browsers

In the midst of counting the total number of Linux users in the world, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler reveals a startling statistic:

The Mac only accounts for roughly 7 percent of active Firefox browser installations.

Sure, Windows has massive market share, but I would have thought more Mac users would be running Firefox than their Windows peers. Meaning, I had assumed that whereas Windows users would be content to let inertia guide them to Internet Explorer (IE), a greater proportion of Mac owners would make the choice for Firefox, instead of Safari that comes preinstalled on the Mac, netting the … Read more

After testing this sleek, straightforward browser, we were ready to get rid of our current, more popular browser, and make The World Browser our default.

The user interface looks professionally designed, with self-explanatory command buttons at the top of the window. Below that are shortcuts to all of your bookmark categories. The interface can be customized to add or remove extra toolbars, but we liked the clean, uncluttered look of the default settings. Tiny navigational buttons make it easy to move through opened tabs. We especially liked the tab preview option for displaying all of your open tabs on one … Read more

Firefox, for all its great functionality and superior performance, has long been a laggard when it comes to managing PDF content on the Web.

Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers both give users the option of reading Portable Document Format content within the browser, while Firefox forces users to navigate to PDFs through its Downloads window. Not very convenient.

Leave it to Firefox's online community, however, to remedy this failing. While there are a range of Firefox plug-ins to help manage PDFs documents, two stand out for me.

The first, Download Statusbar, doesn't actually enable … Read more

Since I helped open this particular can of worms, I feel responsible for sharing the latest news about an issue in which Adobe Systems' software opens Internet Explorer even when Chrome is set as the default browser.

I had a Twitter tirade in January after the umpteenth time that Lightroom showed me the location of a photo in Internet Explorer when I clicked the Lightroom's GPS photo location icon. Internet Explorer also showed when using Adobe Photoshop's browser-based help and when Lightroom launched my Flickr page after uploading images to the Yahoo Web site. The problems showed on … Read more

Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker describes Firefox, the open-source Web browser, as "an anomaly."

While most Microsoft competitors lay down and die when Microsoft claims 90 percent or more of a market, Mozilla has fought back to earn more than 20 percent of the browser market.

Despite this success, Baker believes that government, and in the European Commission in particular, has a role to play in further leveling the playing field. As she notes in a recent blog post, government entities would perhaps have less relevance but for the antitrust activity that resulted in Microsoft's dominant market … Read more

My CNET colleague Sarju Shah over at Gamespot has put together a great rundown of Web browsers you can run inside of the latest video games. The four solutions tested include PlayXpert, Steam, Rogue, and Xfire

Why run these instead of your standard browser? Simple, these browsers have been designed to run as lean and mean as possible, and play nice with an application that's running in full-screen mode. They also feature niceties you won't find in your standard Web browser like hot keys that can make them appear or disappear in an instant, and transparency that lets … Read more

Google is coming a bit closer to releasing a working version of its Chrome browser for Mac.

Programmers for the company had been building an engine that could render Web pages, but it only ran within a simple framework called the test shell. Now they've begun hooking up the renderer to a full-fledged browser, which among other things can handle multiple tasks at the same time. That's key for a real application, especially one such as Chrome that isolates each browser tab into its own computing process.

The result of the work: a screenshot of Chrome running on Mac OS X … Read more

With its numerous customization options, this free toolbar quickly became a favorite, and one of the more useful Internet Explorer add-ons we've tested. ALOT Customizable News Toolbars is well-designed and has such a wide variety of buttons to choose from, you're sure to find something you like.

The toolbar fits snugly in your browser window. Though we liked the overall toolbar design, with its colorful, but not cheesy, buttons, we didn't care for the default layout. The customization option took us to the publisher's Web site, where we deleted the toolbar buttons that we didn't … Read more

Skyfire (coverage), the plucky mobile browser that could, inches closer to a full-version release on Thursday with version 0.9 beta for Symbian and Windows Mobile phones. Despite some rocky loading issues with our preview version, Skyfire's significant additions to its feature set leave much to be admired.

Many of the changes are technical, such as support for all screen resolutions on Windows Mobile phones and a Symbian client that has lost over 50 percent of its kilobyte bulk. Many more developments pack on greater browsing power, like the capability to download some MP3s and videos.

A few features … Read more