Browsers and extensions

You can now get a taste of Firefox OS straight from your desktop browser, thanks to a new Firefox add-on called r2d2b2g that bakes a Firefox OS simulator right into your desktop browser.

Mozilla wrote in its blog post announcing the simulator add-on that the tool has two complementary goals for helping developers. Currently at version 0.7, the company hopes that by version 1.0 the add-on will be stable enough to let developers easily create apps for the new OS.

The second goal for the add-on is that it frees developers from having a device to install a … Read more

With more than 400 million Firefox users, Mozilla doesn't have a problem with relevance. And with today's disclosure that organization's revenue grew 33 percent to $163.5 million in 2011, the nonprofit organization doesn't have a problem with money.

But it does have a problem with mobile.

So concludes Mitchell Baker, leader of the organization behind the open-source Web browser and other projects designed to keep the Internet free from proprietary constraints. Firefox, which just celebrated its eighth birthday, is the main lever that Mozilla uses to try to keep the Internet open. But Firefox is … Read more

The Internet is a pretty great resource for work or school, but it can also be an enormous distraction. timeStats is an extension for Google Chrome that allows you to see how you spend your online time. A few clicks will get you a chart distribution of your Internet activity; a couple more, and you can get even more detailed reports. The reports break down your daily/weekly/monthly activities with awesome pie charts and bar graphs showing what you did on which day. It can also show you other details such as the sites, domain zones, and time spent … Read more

The first Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7 has arrived, gifting many of its improvements to the older OS as Microsoft prepares to keep IE current beyond the gates of Windows 8.

"There's a long alphabet soup of new abilities that we've built into Internet Explorer 10" for Windows 7, Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's general manager for IE, said during an interview last week at CNET's San Francisco office. In addition to porting over the new IE10 Chakra and JavaScript engines, IE 10 on Windows 7 also gets the Touch API innovations that … Read more

Privacy online sounds a lot like an oxymoron these days, but it's still worth trying to protect it the best you can, right? So what kind of tracking is "Do Not Track" trying to protect against, and what will this option do to help stop it?

Tracking is basically the way that Webmasters and advertisers learn about your Web browsing habits. This is where "related ads" come from, despite them not being entirely accurate the majority of the time. Turning on this feature for Firefox will send a request to avoid tracking … Read more

It's not just your imagination -- Chrome really is getting faster.

Google said today that its JavaScript benchmark tool shows Chrome is 26 percent faster than it was last year.

"Stability sometimes takes higher priority, but we're still manic about improving Chrome's speed," Google's Toon Verwaest said in a blog post.

One way Google avoids the bloat that has crippled other browsers over the years -- the company set up automated tests to notify engineers whenever a change in the code makes the browser slower, Verwaest said.

The company's efforts aren't limited … Read more

Many Web sites collect data about you on each visit. This data is used for serving ads that meet your interests, or finding out which demographic is frequenting a specific type of content. In an effort to help you protect your online privacy, Google has added a new feature to Chrome: Do Not Track.

It's important to remember that this option is not going to protect you from Web sites that ignore the Do Not Track request, but it is a small step in the direction of protecting your personal details online. Read on to find … Read more

A nascent Web standard called WebRTC just got a notable boost from TokBox, a provider of online chat services for companies such as Ford Motor and Coca-Cola that need a mechanism to communicate with customers.

WebRTC is designed to enable real-time video and audio chat with a Web browser, enabling Skype-like services on the Web. TokBox released a version of its software that adds WebRTC support, a move timed to coincide with today's release of Chrome 23, which includes WebRTC.

Having browser support for a standard is crucial to its success, obviously. But developers wanting want to use it … Read more

Browsium's business is your business' browsers, and its new Catalyst program looks to solve the problem of corporate intranets requiring older, rickety version of Internet Explorer while the rest of the Web has moved on with its life toward HTML5.

Currently available for free in public beta, Catalyst allows corporate IT departments to force certain sites to open in different browsers. It works in three browsers, Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, and installs a Catalyst add-on in each. That add-on runs in conjunction with a management program that the IT department uses to set rules that tell specific sites … Read more