safari

Apple's Safari is still by far the dominant mobile browser, though its competition is eating away at some of its popularity.

Safari grabbed 55.4 percent of all mobile-browser traffic captured by Web tracker Net Applications in February. That proved a hefty drop from January's 61 percent share and last July's 66 percent share.

At the same time, the stock Android browser, which is found on older Android devices, chewed up 22.8 percent of the mobile browser traffic last month. Though its numbers were higher last October and November, the Android browser has sliced off an … Read more

The Web browser is the most-used kind of software in the world, having become the de facto way that people access the Internet. Today, virtually all computing tasks can be completed in the browser.

Testing browsers can veer from incredibly complex to shockingly simple, depending on what you're looking for and why. At CNET, we prefer a holistic approach to browser benchmarking, looking at a combination of tests that benchmark general browser behavior, as well as several "real-world" tests that look at browser performance in common scenarios.

Riding on the heels of the recent U.S. lawsuit against Google for Safari tracking, Apple users in the U.K. have now launched their own similar case against the Web giant.

Peeved that their online privacy was violated, roughly a dozen people are suing Google in a class action suit, according to The Guardian. The case alleges that Google secretly tracked their Internet habits via cookies in the Safari Web browser. The lawsuit revolves around the way Google may have sidestepped Apple's security settings on the iPhone, iPad, and desktop versions of Safari.

"This is the first … Read more

When browsing the Web you may find text or images to be too small for you, and you may wish to increase their size or otherwise adjust the browser so you can properly see the content.

Though each browser has its own options for making text and images more legible, there are a few approaches in Safari that are a bit uncommon and not only help you zoom in and adjust what you are seeing, but also allow you to manage tabs and other content you are viewing.

Systemwide zoom The first option for zooming in Safari is to use … Read more

When Zynga has a hot game, it knows exactly what to do: Make more versions of it.

The social-gaming company just announced the launch of Bubble Safari Ocean and Bubble Safari for mobile, two new arcade-style games based on Zynga's popular Facebook game Bubble Safari.

Bubble Safari Ocean is already live on Facebook, and Bubble Safari mobile is expected to be available in the Apple App Store later today.

"There's something oddly satisfying about popping bubbles," VP of Zynga games Tom Casey wrote in a blog post. "Maybe it's the sense of power and … Read more

When not blogging for CNET, I review laptops and other tech products. And I've come across a shocking number of laptops with what I can only describe as crappy touch pads, from poorly integrated mouse buttons to mouse buttons that are too stiff to unresponsive performance from the touch pad itself. If you are saddled with such a laptop, you may find that browser extension gleeBox lives up to its name.

gleeBox is available for Chrome and Safari (the gleeBox Firefox add-on is out of date). At its core, it lets you tab from one link to another on … Read more

It's looking like Google may have to soon cough up the $22.5 million fine it agreed to pay in order to settle Federal Trade Commission claims that it illegally bypassed user privacy settings in Apple's Safari Web browser.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston approved the fine in San Francisco federal court late Friday, according to the Associated Press. This is the largest penalty the FTC has ever levied against a single company.

Google and the FTC reached the settlement agreement in August when the Web giant agreed to pay $22.5 million on charges that it &… Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions about MacBook systems not booting on battery power, how to deal with advertisements in Safari, how to restrict printing with an administrator password in OS X, and fonts not displaying properly in Apple's Font Book utility. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Laptops not booting when on battery power MacFixIt reader Robin asks:

In the past day a number of Safari users noticed a frequent and seemingly widespread error that claimed a certificate is invalid for a connection to the URL "static.ak.facebook.com," cautioning users against trusting the connection and providing options to continue or cancel the connection. The error seemed random in nature since it happened on different Web sites that use Facebook's embedded services such as the "Like" button, but also seemed to revolve around a recent event or change that is affecting only Safari users.

Upon viewing the invalid certificate when this error … Read more