firefox

The bottom line: Firefox 14 is a worthy expression of Mozilla's ideals. The browser is competitively fast, sports a minimalist look, and includes some excellently executed features. Unfortunately for the 'fox, that describes most of its competition, too.

Please note that the First Look video below is still applicable to Firefox 14, as is this Firefox How To collection, even though it features Firefox 4.

Review: For those of you who spent last year away from the Internet, it's the year that Firefox went from annual major-point updates to a Chrome-style quick-release cycle. How quick? A new major … Read more

Tuesday's biggest tech story has a superstar trading teams, and I'm not talking Jeremy Lin:

Are you dusting off that Yahoo email account? Freshening up your Flickr page? Yahoo got a dose of Google cool factor with its new CEO, 37-year-old Marissa Mayer. She was a top executive at Google and Google's first female employee. She oversaw pretty much every Google service that's a common part of your life, including maps and search. Expect Mayer to breathe new life into Yahoo's services. Perhaps she can even lure talented computer minds to join her new team. … Read more

The latest update to Firefox brings better security to search and to the URL bar, as the browser gets OS X and HTML5 tweaks, too.

The biggest change to Firefox 14 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux,) is that it runs HTTPS for all Google searches. This means that prying eyes, especially over public networks, won't be able to intercept your queries. Though Firefox currently supports this only for Google, Mozilla said in a blog post announcing the update that it hopes to extend HTTPS to other search engines in the near future.

A small interface design change also affects … Read more

Don't care how, just watch Monday's Update now:

The future PlayStation experience could involve streaming your video games. Sony is buying the cloud-based game provider Gaikai for $380 million in shares. Gaikai lets you stream games like Mass Effect 3 with just an Internet connection. No downloading. No discs. Gaikai began working with Samsung and LG to bring video games to Smart TVs. This acquistion could cause a few ripple effects in the gaming industry, not to mention we could be seeing streaming as an option for a future Playstation device. It could even expand the Playstation footprint … Read more

Internet Explorer has been facing growing competition from rival browsers, but it's still the leader with more than 50 percent of the market, according to Net Applications.

IE grabbed a 54 percent market share last month, down from 56.7 percent a year ago. Traveling further back in time reveals an ongoing decline from November 2007 when Microsoft held almost 80 percent of the desktop browser market.

In second place with a 20 percent share in June, Firefox has also seen its share gradually drop. Mozilla's browser scored a 23 percent share a year ago after hitting a … Read more

Mozilla's browser-based smartphone operating system has grown up a notch, winning over partners such as Sprint and ZTE and picking up the marketing-friendly name of Firefox OS.

In addition, Mozilla has announced several partners, a necessity for making a bunch of software into something people actually use: only a very small number of people have the skills and interest to install a mobile-phone OS.

Carrier Telefonica and chipmaker Qualcomm already were partners that emerged when Mozilla announced B2G at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. They'd said to expect phones by the end of 2012 then, but now … Read more

The first major update to Firefox for Android (download) since January has arrived, and it brings with it a new interface, some new features, and a new approach to Android for Mozilla.

The company released the first stable version of Firefox for Android at the same time that it overhauled Firefox for PCs, back in March 2011. Barely six months after that, the company decided that the original Firefox for Android just wasn't good enough. With a responsiveness rarely seen by large organizations, Mozilla changed course and began to work on a different Android browser.

"In the fall … Read more

The bottom line: Sync remains the killer Firefox for Android feature, but the revamped interface, fast page-load times, and tabbed browsing make it much more usable than before.

Review: Firefox for Android used to be a must-use mainly for Firefox fans. It was good at what it did, but it wasn't great, and the competitive field of Android browsers surpassed it on many levels.

As a reaction, Mozilla spent the better part of a year redesigning the browser from the ground up. The new Firefox for Android brings an interface powered by native code, competitive page-load times, and Flash … Read more

The Internet is ever-changing, and YouTube is no exception. With Google's switch to a more minimal homepage design, it comes as no surprise that YouTube will be following that path as well. The changes aren't too dramatic, but they seem to help streamline user interaction with each video page. So instead of waiting for the newest YouTube remodel, why not take a look at it now? Here's how to get started:

Note: The following instructions have only been tested for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer.

Step 1: Open your browser of choice and open any video … Read more