Browsers and extensions

Dress up your Web experience

Stylish is a Chrome extension that enables you to change and manage the way user style settings of a Web site are displayed. In other words, you can set the look and feel of a frequently visited Web site. Stylish will display the Web site with customized CSS settings that can do things like remove pieces of content, set different colors, or create a whole new experience in other ways.

Stylish is really simple to use: just install the extension, navigate to any Web site, and click on the stylish icon. You can enable or disable user styles on the … Read more

Chrome 23 beta adds more video support, features

Google's Chrome 23 is currently in beta. And the search giant yesterday offered up some new features that it says will make it easier for users to watch and access video.

To make good on that promise, the Chrome Beta comes with Track support in HTML5 videos. Track delivers subtitles, captions, and metadata for HTML5 video that can be viewed online. Developers can split videos up and add that data to clips with help from Track. However, users won't be able to see it all until the browser supports it. Chrome 23 will.

In addition, the Chrome 23 … Read more

Opera 12.1 beta brings SPDY, Retina support

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has released its 12.10 beta version, designed for faster Web communications by supporting technologies including Google's SPDY and the Web Socket standard.

The new browser version, which had been known in earlier testing as version 12.50, adds some clout to Google's SPDY effort to make Web pages load faster. That effort got started with Chrome and arrived next in Mozilla's Firefox. SPDY is a variation on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and its features are under consideration for a new version of the HTTP standard.

"Opera has always been about … Read more

Add tabs to Windows Explorer with QTTabBar

A little Internet Explorer shell named Netcaptor introduced tabbed browsing, and major players like Opera and Mozilla Firefox (and then Google Chrome) made the feature a default tool for surfing the Web. Even though Microsoft eventually added tabbed browsing to its own browser with Internet Explorer 7, the idea of tabs never really translated to Windows Explorer ... until QTTabBar.

QTTabBar is an extension that brings tab functionality to the Windows Explorer file browser. Began as a project by a Japanese developer known as Quizo, QTTabBar (which also goes by QT TabBar) added tabs to Window Explorer during the many years … Read more

IE keeps firm grip on half of the browser market

Microsoft's Internet Explorer still grabs more than half of all traffic among browsers, at least as viewed by Web tracker Net Applications.

Leading the desktop browser market for September, IE took home a share of 53.6 percent. That left Firefox in second place with 20 percent and Chrome in third with almost 19 percent.

Trailing the top five were Apple's Safari with 5.2 percent and Opera with just 1.6 percent.

IE's lead has dipped over the past few years. A high of 79 percent in November 2007 fell to a low of 51.8 … Read more

Safeguard your online Persona with Mozilla ID system

If you've ever struggled with remembering your Facebook password, or felt uncomfortable using your Google ID to log in to a non-Google Web site, Mozilla has a solution for you -- one it calls Persona.

This first beta of Persona, which used to be called Mozilla's BrowserID project, is designed to compete with Web site login systems like the ones offered by Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Whether this open source alternative can hold its own against those other login heavy-hitters, though, is another story.

Persona essentially aims to give you a cross-platform, cross-browser way to log into a … Read more

Safari on iOS favored among 85 percent of users

Apple's iOS users seem more willing to try new things than those running Android.

Advertising network Chitika yesterday released the results of a report on browser usage across mobile platforms. The company found that Safari, the default browser in iOS, is used by 85 percent of the folks running that operating system. Chrome, which sat atop the App Store's listing of free applications for several weeks over the summer, took 3 percent of the iOS market. All other browsers, including Dolphin and Atomic, combined for 11.9 percent share.

Interestingly, Android users are less likely to branch out. … Read more

Google pays bug hunters for finding Windows flaw

You might think Microsoft would be the one handing out awards to those who report security vulnerabilities in Windows, but yesterday it was Google that paid $5,000 to a pair who found one such problem.

Along with the release of the final, stable version of Chrome 22, Google announced that it's paying the bug bounty to Eetu Luodemaa and Joni Vahamaki of Documill for finding a memory corruption issue in Windows.

The award is part of a revised Chrome bug bounty policy in which Google pays for more than just Chrome bugs. "Occasionally, we issue special rewards … Read more

Life beyond JavaScript: Google's abuzz over RoboHornet test

Google last night unveiled an early version of RoboHornet, a general-purpose browser speed test that company engineers hope will shed light on something besides just JavaScript.

But Microsoft, maker of Internet Explorer, has derided the tests as not useful.

There are plenty of JavaScript speed tests, Google's new Octane among them, and for good reason: the programming language is used to turn static Web pages into interactive Web apps. But there's more to fast browsing, and Google hopes others will get involved to flesh out RoboHornet with a full suite of tests.

"It's a living, dynamic … Read more