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, StatCounter’s July numbers show that Firefox and Chrome, when combined, now account for over 50 percent of web browsing. Technically, Firefox now has a 27.95 percent share, while Chrome has 22.14 percent. Combined, their 50.09 percent easily beat IE’s 42.45 percent. → 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, Mozilla, and yes, Google.
In a post yesterday on their Chromium, it’s pretty clear that Google feels their V8 benchmark suite is the best. In fact, they directly call our their rivals’ suites, noting bugs and saying that they must evolve. And then they go one step further: providing links to versions of the rivals’ suites supposedly perfected by Google! → 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 tracking to measure the effectiveness of their ads.
Marin Software, which offers a way to manage paid search advertising, conducted a study it provided to TechCrunch which shows that 80 percent of the time iOS devices don’t count paid-search conversions (i.e., clicks) because cookie-tracking is turned off. On the Mac, the undercounting occurs 50 percent of the time. All told, when you count all browsers, 38 percent of all paid-search clicks are not being counted. → 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 video standard going forward. Of course, since neither IE nor Safari will support Google’s, Mozilla’s, and Opera’s preferred codec for that standard, we’re right back to plugin land! Why don’t we just call WebM, Flash 2.0? → 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, Google decided to follow-up on their three-paragraph post with a ten-paragraph one today more clearly outlining why they’re making the move. It certainly is more clear, and that’s perhaps what makes it even more frustrating.
As Google notes, this is all about the HTML <video> tag. The search giant cites an impasse in figuring out one codec to use for the future of HTML5-based web video. Safari and IE are backing H.264, but Mozilla and Opera refuse to, and had been backing Ogg Theora. So Google dreamed up WebM and got Mozilla and Opera to sign on board. Unfortunately, we’re still at an impasse, because it does not appear that Safari and IE will be doing the same any time soon. → 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 couple of years and was only about 3 percent away from passing longtime leader (again, in terms of browsing traffic to TechCrunch) Firefox. The quickly progressing Firefox 4 beta likely slowed Chrome’s march to the top a bit, but it couldn’t fully hold it back. Now the question is: can Chrome hang on? → 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. Safari was up a smidge (0.06 percent) to 5.33 percent, and Opera declined 0.11 percent to 2.28 percent. → 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 web with IE, now less than half of them are.
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. 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 web with IE, now less than half of them are. → 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 support HTML5. If you go to the landing page that launches the video in Firefox or even the forthcoming IE9 (which isn’t out yet, but is very HTML5-friendly), it detects your browser and suggests you use Chrome instead.
href=”http://techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/demo-firefox-35-treats-videos-like-web-pages-why-cant-flash-do-that/”>supports HTML5? This isn’t the first time there have been issues with HTML5 compatibility. The problem is that HTML5 is so young that the standards have not been hammered out yet across all browsers. The markup language required to produce the same effect is different for different browsers. → 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 using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript standards. → 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, specifically, with Google Chrome and Safari also showing decent growth for the first part of the year. → 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 Safari with 8.88%. → 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, the IE team has posted a video showing the latest version of IE, IE9 (still in beta testing), running against Safari 5. The result? IE smokes Safari. It’s not even close. → 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
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 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
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 (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
