browsers

Camino browser for OS X reaches end of life

Development of the long-standing alternative browser Camino has been cancelled.

Camino was one of the first alternative browsers for OS X, developed using the Gecko engine. Starting initially under the name Chimera, it offered a number of optimizations over Apple's Safari browser, and an alternative to Firefox before Chrome even existed.

Yesterday the browser's development team announced that Camino would no longer be developed, citing an inability to keep up with the fast pace of Web development, and encouraged Camino users to look to other browsers to maintain a secure and fast Web experience:

After a decade-long run, … Read more

Review: Puffin Web Browser offers Flash support to enhance browsing on iOS

Puffin Web Browser is one of those rare alternative browsers that manages to understand what works well in Safari and yet enhance and build on that formula in many ways. While the integration of things like iCloud is not as deep and there are some other features missing, what Puffin brings to the table makes it a solid browser that enhances more than it takes away.

The basic design of Puffin is familiar. It looks a lot like Safari with the tabs on top of the menu instead of below. On the iPad this actually looks quite good and makes … Read more

Review: One Browser offers perfectly-tuned Web browsing on your iPhone

One Browser manages to bridge the gap between user friendly mobile browsing and the full Internet experience offered by Safari and its contemporaries. The result is an app that is immensely fun to use, customizable on an individual level, fast, and extremely responsive.

The biggest obstacle in using One Browser is that it is very different from other browsers on the iPhone. This alone may be an issue for some users, who will be used to the Safari style of browsing. For the adventurous, however, One Browser has a lot to offer. The home screen is one of its core … Read more

IE piggybacks on Everest celebration to showcase new browser tech

There's much more to climbing Mount Everest than the trek to the summit, mountaineer David Breashears would tell you.

To help emphasize that point, the filmmaker and explorer has teamed up with Microsoft to build an interactive examination of the mountain and the Greater Himalaya region, which have enthralled imaginations since Edmund Hillary made his successful ascent of the Everest summit 75 years ago this week.

Everest: Rivers of Ice is a new Web site open to the public on Tuesday night built in HTML5 and CSS3 for touch screens. Created by the Internet Explorer 10 team, Microsoft Research, … Read more

Opera Next makes its debut on Windows, Mac

Opera has built a new Web browser from the ground up, and it's available now on Windows and Mac.

The new Opera, which the organization is calling Next, its channel for what used to be known as "beta," was built from scratch, it claims. What has resulted is a much cleaner interface and a host of features that Opera says, will make it easier for users to find contents.

The big change is that Opera has replaced its proprietary engine Presto with the Chromium engine. That will allow the company's browser to load more quickly and … Read more

Review: K9 Web Protection Browser is an effective content filter

K9 Web Protection Browser attempts to fill the gap in Safari's access filters by providing a secondary browsing experience for children, combined with adjustment of some security settings. The built-in protection settings on an iPhone or iPad are fairly decent but are in some ways limited, especially for younger children. The Web browser in particular allows open access to the Internet if not filtered in some way. This is what K9 Web Protection Browser strives to fix.

The K9 browser looks identical to the Safari browser built into the iOS design, and while there are certainly some limitations as … Read more

Google Translate says 'Hola!' to Chrome

Not only is Google Translate not dead, its powers of mildly accurate, often-amusing, and on-the-fly translations are in the process of being gifted to Chrome 28 Beta for Android.

If you load a foreign language Web site in the beta, which landed in the Google Play Store on Thursday, a bar will appear at the bottom of the screen with a button to translate the site. Tap the button, and voila! It will appear in a different language.

The accuracy of the translation is another issue. However, Google spokeswoman Roya Soleimani said, "Google Translate works through statistical machine translation. … Read more

Review: Chrome 27 is smarter and (5 percent) faster

Chrome is the lightweight flagship browser that originated from an open source project by Google called Chromium and Chromium OS. It is now one of the more widely used browsers thanks to a vast ecosystem of extensions and add-ons, a robust Javascript engine, and a rapid-release development cycle that keeps it on the competitive end of the curve.

Installation

Chrome's installation process is both straight-forward and self-sustaining. After downloading the installer, Chrome's installation process will launch with the standard practices of confirming system directories and a few click throughs. Google will also ask for your permission to anonymously … Read more

Chrome gets a touch faster

Already known for its speed, Google just boosted Chrome's Web site rendering speed by another 5 percent.

The latest stable release of the browser, Chrome 27 (download for Windows, Mac, or Linux), received the small improvement by managing its resources better. To boil down the jargon, the browser's internal resource scheduler now favors more critical resources over preloaded sites.

Chrome engineer James Simonsen wrote in the company's blog announcing the update Tuesday that, across the hundreds of millions of people using Chrome, the amount of time saved equals around 510 years per week. But what we're … Read more