Digital Media

From Firefox to IE and from Chrome to Opera and Safari, there's no sitting still for browser makers looking to keep their products fresh and competitive.

Microsoft actively urges IE 6 users to upgrade

A shopping video and eBay promotion are part of Microsoft's effort to give IE 6 users a reason to upgrade. The company also is trying to move corporate customers away.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 30, 2009 3:03 PM PST

Dell brings Chrome OS to its Netbook

With an experimental project, Dell has adapted Google's browser-based operating system to its Mini 10v Netbook.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 30, 2009 1:03 PM PST

Latest Firefox beta gets file-handling feature

The File interface, a draft standard, gives browsers better uploads and other features. Firefox 3.6 beta 4 supports the technology.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 30, 2009 8:32 AM PST

Why to embrace Firefox 3.6's new-tab ethos

A change to how the new browser positions new tabs is subtle but good, especially as browsers rise in importance. But more work is needed in tab switching.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 25, 2009 11:18 AM PST

Chrome extensions site now open for uploads

Google asks programmers to start adding their Chrome extensions to the new gallery. Chrome users can't yet download them, though.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 24, 2009 9:45 a.m. PST

New standard lets browsers get a grip on files

The Files interface, now a draft at the World Wide Web Consortium, could lead to better uploading and other chores. It's largely built into Firefox 3.6.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 24, 2009 7:38 a.m. PST

Firefox hopes to one-up IE with fast graphics

Windows 7 features called Direct2D and DirectWrite will speed up Internet Explorer 9 performance. But Firefox hopes it might retool for the same benefit first.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 24, 2009 4:00 a.m. PST

Browser-server now baked into Opera

Amid promises to "reinvent the Web," the Opera Browser debuted a new beta feature earlier this year. Opera Unite now comes as a regular feature, starting with Opera 10.10.
(Posted in The Download Blog by Seth Rosenblatt)
November 23, 2009 11:36 a.m. PST

previous coverage

Firefox: Heat and the CPU usage problem

Mozilla's browser does not efficiently use a computer's CPU and, consequently, can cause overheating problems in some laptops, particularly ultraportables.
(Posted in Nanotech: The Circuits Blog by Brooke Crothers)
November 21, 2009 9:15 a.m. PST

Browser security features compared

The newest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and other browsers all protect against phishing and malware attacks, and most also let you browse anonymously, though they implement these features in very different ways.
(Posted in Workers' Edge by Dennis O'Reilly)
November 20, 2009 9:00 a.m. PST

Mozilla reveals 2008 revenue: $79 million

The revenue growth rate tapered off to 5 percent from 12 percent the year earlier. A search deal with Google still supplies the bulk of the Firefox backer's money.
• Mozilla not interested in building a Firefox OS
• Google releases Chrome OS source code
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 19, 2009 12:05 p.m. PST

With IE 9, Microsoft fights back in browser wars

By showing its first glimpses of technology in Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft also is showing it's serious about building a competitive browser.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 18, 2009 3:02 p.m. PST

Apple updates Safari for security

A security update from Apple fixes multiple security holes in Safari, but a lack of transparency makes it hard to judge how severe the threats are.
(Posted in The Download Blog by Seth Rosenblatt)
November 11, 2009 6:17 p.m. PST

After 5 years, Firefox faces new challenges

Mozilla helped reshape the Web since releasing Firefox 1.0 five years ago. Now it's got a reawakened Microsoft and Google Chrome to reckon with.
(Posted in Deep Tech by Stephen Shankland)
November 9, 2009 4:00 a.m. PST

If you're a Mac user with a need for speed, you'll struggle to find a better browser than Mozilla's Camino. Apple's Safari will win a drag race, but it lacks the customizability that comes with an open-source browser like Camino. Unfortunately, both Safari and Camino fall incredibly short against Firefox because both are heavy on speed and light on community.

For those who want a highly optimized, lightning fast browsing experience on the Mac, you can't do much better than Camino, as TechCrunch writes. But most of us want more than that. We want Adblock Plus to filter out ads from our browsing experience. We want Bitly Preview to be able to launch and track tweets from the browser. And more.

