Webware

Safari 5: Fast like a cheetah, tame like a house cat

After a bit of hesitation, Apple released a major update to its WebKit-based Safari browser on Monday. Safari 5 for Windows and Mac comes with several big feature announcements. There's the new Reader option for streamlining articles reading, broader support for HTML5, default support for searches on Bing, and performance improvements. However, the biggest new feature of them all--Extensions--won't be available until later this summer, and depending on what you're looking for in a browser, Safari can be seen as lacking many helpful options.

The official late summer street date for Extensions leaves many questions up for more

Google Maps 4.2 steers Navigation to Europe, Canada

I've definitely come to rely on Google's turn-by-turn voice navigation to guide me through some twists and turns of California's coastline. Starting Wednesday, Canadians and some Europeans will similarly be able to ditch their satnav systems and fire up their Android phones instead.

Google Maps 4.2 with Navigation will pop into the Android Market apps in Canada, and in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland--as long as your smartphone runs 1.6 of the Android operating system or higher.

That's not all the localization love Google has in store. more

Internet Explorer 9

With Internet Explorer 9, you can pin websites to your Windows 7 Taskbar so they are one-click away. Just drag the tab down to the taskbar to pin

Get to your favorite sites faster

Report confirms Google Wi-Fi code recorded data

Stroz Friedberg produced the 21-page report, a copy of which we've hosted on our site (click for PDF). Google paid for the report through its law firm, Perkins Coie, as part of an internal investigation into how Google Street View cars were allowed to collect data from unsecured wireless networks for three years, which has Google in hot water all around the globe.

The report confirms that Google's code (known as "gslite") was set to discard data gathered from encrypted wireless networks but record data gathered from unsecured networks. Google, like other companies such as Skyhook Wireless, recorded more

Another release candidate for Thunderbird 'Lanikai'

Mozilla published a second release candidate for the next build of Thunderbird on Wednesday. Judging from the public bug list, only one critical bug kept Thunderbird 3.1 Release Candidate 2 from becoming the final build of the current branch, code-named Lanikai.

Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, this second release candidate fixes one critical bug on Macs, one major bug on all platforms, and three ''normal'' priority bugs. The now-fixed Mac bug had caused the open-source e-mail client to crash, and then crash again on subsequent launchings. The cross-platform, major-level bug repaired a settings migration assistant problem where the more

AdMob lashes out at new iPhone ad policies

Updated 11:21 a.m. PDT with additional information.

After reviewing Apple's changes to its iPhone developer agreement, Google's AdMob reached the same conclusion that many others did: it could be screwed.

Apple this week changed the terms of the developer agreement that governs iPhone applications to prohibit developers from using advertising in their applications that shares analytic data with "an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple." The most prominent mobile advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a more

Internet Explorer 9

With Internet Explorer 9, you can pin websites to your Windows 7 Taskbar so they are one-click away. Just drag the tab down to the taskbar to pin

Get to your favorite sites faster

New security fixes for Chrome stable

Google pushed out an update for the stable branch of its Chrome browser Wednesday. The update, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, addresses multiple security bugs including nine tagged as high-level problems.

The high-level security bugs included cross-origin bypass in DOM methods that netted a security researcher $2,000 in Google's ongoing bug-hunting contest, a memory error in table layouts that earned another researcher $500, holes in the wall of the sandbox on Linux computers, HTML5-based geolocation events firing even after the relevant document had been deleted, and multiple memory errors.

This is the first security-fixing release for the stable more

Google's new search index Caffeine goes live

The company announced the release of its Caffeine indexing technology--which it has been testing for almost a year--in a blog post late Tuesday evening. "Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before," the company said in a blog post.

Google started testing Caffeine in August 2009, and search guru Matt Cutts said more

Apple change could thwart Google's AdMob

Less than two weeks after Google completed its acquisition of iPhone ad network AdMob, Apple appears to have thrown Google quite the curveball.

Apple quietly changed the terms of service for the iPhone developer agreement Monday along with the release of developer version of iOS4 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, according to MediaMemo and several other blogs. If preliminary interpretations of a key section are correct, Google's newly acquired AdMob subsidiary will be unable to share ad analytic information with its customers who have placed ads in applications on the iPhone, rendering those ads much less valuable.

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Google hides World Cup Easter egg in search

Google has changed a single search page to prepare us all for the FIFA World Cup, which is slated to begin in just two days.

When users type "World Cup" into Google Search, they will find a different header at the bottom of the page where Google allows users to click on the desired page in results. Instead of the familiar "Goooooogle," the page says, "Goooooooal!."

Wondering if the change occurred on every search page related to the World Cup, I started trying other queries out, like "soccer," "world cup soccer," and others. In each instance, the familiar "Goooooogle" was more

Android developers puzzled over missing apps

Updated 2:00 p.m. PDT with additional information and word the problem has been fixed.

Android developers are reporting that Google has been slow to react to applications that are disappearing from the Android Market.

Some developers who had resubmitted applications to the Android Market starting around Thursday following the addition of small updates say their applications could no longer be found within the Android Market following the update, according to a report from ReadWriteWeb. Multiple developers reported the issue within Android developer forums and the Android Market forums over the weekend, but Google has mostly remained silent on more