ReadWriteWeb

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.

Meanwhile, in the mobile browser market, Apple's Safari has risen over 12 percentage points to have a 62% share of that market, according to leading Internet statistics provider Net Applications. However, Apple will have to continue to look over its shoulder at Android, which has also gained over 2011. Let's look more closely at how the desktop and mobile browser markets changed over 2011.

We're approaching the end of November, which for those of us in the United States who celebrate it, means it's time for Thanksgiving. It's a holiday that typically involves some combination of family, eating, drinking and/or relaxing. Despite it being a national holiday, the tech-savvy do not get the entire day off. For many, being back home with family means being casually asked to "take a look at" a loved one's computer or perform other IT duties around the house.

Whether they explicitly ask you to do it or not, chances are your parents' Web browser could use an upgrade. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal put out a humorous call to action asking that you do just that, with or without the consent of your parents. Lifehacker goes so far as to show how to trick them into thinking nothing's changed.

A project lead by some of the most-respected leaders of the Internet has secured $240,000 in funding to build a prototype system for both expert and peer review of all the content on the web, sentence by sentence. Called Hypothes.is, the project is lead by early search engine innovator and climate change activist Dan Whaley and backed by advisors from John Perry Barlow of the EFF to Garret Camp of StumbleUpon to Kaliya Hamlin of the Internet Identity Workshop to Nate Oostendorp of Slashdot, and many more.

We wrote about the Hypothes.is fundraising effort on Kickstarter last month. That effort succeeded, including with a large matching pledge by cleantech and web venture capitalist Sunil Paul. And so Hypothes.is will be built. What do people want out of it and does it stand a chance to change the web? Opinions differ.

Whether it's to elude oppressive governments or something a bit less noble, many users have a need to browse the Web in complete secrecy. Tools that enable anonymous browsing have existed for years on the desktop and some have popped up for Android. There are some for iOS as well, but until now, none of them featured the bulletproof privacy of the Tor network.

Enter Covert Browser, which was approved by Apple earlier this week. It uses Tor to encrypt Internet traffic and route it through three different servers to ensure data about users cannot be intercepted by third parties. Such data would include browsing history or, more commonly, one's geographic location.

Today, personalized news app News360 made another leap from tablets and smartphones to the desktop. A new browser plugin called Periscope brings some of the service's news aggregation features to bigger screens and helps readers get deeper context and perspective on news stories.

The plugin, which is now available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, detects news stories and displays a slim toolbar across the top of the browser window with links to related stories from other outlets. That bar can be expanded to show more stories, complete with big, fancy thumbnail images and related tweets.

Opera Software recently released the beta of version 11.6 of the Opera browser, furthering its support for some of the latest HTML5 features. The browser's latest update introduced Ragnarök, the company's implementation of the latest HTML5 parsing algorithm and includes support for a few things most other browsers don't yet offer.

The latest version of Opera supports radial gradients in CSS3, which allows front-end developers to define the color and placement of circular gradients using only CSS code, rather than relying on images to create this visual effect. It also uses the newest version of the JavaScript standard, ECMAScript 5.1, and supports HTML5 microdata for search engines. Using microdata, developers can add semantic context to certain content, which allows Google and others to present it accordingly in search results.

I first saw a startup called Apture demonstrated in an off-the-record session at O'Reilly's by-invite-only FOO Camp several years ago. The room was packed and I had to stand on my toes outside the doorway to see Apture's Tristan Harris navigate around the Internet on a projected screen. He was highlighting words with his cursor and making related articles, photos, Wikipedia pages and YouTube videos pop off the surface of the page in a handsome little box with rounded corners. Everyone in the room made ooh and aah noises when they saw it. Wherever you saw a word - you could learn a whole lot more about it with a little swipe of your mouse.

What will the Internet look like in 5 or 10 years? Will it still be a series of linked pages that users browse through, one at a time? Google may be betting that it will be something very different, if the company's latest acquisition is any indication. Apture, the service you can see in action if you highlight any word on this ReadWriteWeb, has been acquired by Google, the two companies announced this morning. An addition to offering media-rich contextual search pop-ups on the pages of publishers who have installed the service, Apture also offers a browser plug-in that adds the same functionality to any page on the web. Much of that same functionality will be baked into Google's browser Chrome very soon.

Good news for Twitter, for Firefox & for Firefox users.

Firefox 8.0 was just announced for download and one of the biggest changes that users will notice is that Twitter search has been added to the default search options in the top of the browser. Answers.com and CreativeCommons are out (ouch) and Twitter is in.

The implementation is nothing special, it just drops users off on Twitter's own search page, but for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who don't know how to navigate to Facebook other than to search for it in their browser search bar - those people will now be one step closer to seeing what Twitter can do.

Today's beta release of Chrome enables users to sync different accounts across multiple computers. This allows more than one person to sign into Chrome on a shared computer and have access to all their browser data. It also enables one person to have different Chrome profiles with different email addresses, e.g. work and personal, that can all be accessed from any computer by logging in.

Chrome currently syncs bookmarks, extensions, passwords and other personalized settings to the user's Google account. Signing into Chrome from anywhere, on any computer, will bring up the user's browser, just like at home. But the current stable release only allows one account. Today's beta makes it possible to use multiple Chrome accounts on any copy of the browser.

Dolphin HD, a popular third party Web browser for iOS and Android, has been found to have a potentially serious privacy flaw. The software routinely sends a list of visited Web addresses back to the servers of MoboTap, the company that makes the browser.

The breach, which was confirmed by CNet today, affects the security of encrypted data accessed over HTTPS, in addition to raising privacy issues.