Sure, you can "PimpMyCamino," but you won't get nearly the level of detailing that comes with Firefox's impressive community. It's not hard, technically, to migrate from Firefox to Camino, but in the move you're going to end up losing most of the add-ons that make Firefox so powerful.

Camino has ad-blocking functionality built into the browser, and you can find an array of themes to dress it up. But really, the primary reason to use Camino is if you want raw speed. But if that's all you want, Safari is likely a better choice, given the somewhat limited customizations and add-ons available for Camino. Or Google Chrome, which hasn't fully launched on the Mac yet but promises a big speed boost once it does.

Browsing is about more than speed. Firefox delivers a global community with a diverse array of needs and solutions, which is why it remains my preferred browser, even as Camino sprints by, unadorned.

CARLSBAD, Calif.--Although it has managed to grab nearly a quarter of the browser market, Mozilla now finds itself in an unenviable position--competing against Microsoft, Apple, and Google all at the same time.

Speaking at D: All Things Digital on Thursday, Mozilla's Mitchell Baker noted that the company didn't set out with that in mind.

"That's not the business model you are going to pick," Baker said. "It is a daunting space to compete with the three giants of the era."

That said, Baker and fellow Mozilla executive John Lilly said there is still a place for Firefox.

"We've just got to be us," Lilly said. "Mozilla has always been about scratching an itch."

Another challenge, Lilly said, is that people don't perceive the browser as something that changes their Web experience. "Most people just think it's this pane of glass," Lilly said. Three quarters of people use the browser that comes with their computer, he said.

But browsers are important, Lilly maintained.

"We spend more time with our browser than we do in our cars," Lilly said. "The real truth, I spend more time with my browser than I do with my family."

... Read more

Google has begun supporting a new HTML feature to show video in its Chrome browser as an alternative to Adobe Systems' much more widely used Flash, but the technology overall remains rough around the edges.

The support comes in Chrome 3.0.182.2, a developer preview version that on Wednesday inaugurated work on the 3.0 generation of the Google browser. HTML video is one of a handful of technologies in the still unfinalized HTML 5 standard that Google hopes will transform the Web from a collection of relatively static sites to a foundation for full-blown applications that rival those on PCs.

The "video" tag in HTML already is available in various versions of Apple's Safari, Firefox, and Opera, which at least in theory makes handling video on the Web as easy as handling images. But the HTML 5 standard that includes video isn't finalized yet, so don't expect a coding revolution yet.

The video tag can be used to show video that today would show up in a conventional box, just as with Flash or Microsoft's competing Silverlight plug-in. But it also enables deeper integration with a Web site. For a good example, watch Paul Rouget's demonstration of HTML video in which images, text boxes, and videos are overlaid on another video, with a JavaScript program dynamically changing the appearance.

In a talk Wednesday at the Google I/O conference, Matthew Papakipos, a Google engineering director, said HTML 5 video will permit close integration with the Web site's programming, so for example various actions on the Web site can trigger different videos to start or stop.

HTML 5 video still faces many hurdles to adoption, and browser support being just the first. Next come resolution of browser compatibility problems, upgrades by browser users to support the feature, and real-world use of the technology on Web sites.

The challenge is illustrated by video entertainment site DailyMotion, which on Wednesday announced plans to make 300,000 videos available through the HTML 5 video technology by the third quarter of 2009. DailyMotion recommends the Firefox 3.5 beta version to watch videos, which indeed worked for me, but the newest Chrome developer version and the Safari 4 beta reverted to Flash.

One issue is the technology used to encode and decode video. Firefox supports the Ogg Theora format for video (and the Ogg Vorbis format for the related HTML 5 audio tag), for example, and that's the format that DailyMotion is using.

More common in the real world, though, is the H.264 standard. Papakipos said Chrome will support H.264 video and AAC audio as well as Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio format.

Google plans to make its first foray into the old-fashioned world of television advertising with spots promoting its Chrome browser this weekend.

Google Japan had already released a 30-second video promoting Chrome on YouTube, but the company will distribute that video through the Google TV Ads network this weekend as an experiment to see if it can drum up interest in Chrome, its new browser. Google said it's using the research it has done on measuring the relevance of television ads in order to place the Chrome ad appropriately.

