web

BARCELONA, Spain--Opera Software has dropped the new engine into its browser and now has begun revving it up.

At the Mobile World Congress show here, the company began showing for the first time its new WebKit-based version of Opera for Android. That browser is the first product from a completely overhauled product line and technology strategy for the company based in Oslo, Norway.

Opera is changing the browser engine at the core of its software, dumping its own Presto for the open-source WebKit used in Chrome and Safari. It's a radical change in many ways: many engineers are changing … Read more

Goodbye ".com," and hello ".cadillac," ".vegas," and ".music." The world of Internet suffixes is about to go through a major growth spurt.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, announced today that hundreds of new Web address suffixes will roll out this year, according to the Associated Press. This will be the largest growth of Internet addresses since the 1980s.

The Web has become saturated with ".com" addresses, which has made people and businesses petition ICANN for new names.

Foreign languages will be the first to get new … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Mozilla, Ericsson, and AT&T announced today they're demonstrating technology to place Internet-based voice and video calls that bridge traditional telephone services and the Web.

The demonstration, at Mobile World Congress here, uses the nascent WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) standard to set up browser-based communications between different devices.

The "proof of concept" links a Web app with a person's existing phone number and "shows how consumers can easily take and receive video calls from their mobile phones or desktop browser using WebRTC or share their Web experiences with friends or family who might … Read more

Google removed the ability to display a custom background image on your Google Search homepage. However, there's a Chrome extension that can help you regain your little slice of customization.

Aside from allowing you to change the background image, the extension will let you do some other neat things, too. You can remove the Google logo, search and lucky buttons, footer, and promotional links.

Head to the Google Chrome Web Store and install the Custom Google Background extension.

After installing the extension, you can select where you'd like to use an image from. You can also … Read more

Are you still flying solo instead of jumping on the Mailbox or Mailstrom bandwagon? That doesn't mean you can't get a little help from Astrid, your friendly squidface to-do list app, when using Gmail in Chrome.

Each time you read your Gmail, you may star or label some of the messages that you want to get back to. This is a great idea in theory, but messages can easily be forgotten. Instead, you can add a reminder to your Astrid that will keep up with your lack of focus on the Internet.

Here's how to get started:… Read more

While Chrome has had an internal PDF viewer for a couple of years now, Mozilla only just added the feature to Firefox 19. It's a feature that most people will find convenient as is, but if you're looking to take some control over how Firefox handles PDF files on the Web, here's how:

PDF file handling options The Firefox PDF viewer is enabled by default and will display PDFs within the browser when you click on PDF links. If they don't, make sure you've disabled any PDF plug-ins you may have previously installed. If you … Read more

Buried in a press release on Yammer momentum are a couple of new details about Microsoft's plans for integrating Yammer with SkyDrive Pro and Office Web Apps by summer 2013.

From the February 20 press release:

"SkyDrive Pro was previewed at the recent SharePoint Conference, and Yammer is implementing it as the underlying platform for file storage. In addition, Yammer is enhancing the ability to preview and edit files directly within Yammer feeds using Office Web Apps. The combination of these capabilities will dramatically enhance a user's ability to create, collaborate, share, and discover content within Yammer. … Read more

Mozilla, which bowed to the market power of the H.264 video compression technology last year, now has built support for the patent-encumbered standard into the Nightly version of Firefox on Windows 7.

Mozilla can't actually ship H.264 in its open-source product because of the patent licensing requirements, so it decided instead to adapt Firefox to draw on H.264 support built into newer operating systems. The first step is done -- if not fully tested and debugged -- on Windows 7, according to a Mozilla blog post today.

Mozilla had thrown its weight behind VP8, a royalty-free … Read more