Digital Media

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.

Mozilla has launched a usability test plug-in for its open-source Firefox browser, in a bid to make testing and user feedback easier and more attractive.

Test Pilot, an add-on for Firefox 3.5, was rolled out on Wednesday. "We are looking for Firefox users of all levels of skill and all levels of technical knowledge to help improve Firefox and Labs experiments," Mozilla Labs employee Jinghua Zhang wrote in a blog post.

(Credit: Mozilla)

The opt-in program allows those who sign up to "try out the newest features and user interface ideas before anyone else, but also see and learn how those results may contribute back to the product design," Zhang wrote, adding that participants would not have data about their product usage submitted without their permission.

Test data will be anonymized and aggregated for presentation to the general public without the user's individual data being identifiable, Zhang said.

Test Pilot was first announced by Mozilla Labs in March last year. At the time, Chief Innovation Officer Chris Beard wrote in a blog post that Mozilla had to "rely upon the blogosphere and word-of-mouth to attract the attention" of people interested in trying out new Mozilla experiments.

"The problem is that we are systemically biasing feedback towards only those who happen to hear about a particular experiment (on a given day) and in those cases skew to the technically savvy early adopter," Beard wrote. "It is therefore very hard to derive conclusions representative of our much larger and increasingly mainstream user base."

Beard added that each of Mozilla's feature tests was isolated, and the organization had to "start from scratch" in finding volunteer testers each time.

With Test Pilot, an icon is permanently visible at the bottom right-hand side of the browser window, allowing the user to keep an eye on which tests are upcoming or currently under way.

Those signing up for the program will first need to complete a survey, which gauges their level of technical knowledge.

According to Zhang, the Test Pilot program is "still in its 0.1 release," and revamped iterations will be made available "within the coming weeks."

David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.

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."

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.

Brand Thunder, a company that lets people customize Firefox with brands, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Ohio TechAngels and other angel investors, the company said Tuesday.

The company revamps the open-source Web browser with various brands such as Nascar, hockey teams, country singer Julianne Hough, and various other partners.

To fund its business, Brand Thunder also changes the default search engine to Yahoo, which shares resulting advertising revenue with the company.

Brand Thunder also said it's signed a new partnership with Major League Soccer for a branded browser.

Update 9:45 a.m. PST: The company followed up with details of the funding: $350,000 from TechColumbus, $200,000 from the Ohio TechAngels Fund, and $200,000 from other angel investors.

In addition, the company said it expects to break even by the end of the quarter. It had hoped to do so in February, but a slowdown in Yahoo search delayed it slightly. The company also receives revenue from maintenance, upfront fees, and other sources.

Brand Thunder lets people customize Firefox with assorted brands.

(Credit: Brand Thunder)

Russian-language Firefox users will see a new default search provider soon: Google rival Yandex.

Mozilla currently has Google set to be the default search engine in Russian Firefox, but it concluded that Yandex was the better choice, according to a blog post by Mozilla General Counsel Harvey Anderson on Friday.

"Over the past few months, we have listened to feedback, talked with our localizers, studied the trends of our Firefox Yandex builds, and reviewed the Yandex user experience. All this activity led us to the conclusion that our Russian users really wanted direct access to the Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds," Anderson said.

"As a result, we're planning on setting Yandex as the default search provider for the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds," he said. Version 3.1 is due in coming weeks, after a third beta version is released and tested.

Mozilla gets the vast majority of its revenue through a partnership under which Google shares revenue from search ads. In 2007, that was $66 million of Mozilla's $75 million total revenue.

Details on the change can be seen in the Mozilla bug tracker, which specifically refers to "the new business arrangement between Mozilla and Yandex in Russia."

It appears that nearly 2 million people in the United States downloaded Google's new Chrome Web browser in its first week of availability, Nielsen Online said Wednesday.

Nielsen, which bases its statistics on the behavior of a panel of Internet users, said that from September 1 to September 7, 1.93 million people visited the Google "Thank You" page associated with the download process.

The online chatter about Google's browser surged to more than half the remarkable level of Apple's iPhone, Nielsen said. This chart shows the percentage of blog postings and other online commentary that mentioned Chrome.

(Credit: Nielsen Online)

That's nearly 1.4 percent of all U.S. Internet users, Nielsen said. That may sound small, but it's a pretty good response for a beta version of a product that most people don't need, since so far, it only refines the familiar activity of using the Web.

Of course, getting people to try Chrome is easier than getting them to switch, but Google appears determined to push the open-source browser as hard as possible. On Tuesday, the company began a program to let people get the latest Chrome updates.

The buzz followed on the heels of the launch, according to Nielsen's measurement of Chrome mentions on blogs, discussion boards, and other online forums.

"The interest in all things Google was apparent in the online discussion surrounding the somewhat-unexpected Chrome launch," said Jon Stewart, research director of technology and search at Nielsen Online. "The browser was mentioned in nearly 1 percent of all online discussions the day after its launch--a respectable slightly-more-than-half of what the highly anticipated iPhone 3G generated when it launched earlier this summer."

Firefox 3.1 alpha 2, code-named Shiretoko, adds functionality for Web developers with very little eye candy for users.

Johnathan Nightingale of Mozilla described Firefox 3.1 as having more refinement than new features. This alpha release is intended for developers and testers only and should not yet be for general-purpose use.

The most visible enhancement in this alpha release is a feature that allows you to drag and drop tabs between two open Firefox browsers.

There are considerable under-the-hood enhancements here. Built on a pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine, Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 includes support for a video tag element in the HTML 5 standard, which allows designers to embed video directly into pages without using proprietary formats. It also includes support for CSS 2.1 and 3, further enhancing the browser's overall performance.

To make Javascript run faster, there is support for "Web workers," a threading process that allows scripts to run in parallel in the background.

For Windows Vista users there's a new Aero "glass" style for the Mozilla browser interface. This means that developers can write Web applications that will appear to be translucent on browsers running Windows Vista with Aero turned on.

The first public beta for Firefox 3.1 should be available in late September or early October. Final release will be in late 2008 or early 2009.

Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 is available from Mozilla.

The Mozilla Corporation has released an advance testing version of its popular Firefox Web browser, just days after Google revealed its competing Chrome software.

The second alpha of Firefox 3.1 was made available overnight. The software, code-named Shiretoko, is at this stage intended for software developers and testers only, with the stable and recommended version of Firefox being 3.0.1.

In a statement, Mozilla said the testing version of Firefox introduced several new features, including the browser's highly anticipated support for a new video tag element introduced with the HTML 5 standard to provide more functionality around the amount of video that is increasingly being delivered through Web browsers.

In addition, Shiretoko allows users to drag and drop tabs between browser windows, improves performance in some areas and provides better integration with Windows Vista's Aero 'Glass' theme for those wanting to add extra themes on top of Firefox.

The new software also adds some speed enhancements to the browser, particularly in the area of JavaScript handling, which was one area Google highlighted as being a strength of the Chrome browser it launched this week, also in testing form.

Mozilla is planning to integrate a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed TraceMonkey, into Firefox. However the organization noted that technology was not included in the software released overnight, although it could be tested by following a set of instructions posted online.

The alpha release of Firefox 3.1 can be downloaded from Mozilla's Web site.

Renai LeMay of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.