browsers

As CNET's Ina Fried reports, Microsoft is trying to downplay Internet Explorer 8's performance deficiencies, arguing that "in most cases, the difference could literally be measured by a blink of an eye."

I guess that it depends on who's blinking. Walt Mossberg, the noted personal-technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, rebuked IE 8's performance in an All Things Digital post, noting that in his tests, the new version of the Microsoft browser was slower than Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome. All of them. Considerably slower, in many cases.… Read more

It's no secret that when judged by several popular Web browser speed tests, Internet Explorer 8 doesn't hold up well. Beta versions of IE 8 have been available to the general public for more than a year, and today's release of the stable build didn't include anything revolutionary.

Using the SunSpider JavaScript test, the official IE 8 scored 9849.4 ms on a Windows Vista machine with 2 GB of RAM and a 3.00 Ghz clock. This is significantly slower than most other major browsers. Not surprisingly, Microsoft claims (scroll down to Case Study Videos) … Read more

Update, March 14, 2011: Note that Internet Explorer 8 is now for Windows XP only. If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, you are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Internet Explorer 9 (download) for improved browser security and better browsing features.

Internet Explorer 8 addresses just about all of the major concerns that users and critics have had with the world's most used browser. Whether they get answered in a way you like is another matter.

There are several new and interesting features. Web Slices lets you save predefined sections of a Web page for at-a-glance viewing. Instead … Read more

Cisco announced Thursday that it will pay more than $600 million to buy Pure Digital, the company that makes Flip Video camcorders. Reporter Marguerite Reardon joins today's podcast to talk about why that shouldn't be a surprise.

Also in this podcast: Microsoft unveils Internet Explorer 8; a security conference in Canada that got makers of Safari, Firefox, and IE's attention; and Google adds a feature to Gmail that just might make your life Rickroll-free.

Today's stories:

Cisco buys Flip Video maker for $590 million

Oracle delivers solid third quarter

Safari hole exploited in seconds at hacking contest… Read more

Internet Explorer 8 takes some long-needed strides to bring it up to speed with its competitors. It's more secure, with tab sandboxing and more aggressive malicious site warnings, and introduces some slick new features like Accelerators and Web slices.

Even with better support for Web standards, it's far from perfect. Check out what's hot and what's not in this First Look video.

Ever since Google launched Chrome in September 2008, Google has been touting how fast its browser can run Web-based programs written in JavaScript. Now the company has launched a site called Chrome Experiments designed to show off what fast JavaScript can enable and to encourage adoption of the browser.

Browser benchmark performance scores make for nice bar charts, but they can be detached from real-world computing needs. Chrome Experiments--which don't require Chrome but sometimes break without it--are a collection of taxing applications written in JavaScript that are designed to be more engaging.

Among the 19 examples so far available: … Read more

Google released a new beta version of Chrome Tuesday, offering a better balance between software that's stable but out of date on the one hand and cutting-edge but crash-prone on the other.

The new version offers a number of new features, including zooming that increases or decreases the graphics as well as text; autofill to ease the chore of re-entering information in Web site forms; and new tab-dragging features that let you dock browser windows to the sides of the screen. The new beta version is essentially the same as Chrome 2.0.169.1 that was released last … Read more

Bitstream launched the public beta of its Bolt mobile browser about a month ago at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Since then, the browser for Java-enabled phones, like BlackBerry and Nokia handsets, has attracted almost 300,000 beta users and rendered over 15 million pages.

Bolt's browser doesn't look like a game-changer, at least not compared with Skyfire when it first emerged to hungrily eye Opera's established market share. Bolt's basic interface tends toward the spare, with an address bar up top, three tabs to reach your history, favorites (which include presets to get … Read more

Mozilla had planned to release its new "Shiretoko" version of Firefox in early 2009, but with the scale of changes made to the open-source browser, a date halfway through the year now looks more realistic.

After releasing Firefox 3.1 beta 3 last week, the organization behind the browser said a fourth beta is planned--and with the new version number 3.5.

"There are no plans for a Beta 5 at this time, and after Beta 4 we'll be looking to move to a release candidate," said Firefox director Mike Beltzner in a statement. "… Read more