Software, Web Browser | featured news

Last Thursday, Microsoft announced several new features to the upcoming IE10, which will launch as part of Windows 8. One of these features, which turns on “Do Not Track” by default, has caused quite a stir over the weekend as new outlets and bloggers have discussed the potential benefits and ramifications of this feature.

Here’s some news you probably didn’t expect to read: Yahoo just released its own Web browser. Well, sorta. The new software, dubbed Yahoo Axis, is being called a "search browser." Its main trick is the ability to bypass the standard list of links and instead send users directly to websites and pages via thumbnails.

Mozilla has released Firefox 12. The new version of the open source Web browser introduces a new update service for Windows that allows the browser to perform updates without user intervention. Full support for background updates is expected to arrive in Firefox 13.

Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker is sitting on a ticking time bomb. The survival of her company, which pledges to make the web a better place, is at the mercy of one of its main competitors, Google.

Google has released the newest version of its Chrome Web browser, and in the process fixed nine security glitches and folded in the updated Adobe Flash Player that allows users to set the software to update automatically.

Google’s Chrome browser became the most-used browser in the world for one day last weekend, according to web analytics company StatCounter.

When you have it on, every time you visit a Web page, it records all the third-party trackers that glom onto you. There’s no great technical wizardry involved—anyone who knows how to navigate the developer settings on her browser can see the same data—but Collusion visualizes the information in a simple, alluring schematic.

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

In our Top Consumer Products of 2011 list, we selected the Chrome web browser as our number 1 pick. Its market share has grown over 2011 and it's on track to surpass Firefox as the 2nd most popular browser on the desktop (exactly when it passes Firefox depends on whose statistics you read). Over 2011 Google has demonstrated, in both user numbers and technical innovation, that Chrome is the most significant challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the browser market since the days of Netscape Navigator in the late 90s.