browser

The Opera Software browser brain transplant that began on Android is now complete for Windows and OS X users, too.

The Norwegian company has been rebuilding Opera on the same browser engine Google uses within Chrome, scrapping its own Presto engine. The first fruits of the transformation arrived on Android devices, but now the new Opera 15 has been released for personal computers, too.

A browser engine's job is to process all the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS instructions on a Web page or Web app then render the result on the screen. Although Opera is following Chrome at this … Read more

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

AVAST Browser Cleanup removes the annoying toolbars, plug-ins, and add-ons that gum up your Web browser, including some that the average user would find difficult to remove, while leaving your safe or approved toolbars and extensions alone. Like AVAST's basic antivirus program, Browser Cleanup is free. It's also portable, so it runs without having to be installed. AVAST Browser Cleanup is for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, and worked with all three of our installed browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome.

Since AVAST Browser Cleanup is portable software, it doesn't need to be installed or uninstalled: It … 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

SlimBoat Web Browser Portable offers a familiar, multi-tabbed Web browser experience for easy Web surfing from any location. While a little too slim on design compared to other popular Web browsers, it offers some neat additional features and performs well.

At a little over four megabytes, this one makes other portable browsers look hefty in comparison. To give you that lean look, SlimBoat Web Browser Portable forgoes some features you'd find on other browsers. There's no support for third-party extensions like you'll find in Opera or Firefox. There is a built-in ad blocker and speed dial, though. … 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

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