Browsers and extensions

Safari, the top browser in terms of mobile usage, lost a little share to three rivals in June.

The Apple browser dropped from 60.0 percent of usage in May to 58.0 percent in June, still well ahead of competing browsers, according to statistics released by tracking firm Net Applications on Monday. Google's unbranded Android browser, in second place, also dipped, from 20.7 percent to 20.6 percent.

Picking up the slack were Opera Mini, which rose from 10.5 percent to 11.2 percent; Google's Chrome, which rose from 3.2 percent to 3.8 … Read more

Mozilla debuted a new Firefox for Android 23 beta (download) on Thursday that brought with it a flatter but more Web-friendly version of the familiar browser logo.

The new logo has been designed, wrote Sean Martell, Mozilla's lead visual designer, with "SVG compatibility and color consistency" in mind. It doesn't ditch detail just for the sake of it, he said in his blog post about the change, but actually adds more detail in some areas.

One major detail he pointed out that has changed is the fox's arm. It now comes from its shoulder, instead … Read more

On the heels of its SPDY success for goosing Web communications standards, Google is tinkering with an even lower-level protocol with a project called QUIC.

To see if the technology meets its potential without causing new problems, Google has built QUIC into developer versions of Chrome and enabled it for a fraction of users. The hope is that it will cut the round-trip time of the back-and-forth communications between computers on the Internet, according to a blog item posted Thursday by Google engineer Jim Roskind.

"If we're able to identify clear performance wins, our hope is to collaborate … Read more

The latest version of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 11, comes complete with a host of touch features designed for Windows 8.1.

In a blog post announcing the launch of the preview version of IE11, Microsoft focused much of its time on the "touch optimized" feature set available. The browser includes a "stick to your finger" feature that allows users to pan, zoom, and swipe around a Web site. That swipe feaoture can also be used for folks to go back to a previous page or forward to a previously viewed page. In addition, the … Read more

If you are a Firefox user, you may have noticed that yesterday Mozilla released an updated version of the browser. This new update includes a number of security updates and graphics optimizations, but in addition OS X users are now able to monitor downloads directly in the Dock.

When you download a file in Safari or prior versions of Firefox, the download process can be followed by going to a special Downloads window, where you can monitor overall and individual download progress; however, this requires you to keep such a window open. Even though Safari's downloads toolbar menu will … Read more

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a group that represents hundreds of Internet advertisers, has attacked Mozilla's involvement in a Stanford Law School privacy project to judge whether individual Web sites can be trusted to set behavior-tracking browser cookies.

The IAB doesn't like the Cookie Clearninghouse, which Stanford's Center for Internet and Society and Mozilla announced on June 19. The project aims to rate individual to bring privacy ratings for browser cookies -- the small text files that Web site operators can store on people's computers. Cookies can be useful for remembering that you're logged into a … Read more

If Internet Explorer 10 impressed you, you're going to love what we now expect from IE11 at Microsoft's Build conference on Wednesday.

Information leaked by a Microsoft Developer Network subscriber appears to confirm long-rumored details on what's going to be included in Internet Explorer 11.

The next major version of the browser, expected to arrive with Windows 8.1 later this year, will include support for many under-the-hood features that Firefox and Chrome already offer, and some that they don't.

According to Microsoft-News.com, IE11 will include WebGL support, a standard originally from Mozilla that makes … Read more

Today's stable release of Mozilla Firefox 22 (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android) includes a variety of back-end technical updates and relatively minor tweaks (to be honest, the word-wrapping of plain-text files is the most relevant to me).

The most notable news is Firefox's new default support for WebRTC (the RTC stands for real-time communication), a set of API components that allows developers to create browser-to-browser applications without plug-ins. WebRTC was developed by Google for Chrome and open-sourced back in 2011, so Google Chrome (Windows, Mac, Android) of course supports it as well.

In real terms, WebRTC enables features such … Read more

Google has released its promised photos app for Chromebooks, software that imports photos from an SD card, backs them up to the cloud, and spotlights the ones it judges to be the best.

The software, a Chrome extension, is available only for the Chromebook Pixel at present, but Google is "working to bring the app to other Chromebooks as well," said AJ Asver in a Google+ post Tuesday.

Sundar Pichai, head of Chrome, Google Apps, and now Android, gushed about the app in a February interview during the debut of the Chromebook Pixel, Google's high-end, $1,300 laptop. … Read more