browsers

Firefox is set to top 20 percent global market share in July, continuing its steady trend toward world domination through, er, open-source liberation.

Unlike Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which relied on all sorts of tricks and tying to achieve its dominant status, Firefox's gains seem to be coming for two reasons:

As ReadWriteWeb points out, the game is increasingly Firefox's to lose. Internet Explorer used to command 96 percent of the market. Now it's struggling to hold onto 80 percent, with Firefox chipping … Read more

The latest Flock update for Windows and Mac introduces more services to its ever-growing list of options, as well as a battery of performance and stability enhancements.

Most notably, Pownce and Digg have been integrated as people services. If you're not familiar with the self-styled "social browser," this means that you can perform all Digg- and Pownce-related chores--sorry, that should be "tasks"--from within the browser's social-networking features. Support for AOL Webmail has also been added, letting you check that account as easily as your Gmail account.

There's still a long list of known bugs … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Google showed off working prototypes Wednesday of new possibilities for its Gears project to goose Web browsers' abilities.

When Google launched Gears a year ago, the company overemphasized one important feature, its ability to make Web applications work even when the browser is disconnected from the Internet, Chris Prince, a lead Gears engineer, said in a talk at the Google I/O conference here Wednesday. The new features, though, head in dramatically different directions: notifications on the desktop of various events, support for location information, better interactions with a computer's file system, and technology to let large file … Read more

A year ago it was Google with its Gears project. Now Yahoo wants to make your browser better, too.

A year after the Google launched its Gears project, Yahoo announced software called BrowserPlus that has a similar philosophy: expand what's possible to make Web applications a better alternative to programs running natively on a personal computer. Right now, it's available only in a "sneak peek" on some Yahoo-operated Web sites.

"BrowserPlus is a technology designed to 'extend the Web,' so that developers can build more exciting Web applications and so end users can get more … Read more

Firefox fans looking for a major update to the open-source Web browser probably will get a final version of it next month.

"We're looking for final ship sometime in June," said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an interview Wednesday. Mozilla, which was spun out of AOL more than 10 years ago, oversees the Firefox programming project.

One of the Firefox's strengths is the broad collection of hundreds of add-ons, but that also means things move more slowly when programmers must update their projects to be compatible with Firefox 3. And that's … Read more

Wednesday's beta release of a software development kit for Opera widgets brings the Norwegian company one step closer to its lofty goal of world browser domination.

Opera Software if offering the SDK for widget authors to deploy their Web applications on the spectrum of devices that support the Opera browser.

The Opera widget SDK was designed on W3C standards to support CSS, JavaScript, Ajax, and HTML languages. The kit itself contains an emulator, libraries, and documentation full of nuggets on best development practices. Along with the emulator, developers may find the included Opera Dragonfly debugging tool most useful; though … Read more

Mozilla surprised us a bit with an unexpected release of the first release candidate for Firefox 3 last weekend. It's a likely sign that the official release is nigh.

When will that be? You already know the answer: "When it's ready." My best guess is sometime in the late afternoon, either this month or next.

That said, Release Candidate 1 is going to be close enough to the final version of Firefox 3 that you won't notice any significant differences...until of course, you check your add-ons--extensions and themes. A large number might be incompatible with RC1.

However, let's cut the developers some slack. If an extension is compatible with Firefox 3 beta 5, it will be compatible with RC1 shortly. There's some frantic updating that's likely happening right now. However, if you like Tab Mix Plus a lot (which I do), you might be waiting a bit.

The lack of a few of your favorite extensions and likely all of your favorite themes doesn't mean you shouldn't upgrade to Firefox 3 right now, especially if you're a Web developer (duh), or if you regularly use Web-based Javascript applications such as Gmail frequently.… Read more

The initial release candidate of Firefox 3 is ready for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It's a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.

Among the major improvements are changes in the look and feel on the various operating systems, major security enhancements, and increased performance and stability. It is based on the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, which includes 14,000 updates to the code.

On the performance front, the documentation states that … Read more

Safari users are at risk of littering their desktops with malicious software because the browser does not ask for user permission when downloading files in the way that Firefox and Internet Explorer do, a security researcher said Thursday.

In a blog post titled "Safari Carpet Bomb," Nitesh Dhanjani describes how a rogue Web site can easily download resources to the Windows desktop or downloads directory on the Mac.

"Apple does not feel this is an issue they want to tackle at this time," he writes.

An Apple representative told Dhanjani that an "enhancement request" … Read more