Browsers and extensions

Ah, the Olympics. We get three weeks of athletic prowess, medal counts, moving personal stories, and slow-motion replay of swimmers touching the side of the pool. If you can't stand yet another headline about sporting glory, turn to the Olwimpics browser extension for relief.

Olwimpics' sole purpose in life is to expunge the Olympics from your browsing experience. It's available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It thoughtfully covers up keywords with Olympics-color blocks, though it doesn't make the accompanying images disappear.… Read more

Chrome is one of the most popular Web browsers, but sometimes a missing feature can be rather shocking. Automatically deleting things like your browsing and download history, cache, cookies, and even saved form data is missing from Chrome! You could do it manually every time you browse the Web, remember, or get paranoid, but you shouldn't have to.

That's why Click&Clean, a Chrome extension, exists. Not only does it offer more features than the standard check boxes built into Chrome, it also performs actions automatically. That's right, no remembering, lots of being lazy... I mean, … Read more

The World Wide Web (W3C) Consortium has named four members of the computing industry to lead standardization of HTML5, the overhauled version of a standard that underlies the entire Web.

The four editors are Travis Leithead and Erika Doyle Navara, both of Microsoft, Ted O'Connor from Apple, and Silvia Pfeiffer, consultant at Ginger Technologies. Paul Cotton, one of the HTML Working Group's co-chairs, announced the new editors in a mailing list message yesterday.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which governs how programmers describe Web pages and how browsers interpret that coding, was born at the CERN nuclear physics lab … Read more

What makes someone choose one browser over another? Often people use whichever browser is closest at hand: Internet Explorer in Windows and Safari on Macs.

Lots of folks choose Firefox because of the browser's many useful add-ons. But the best reason to go with one browser over another is speed. In my experience, no browser is faster than Google Chrome.

There's no easier way to start an argument among geeks than to claim one browser is the speed champ. If you look hard enough you can find a reliable study naming each of the most popular browsers the … Read more

Mozilla took a big step toward the coming conflict between native apps and Web apps as it introduced Web app support to Firefox 16, which moved to the the developer's Aurora channel last Friday.

The Web app support in Firefox 16 Aurora (download for Windows, for Mac, for Linux, and for Android) means that when the Mozilla Marketplace opens to the public -- likely to be sometime before the end of 2012 -- people will be able to run Web-based apps through any iteration of Firefox. This is part of Mozilla's "Kilimanjaro" project, syncing up the … Read more

This morning, I installed the Firefox 15 beta on my two favored Android devices: a Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone and an Asus Nexus 7 tablet.

Big deal, you say. Installing a browser. Ho-hum.

It shouldn't be a big deal, but it is -- because you can't install Firefox on an iPhone, an iPad, or a forthcoming Windows RT tablet.

But on Android, Google has chosen to let any other browser compete directly against its own. For that reason, I regularly use Opera Mini and Opera Mobile alongside Google's Chrome. The Dolphin Browser HD, installed more than 10 … Read more

Firefox users who've installed a custom theme may bump into trouble if they upgrade to the latest version of the browser.

Released earlier this week, Firefox 14 offers a few enhancements, including better security. But it comes with one gotcha -- lack of support for a lot of existing themes.

Many Firefox users probably know that they can change the style of their browser by installing one of many custom themes, available at the Themes section on Mozilla's Add-Ons page. You can choose from among hundreds of different themes to customize the look and feel of Firefox's … Read more

A plethora of changes land in Firefox for Android 15 beta, as its desktop counterpart moves its memory management improvements up a notch.

Firefox 15 beta for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux (download), brings the memory management improvements developed in Mozilla's MemShrink project one step closer to the stable version of the browser, this time focusing on long browser sessions and how add-ons affect Firefox. Nicholas Nethercote, a developer at Mozilla, wrote on his blog that Firefox 15 beta is likely to be "drastically" faster than Firefox 14, in some cases.

The changes in the beta … Read more

Google has taken a new step to significantly expand what Web apps can do -- and thus also lend new muscle to its Chrome browser, Chrome OS browser-based operating system, and Chrome Web Store for finding and buying Web apps.

This week, Google released a new developer version of Chrome 22 that by default enables a technology called Chrome packaged apps.

This foundation is designed to expand what Web apps can do by giving them the standalone look of a native personal-computer app and some native-app privileges that Web apps ordinarily wouldn't have. They load from a computer's … Read more