Browsers and extensions

Everybody knows we all need faster Web sites: speedy load times and responsive pages means that people stay on a site longer, look at more photos, see more ads, and buy more stuff. Much of the work to speed things up has happened in the browser, but a startup called Instart Logic hopes to profit by changing what happens on the server, too.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company came out of stealth mode Thursday, describing how its technology works and touting customers including Game of Thrones Ascent, GameStop, Bonfaire, and Kitchit.

"We generally drop people's load time … Read more

On Tuesday, Qihoo launched two major security products: 360 Internet Security and 360 Mobile Security.

360 Internet Security (32-bit / 64-bit) is a light weight security program that provides real time scanning, automatic updates, and some basic tools to protect your PC from viruses, malware, and other potentially unwanted or suspicious applications.

360 Mobile Security is the younger Android cousin, designed to provide malware protection for your mobile device and comes with a slew of useful system management tools to give you control over what apps have access to your sensitive data. Grab them both over on Download for an exclusive … Read more

While Apple's updates to Safari for OS X Mavericks are more about keeping up with the Joneses, Safari for iOS 7 looks to forge new ground by making the browser look and feel more like the operating system.

Safari for iOS 7 features a nearly chrome-less interface ("chrome" refers to the visible interface portions of software), a new tab view, fewer restrictions on tabs, and iCloud Keychain integration, Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.

By default, the iOS 7 Safari is set to what looks like full-screen mode. With the browser's chrome mostly … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Once again, Apple's changes to its Safari browser on OS X represent keeping up with the competition instead of forging new ground.

At the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, the company unveiled the next version of Safari, which Apple says will have significantly faster page rendering, better security, and will make it easier to read multiple articles on the same site.

The Safari 7 update introduces to the browser stronger connections to OS X's password-management tool called Keychain. Leveraging the iCloud browser syncing that debuted in last year's Safari, … Read more

Google continues to slowly build Google Now into its services. It made the data-rich Now-styled notifications available through an advanced option setting in Chrome for Mac on Thursday, following basic implementation in Chrome for Windows and Chrome OS earlier this year.

You can activate Google Now notifications in Chrome for Mac by typing chrome://flags into your address bar, scrolling down to the Enable Rich Notifications, and changing the setting to Enable. The setting is limited to the most unstable of the browser's builds, Chrome Canary. Canary will only work on OS X 10.6 and newer.

Google Now … Read more

Web-based photo editing took a second step forward Tuesday with the release of WebRaw, a tool that uses Mozilla's ASM.js technology for the computationally intense process of handling raw photos.

Raw photo formats, available on high-end cameras, offer better image quality and more editing flexibility, but they also are much more of a hassle than standard formats like JPEG, in part because they're so burdensome for computers to decode. That's why the demo, from Mozilla's Vladimir Vukicevic, is interesting: processing raw photos is the sort of chore that only a couple of years ago would … Read more

Foxconn and Mozilla announced a partnership Monday under which the Chinese electronics manufacturer will build not just Firefox phones, as others have announced, but tablets, too.

The rumored partnership was confirmed as Mozilla and Foxconn announced their tie-up at the Computex show in Taiwan. By including software in its devices, Foxconn gets to sell a more complete and therefore potentially valuable product to those companies that actually will attach their brands to the hardware.

"We believe that the integration of software and hardware development will offer greater benefits to our customers and consumers," said Young Liu, the general … Read more

As Chrome usage grows on mobile devices, the latest iOS version of the browser finally arrived Monday with the same voice search feature that its cross-platform siblings have.

Chrome 27 for iOS (download) incorporates voice search, which uses Google's own voice-recognition database and not the Nuance-driven Siri.

As with other Google services that use its voice search, including Google Now for iOS, voice search in Chrome for iOS will read back to you your query as it pulls up the familiar blue-link list of Google search results.

One interesting difference between voice search on Chrome for iOS and Chrome … Read more

The Android version of Chrome has begun carving a niche for itself in the mobile browsing market.

In May, usage of the mobile version of Google's browser on smartphones and tablets accounted for an all-time high of 3.2 percent, according to Net Applications' usage statistics. That figure may not sound like a lot, but the browser only crossed the 1 percent threshold in November 2012, and it's now surpassed Microsoft's IE at 2 percent of mobile browser usage.

At the same time, Google's unbranded Android browser, which predates Chrome, appears to be waning. Its usage … Read more