Web Browser | featured news

Two weeks ago, Mozilla announced a major milestone for its Firefox web browser: one billion downloads. They even launched OneBillionPlusYou.com to mark the occasion and demonstrate just how large one billion really is.

The topic of site support for IE6 has had a lot of discussion on the web recently as a result of a post on Digg. Why would anyone run an eight-year old browser? Should sites continue to support it?

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Final is now officially available for download.

In a nutshell, Opera Unite is a web server within a web browser. Instead of just browsing the web, Opera now lets you share files and photos, communicate with other users, chat, and host your web site directly on your own computer.

Mozilla said the latest version of its Firefox browser 3.0.11 was downloaded 150 million times during the first 24 hours it was made available.

This time, all the major tech outlets are credulously reporting on this morning's press release from Apple, which heralds the runaway success of Safari 4 on the basis of 11 million downloads in three days. What is at issue is the ridiculously thin claim that the latest Safari is a wild success on the basis that Apple basically pushed it out to everyone it possibly could, whether they wanted it or not.

The company announced Thursday that an update to Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, combined with a new version of the Webkit browser engine, should improve the loading speed of JavaScript-heavy Web pages by up to 30 percent. The updates will be automatically downloaded to existing copies of Chrome.

The web browser is probably the most essential application on your PC; there is no better practical way of staying connected to news, your friends, and most importantly, the lulz. But whether you’re using Internet Explorer or newly minted Chrome, each of today's popular web browsers has different strengths and weaknesses.