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 app — which is one of the best apps on the platform. So when he rants about something (as he does from time-to-time), people listen. And today he went on one such rant.
Following Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ post about Flash this morning, Hewitt went on Twitter and started going off with some of this thoughts. I asked Hewitt if I could recap them; his response, “sure, why not.” Hewitt, some may recall, quit iPhone development over his distaste for some App Store policies. Today, seeing a wave of anti-Flash talk on Twitter spurred by Jobs’ post, Hewitt started out: → 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
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
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber wrote what I thought was a good response to my post about Apple’s App Store sexy app policy. While I noted that one of the reasons Apple’s policy was silly was because each iPhone contains two apps, iTunes and Safari (both made by Apple), that grant users access to content much worse than the kind of stuff now being banned from the App Store, he comes back to say that maybe the idea isn’t to remove this content from the iPhone itself, but rather just from the actual App Store.
My first reaction to this was the humorous thought that both iTunes and Safari would be banned from the App Store had they not been included by default on every iPhone. But that actually lead to a more interesting thought that a few other posts around the web back up today: Safari is the iPhone’s peephole. → 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
Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.
Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project. → 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
There is no question that mobile browsing is taking off. The latest data from Opera shows that nearly 32 million people used its Opera Mini mobile browser in August, 2009, a 147 percent increase over the year before. In terms of pageviews, Opera Mini delivered 13.9 billion last month, a 235 percent annual increase. That means that each person is loading 436 pages a month on their cell phones, or 14 a day. A year ago, Opera Mini users were uploading 323 pages a month, or 10 a day. So both the number of people browsing on mobile phones and usage is going up.
But is Opera Mini the “world’s most popular mobile browser,” as Opera claims in a press release? What about the mobile version of Safari, which is the only browser allowed on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple has sold a total of 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches (30 million iPhones, and 20 million Touches), which both come with the Safari mobile browser. → Read More
The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.
Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. → Read More
Mozilla today released Firefox 3.5 into the wild. Not surprisingly, it’s flying off the virtual shelves. And unlike when Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 last year, its servers are staying up and reliable, so the rate of downloads is pretty incredible. This site, run by Mozilla, shows the download stats for the new browser. Overall downloads are now approaching 1.3 million worldwide, with over 350,000 of those in the U.S. But even more amazing is the number of downloads occurring each second, it’s ranging from 59 to 95 right now. Again, that’s every second.
Outside of the U.S., the browser is moving quickly in Germany, France and the UK. The claim is that it’s much faster than the previous iterations of Firefox, and based on just a quick run-through of my favorite sites, I’d say that is in fact the case. Though, to be fair, it’s hard to know if that has something to do with the fact that just about all my browser plugins are not yet working with this version. → Read More
Opera may be reinventing the web next week, but in the meantime the browser wars continue to rage on. Apple has come out with a news release claiming its latest browser, Safari 4, has topped 11 million downloads in the first three days of its release. Surprisingly, it also claims over half of those (or 6 million to be specific) were the Windows version of the program.
Apple continues to tout the speed of its browser, claiming that it loads HTML pages 3 times faster than both Firefox 3 and IE8, and that the new Nitro JavaScript engine executes JavaScript nearly 8 times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Mozilla’s latest browser version. → Read More
And what else did Apple unveil today, hmm? How about the final version of Safari 4! Yup, it should be available to download today at some point. → Read More
After weeks of dealing with Firefox running like a pile of hot garbage on both of my Macs, I made the jump over to the Safari 4 Beta as soon as word of it broke this morning. All was well until I went to go log in to pay my gas bill, when I suddenly realized that I had no idea what the passwords were for my less frequently used services. 1password keeps track of all that junk for me, and suddenly 1password was no where to be found. I was alone. Fortunately, it’s a pretty easy fix. → Read More
A month after being granted U.S. patent No. 7,441,196, a company in Los Angeles called EMG Technology is suing Apple for “the way the iPhone navigates the Internet,” according to a press release. The suit did not specify the damages EMG is seeking, but the company has hired a serious gun: Stanley Gibson, one of the lead trial attorneys who won the $1.35 billion patent infringement lawsuit against Medtronic. Read more… → Read More
The Bits blog is running a small profile of Opera right now. For the most part it’s fairly boring: Opera is a bit player (we know) that is making inroads in the mobile space with Opera Mini (again, we know). Here’s something you may not know: Apple is blocking Opera from releasing the iPhone version of Opera Mini. So claims Opera’s CEO, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. While that in and of itself may be news to some of you—it’s news to me, that’s for sure—we already know where Apple’s coming from. Apple has a policy that says, briefly, it won’t allow any application on the App Store that competes with one of its products. Since there’s already Safari on the iPhone we won’t be seeing any other Web browser there, Opera or otherwise. Should we be mad at Apple? How much harm would it do to Apple’s bottom line to give people the choice of staying with Safari or giving Opera a shot? → Read More
The first shots of Snow Leopard, Apple’s new operating system that should be here in about a year, are now starting to appear online. On a German site, of all crazy things! Anyhow, the biggest news from the released screen shots is the existence of a mysterious “Save as Web Application” menu item in Safari. What this does is save the Web site—let’s say Gmail, for example—and somehow saves a copy of it for use offline and on the desktop. In other words, it saves a Web site and turns it into a locally executable application. We’re officially going backwards, functionality-wise. All that, of course, is idle speculation. “Save as Web Applcation” could well mean something entirely different in Apple Speak. The rest of the screen shots, and there’s a lot of them, just show updated versions of apps like Quicktime. via Apple Insider → Read More
A couple of days ago we brought you scandalous — scandalous — news that PayPal was planning on blocking Apple’s Safari, as well as many other browsers that don’t offer anti-phishing technology. That’s not entirely so, says PayPal, stating to 9 to 5 Mac that while it is preparing to implement such technology, Safari should be fine. It’s more about the older, un-secure browsers than it is the specific anti-phishing technology. Well, OK then. → Read More
Would all Web browsers considered safe by PayPal please take one step forward? Not so fast, Safari. PayPal is planning on barring usage of its site by browsers that don’t include Firefox-like anti-phishing features in the near future. This would include Safari and many older browsers, effectively giving Firefox and Internet Explorer the only real access to its site. Many other smaller browsers do include anti-phishing technology, but they’re market share is negligible when compared to the big two. No word on if Apple is planning on including anti-phishing features in the next version of Safari, but considering all the other competitors do so, it’s likely. In the mean time, your using something else for PayPal. → Read More
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