Chrome was also featured as part of a huge ad on the front page of The New York Times' Web site Friday, with several different videos promoting the browser. Those are also available, of course, on YouTube.

For a consumer brand of its size, Google does relatively little advertising. It put Chrome ads on YouTube in January, but "house ads" are a little different than network television exposure. Likewise, T-Mobile advertises the "G1 with Google" in hyping up the Android-powered G1, but that's not exactly the same as making Google the focus of the ad.

The amount of market share commanded by Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser has dropped for the seventh consecutive month.

Internet Explorer now has 67.55 percent of global browser market share, a drop of over seven percentage points in a year, according to figures from Web metrics company Net Applications, released Monday. Mozilla's Firefox browser, meanwhile, has gained market share in the same time frame, climbing over three percentage points to 21.53 percent.

Microsoft's browser has steadily lost ground to its competitors in the past year. Its share dropped sharply in both October and November 2008, when it lost over one percentage point in each month.

Apple's Safari browser now stands at 8.29 percent, up from 7.13 percent in November, when IE dipped. Safari has gained share more quickly than Firefox in that period: Mozilla's browser accounted for 20.78 percent of browser use three months ago, and now has 21.53 percent.

Google's Chrome browser, launched in September 2008, now has 1.12 percent of the market, having overtaken Opera in November. Opera's share of the market now stands at 0.7 percent.

Internet Explorer's drop of seven percentage point since February last year is a continuing trend. Microsoft lost over nine percent of browser market share in the preceding two years.

Most of IE's drop in the past year has been in Internet Explorer 6, which fell from 30.63 percent last February to 19.21 percent this January. Internet Explorer 7 has gained market share overall over the same time period, rising from 44.03 percent to 47.32 percent.

Microsoft launched the first release candidate for Internet Explorer 8 last week. It hopes to regain lost ground by adding features such as private browsing and a cross-site scripting filter.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Well, now we know one customer who's excited by Google's new ad possibilities at YouTube: Google.

The company is showing ads for its open-source Web browser. I saw Chrome overlay and display ads on a classically viral video, "No Pants Subway Ride 2009." (Snow angels on a New York City sidewalk in your underwear? Does your mother know?)

Chrome ads also are appearing on Facebook's Boggle-like Scramble game.

Both of these venues have plenty of unsold, low-cost inventory, so Google probably isn't spending Super Bowl-level marketing money on them. On the other hand, they promote Chrome chiefly to the more technically plugged-in early adopter crowd who's most likely to already have heard of Chrome. But it's still probably not a bad idea, since many people, even the early-adopter crowd, still haven't tried Chrome or its newer incarnations.

When Google launched Chrome in September the company also promoted the browser on some of the most prized real estate around, its own search home page.

Being able to promote Chrome essentially for free on YouTube illustrates both the power and ambition that Google has built up as it branched out from its search-engine roots. It also shows that the company is getting more hard-nosed about its business, no longer relying just on word of mouth to promote itself.

Chrome ads also indirectly showcase the fact that people can advertise on YouTube. Converting YouTube's popularity into revenue is a top priority at Google, and the company is claiming some progress if not actually big money.

"YouTube is emerging as a key component of our display strategy," said Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management, in discussing Google's fourth-quarter earnings last week.

Added Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, "We have introduced three new video formats in the last four to five months...for advertising. Each of them is having some traction. It's fair to say that we've not found a single solution that really drives revenue widely, and we're certainly working on that."

My biggest day-to-day gripe about Chrome is its missing support for automatic discovery of Web pages that offer RSS or other subscription services. But Google now has published a document detailing how it plans to address that weakness, though.

"We will autodetect RSS and Atom feeds using the standard autodiscovery tags," according to the developer document about Chrome support for RSS and Atom, a similar technology for letting people sign up for update "feeds" such as new blog postings. "When a feed is available for a page, we will display an RSS icon in the address bar."

