever you call it) at the top of mobile Safari which tells you when a site has finished loading… → Read More
Safari 6 brings improved performance and many new features to OS X, including offline reading lists, a unified search field and support for Do Not Track. What seems to be completely gone from Apple’s site now, though, is any mention of the Windows version of Safari. Indeed, it looks like Apple has removed all download links for Safari from its site for the time being. This could be because Apple… → Read More
Getting Retina-ready isn’t the only big change coming to Apple’s web browser Safari today, it’s also getting a revamp which introduces a number of new features. Included in the list are faster search suggestions, a new unified smart search field, iCloud syncing (this one we knew about already), a new feature called TabView which uses gestures to navigate through tabs, and what’s being touted as… → Read More
Much of the time when you talk about browser market share, it’s in the context of IE vs. Chrome vs. all the rest. But new data released from e-commerce technology company Monetate today has thrown the mobile version of Safari into the mix. The result? The firm found Mobile Safari to be the most rapidly growing web browser over the past year on its sites, going from 5.84% in Q1 2011 to 11.12% in… → Read More
A month just ended, which means new stats. In the world of web browsers, there are two particularly interesting ones of significance. One points to “open” web browsers now in the majority amongst those that surf the web. Another points to WebKit browsers passing Firefox, to claim the number two position amongst web surfers.
As first noticed by Google’s Peter Beverloo this morning… → Read More
When it comes to Chrome, Google has long been addicted to speed. And for many tasks on the web today, that speed is related to how fast your JavaScript engine is. Google has long held that their’s is the fastest. But it’s hard to know for sure because there are a few different benchmark suites to test such speeds — and the most popular ones are made by companies with stakes in the game: Apple… → Read More
Apple mobile iOS devices (iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches) are used by 130 million people, but they present a huge blindspot to advertisers. All Apple mobile devices use the Safari browser, as do millions of Apple laptop and desktop computers. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default, which is good for privacy and good for consumers. But it is bad for advertisers who rely on browser cookie… → Read More
Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 were the first two Web browsers to fall in the latest Pwn2Own contest. And yes, this takes into account Apple’s latest Safari security patch that dropped yesterday. → Read More
We’ve already done a full breakdown of Google’s clarification of their H.264 pullout today. But buried in their post is another interesting nugget worth highlighting by itself: WebM plugins are coming shortly for Safari and IE9.
Yes, plugins.
This is both humorous and terrifying on a few levels. First and formost, the point of all of this H.264/WebM stuff is so that the web can shift to an HTML5… → Read More
Earlier this week, Google wrote a very short post on their relatively small Chromium blog to announce a big change: they were dropping support for the H.264 codec in Chrome. While they may have tried to whisper it, the post resulted in a shitstorm that reached high into the heavens. It seems as if just about everyone weighed in on the decision (including us, twice).
As a result of the fallout… → Read More
It has finally happened. It took a little longer than anticipated, but Chrome has now passed Firefox as the browser most often used to visit TechCrunch. For the month of November, Chrome is number one for the first time, edging out Firefox 27.80 percent to 27.67 percent.
Back in early September, on Chrome’s second birthday, we noted that Google’s browser had been making huge gains over the past… → Read More
Browser market share numbers are out for October from Net Applications. Chrome made the biggest gains with a 0.49 percent jump from September to 8.47 percent.
Chrome is the third most popular browser after Internet Explorer (59.26 percent) and Firefox (22.82 percent). Both FireFox and IE saw their overall market share positions erode slightly by 0.39 percent and 0.14 percent, respectively. … → Read More
According to the the latest data from the company, last month, September 2010, marked the first time IE fell below the 50 percent share mark in the past decade. Of course, this data only counts what StatCounter collects, but they claim that it’s a huge dataset worldwide — billions of visits from millions of sites. And the trend is clear: two years ago, two-thirds of those people were browsing the… → Read More
On Monday, Google made a big splash with a customized Arcade Fire video page that showed off all the cool things HTML5 can do, from video, animations and 3D rendering to gorgeous fonts and choreographed windows. It’s all cutting edge stuff as far as what is possible with a Web browser goes, but there is one very big problem. It doesn’t work so great in all browsers, even browsers that supposedly… → Read More
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
Fresh off the heels of launching a slew of new products yesterday, Apple this morning debuted Safari 5.0.1, switching the flip on Safari Extensions and formally introducing the Safari Extensions Gallery, a directory of available extensions across categories.
The company had introduced extensions support in Safari 5 last June, giving developers the opportunity to start creating browser add-ons… → Read More
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is showing early signs of a ‘comeback’, reversing a practically constant slide in browser usage over the past few years for the month of June, according to figures just released by Net Applications.
Still the dominant browser in terms of market share any way you slice it, Internet Explorer appears to be reclaiming share at the expense of Mozilla Firefox… → Read More
According to website analytics company StatCounter, Google Chrome has now overtaken Apple’s Safari in the US browser market for the first time on a weekly basis, claiming third place overall.
StatCounter, which says it analyzed some 874 million pages viewed on its network of over 3 million websites in the US alone for the week 21 to 27 June 2010, pegs Chrome’s market share at 8.97%, ahead of… → Read More
Yesterday, Apple released the latest version of its web browser, Safari 5. In their release notes, they highlight not only new features, but also the fact that it’s faster than the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. One competitor they didn’t mention was the most-used web browser in the world: Internet Explorer. Today, Microsoft has responded to that.
In a post on their Blogging Windows blog… → 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… → Read More
The rumors were true. Apple announced the update to Safari 5 and Apple is ambitious about trumping Chrome and Firefox in the browser wars. Just as reported over the weekend, Safari will gain some major backend updates to add speed and functionality to Apple’s browser juice. Here’s what’s new: → 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… → Read More
With WWDC just around the corner, it was only a matter of time before a few more details leaked out about the event. Steve Jobs recently mentioned at All Things D that come Monday we wouldn’t be left disappointed, even after the new iPhone had been leaked into the wild. Something exciting is still up Steve’s sleeve but is it Safari 5? → 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… → Read More
There are few people who know the ins and outs of the web as well as Joe Hewitt. For the past decade, he’s had his hands deep in everything from Netscape, to AOL, to Firefox, to Facebook (where he currently works). Hewitt also knows a thing or two about the iPhone. He’s the one who first built Facebook’s excellent iPhone web app (before there were native apps on the iPhone), and then the native… → Read More
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