Browsers and extensions

Google Search (free) has been on iOS for some time, with well-known search capabilities, access to Google apps, Google Goggles for identifying products, and Voice Search. But an update to the app yesterday enhanced Voice Search with spoken answers, and it quickly became clear Google Search had an edge on Siri -- especially when it comes to speed.

Siri has a distinct advantage in most cases because it's integrated with the iOS. This means you can have Siri "Call Rebecca," for example, and Siri accesses your contact list along with your phone app to make the call. … Read more

You might think developing technology standards is plodding, bureaucratic tedium compared to something like the frenzy of smartphone innovation.

But you'd be wrong, at least in the case of Paul Cotton, who leads Microsoft's involvement in the important and often fractious world of Web standards. Web standards are hot -- and hotly contested.

Cotton, an even-keeled Canadian, discovered a passion for standards more than 20 years ago when figuring out how to digitize airplane maintenance manuals. He's comfortable with the contradictory motives of standards groups: fierce competition one moment and gentlemanly cooperation the next.

It's a … Read more

Mozilla's Social API has activated in Firefox Beta today with its first partner, Facebook Messenger. The innovation has the potential to forever alter how browsers interact with social-networking sites, but the project is still in its infancy.

The Social API (turn it on here: Firefox Beta or Firefox Aurora) looks at the problem of how to integrate modern social networking into the browser, Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's director of Firefox Engineering, said during a phone conversation with CNET. "People don't use social like they use other parts of the Web. It's not task based; it's … Read more

Isn't it annoying when you load a Web page and audio starts playing without warning? Usually it's a background music track or an advertisement video, but it always seems to happen at the worst time: when your volume is the loudest. Maybe you just finished watching a movie on Netflix with a lot of whispering and suddenly your ears are being assaulted by loud noises.

Instead of policing your volume levels before each Web browsing session, why not just disable those plug-ins from loading content unless you say it's OK? Here's how to disable plug-ins from … Read more

After using the new Samsung Chromebook for the better part of a workday, I have to say I'm impressed -- as long as you consider the constraints of its $249 price tag.

Google announced the Samsung Chromebook today along with new ambitions to spread its browser-based, cloud-focused Chrome OS laptop much more widely. Google envisions it as good for an extra machine that lies around the house or as a laptop for students.

I find it a reasonable device for those categories, especially for people like myself who already have their head in the Google cloud with Google Docs, … Read more

Google introduced a new 11.6-inch $249 Chromebook today that lowers the entry price and raises the expectations for its Chrome OS products.

Chromebooks are cloud-computing laptops use Google's Chrome OS, which is built on Linux under the covers but which actually runs applications in the Chrome browser. When Google released two second-generation Chrome OS products, the $550 Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook and the $330 Series 3 Chromebox in May, it aimed for increased processing horsepower.

If the Chromebook Series 5 550 drew inspiration from a MacBook Pro, the new Chromebook did so from a MacBook Air. It'… Read more

Google released its first stable version of Dart, a programming language for Web applications that it believes improves on the incumbent JavaScript language.

"I'm pleased to announce that the M1 release of Dart is ready...This release is a more stable and comprehensive version of Dart," said Lars Bak, a programmer and key figure in the project, in a mailing list message today about the milestone 1 release. "Moving forward, we'll mainly focus on performance and completeness without introducing breaking changes to the Dart programming language."

It's hard to get new programming languages … Read more

Firefox is going social, at least in a tentative sort of way.

Mozilla announced today that its Firefox Beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux will support Social API, a framework designed to let developers integrate social-networking features directly into the browser. Mozilla was quick to point out that the Social API support is "preliminary" at this point, suggesting it isn't fully baked and ready for prime time.

Mozilla didn't offer many details on how the social features might be integrated into the browser. It did say that it envisions developers allowing the browser's users to &… Read more

Mozilla released a new version of Firefox (Windows, Mac) today, one day after yanking the Web browser to address security flaws.

Firefox 16 was pulled off Mozilla's installer page yesterday, just one day after its release, to fix a vulnerability that could have allowed a malicious site to identify which Web sites a user had visited, said Michael Coates, Mozilla's director of Security Assurance. The flaw was publicly disclosed yesterday by security researcher Gareth Heyes, who published proof-of-concept code to demonstrate the vulnerability.

Though Mozilla said it had no evidence that the vulnerability was being exploited in the … Read more