Firefox shows the standard orange feed icon in its address bar when it encounters a site that has offers a feed; clicking it lets a person subscribe to the feed with a Web service such as Bloglines, My Yahoo, or Google Reader. Internet Explorer lets people subscribe to the feed using itself as the feed-reading software, an approach I dislike.

Though I switched to Chrome by default, I still use Firefox when I want to subscribe to a feed when there's no explicit or obvious option to do so on the Web page itself. Sometimes I seek out a feed, but with Chrome, there's often not even an icon to suggest I might want to even if I wasn't planning on it.

Chrome's subscription mechanism works as follows: when a person clicks on the feed link, Chrome will display a browser-formatted version of the content. Above the content is a "subscribe now" button with a drop-down menu that lets a person select a specific feed reader.

"A newly added feed reader becomes the default selected option the next time a feed is previewed," the document said.

The approach looks good to me, but there's no indication about when it will come to fruition. Google also showed a similar planning document for Chrome extensions, but version 1.0 has been released and there's still no way to use AdBlock Plus or Roboform, the two Firefox extensions I hear the most requests for in Chrome.

Google continues with its approach of release early and iterate often, though. On Tuesday evening, it released a new developer version of Chrome, 1.0.154.39.

The new version fixes a spate of bugs, including a couple that hampered use of Microsoft's Hotmail and the activation of the F1 function key to show Google's Chrome help site.

Despite the hype, it seems few IT teams are testing Google's recently launched Web browser Chrome--yet.

In Silicon.com's latest exclusive CIO Jury poll, the respondents revealed that they were still steering clear of the application, with 10 out of 12 saying their IT teams are not testing it.

Many in the "no" camp attributed their lack of Chrome testing to their IT infrastructures being set up to run with Internet Explorer as the default browser. Google unveiled Chrome at the start of September.

Nic Evans, European IT director at Key Equipment Finance, said: "Too many business applications are only certified for Internet Explorer to consider any alternatives so soon."

One respondent, however, hoped that the advent of Chrome will force Microsoft to up its game in the browser market.

Iain Hepburn, IT director at law firm Clarke Willmott, added: "We use MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) and extensive other MS applications and development tools, so we pretty much live in a MS world and have to use IE to get full functionality. We will be watching with interest though and any competition which forces everyone (MS) to raise their game is good for the consumer. We await the release of IE8 and what that may bring."

For the public sector, the issue of using Chrome may be academic, as IT leaders there may have to take a lead from the central government security gatekeepers.

Andrew Watson, CIO at the British Transport Police, said: "We are not testing Chrome. Partly because the Internet is such a potential security risk, we would take our steer off of CESG (the Information Assurance arm of the Government Communications HQ) about its suitability for use in secure government environments."

But those who have tested the browser did have praise for it.

Peter Pedersen, CTO of clothes retailer Figleaves.com, said: "(We've had) good results so far--far more friendly on the PC memory than IE."

Although his IT team isn't testing Chrome, Key Equipment Finance's Evans added that he had experimented with the Google app himself, describing it as "a more clean and efficient browser."

Other CIO Jury participants who said they are not seriously testing Chrome as a business browser added that they intend to watch the browser's development, possibly with a view to adopting it in the future.

One CIO who is testing Chrome, however, queried the business support that Google is able to provide.

Andy Jackson, head of IT for business-to-business media group Huveaux, said: "We could have done with Google providing us with a technical channel for questions and updates to minimize the impact of the announcement on the development team."

Taking part in this CIO Jury were:

• Chris Broad, head of IS and Technology, UKAEA
• Pete Crowe, IT director, Fat Face
• Nic Evans, European IT director, Key Equipment Finance
• Madhushan Gokool, IT manager, Storm Model Management
• Paul Haley, director of IT, Aberdeen University
• Iain Hepburn, IT director, Clarke Willmott
• Peter Pedersen, CTO, figleaves.com
• Richard Storey, head of IT, Guys & St Thomas' Hospital
• Andrew Watson, CIO, British Transport Police
• Jane Kimberlin, IT director, Domino's Pizza Group
• Mike Roberts, IT director, The London Clinic
• Andy Jackson, head of IT, Huveaux

Julian Goldsmith of Silicon.com reported from London.