Microsoft's search engine Bing today announced something it probably should have made available a long time ago: a new version of Firefox with Bing as the default search option in the search box and the Awesome Bar. Of course the download is optional and just for all you Bing lovers who sought an easy way to switch to Bing inside your Firefox instead of Google.
What does it mean for Google, Google's partnership with Firefox, Firefox, Chrome and Bing? Time will tell if it means anything and that's probably largely dependent on how far and wide such a custom browser gets used. It could be a good backup though in case Firefox's biggest revenue partner, Google, decided to focus all of its support on its own browser.
In the new stable release of its Chrome browser, Google has ramped up the importance of Web apps on the desktop. The New Tab page is now a Web app launcher with big, friendly icons. The new look was added to the beta channel last month. The Chrome Web Store was also renovated. It's now a "wall of images" that shows app info with one click.
Google recently implemented new technologies in Chrome enabling Web apps to securely execute low-level code in the browser, blurring the line between Web and native apps. Google wants Web apps everywhere, and today's Chrome release is full of new ways to promote them.
Android made a jump today that signals the future of the platform. Anybody familiar with Android will take a look at its new Ice Cream Sandwich platform and know that Google has truly morphed its tablet version of the platform, Honeycomb, and the previous smartphone versions into an entirely new user interface. Whether or not users will respond favorably to it remains to be seen, but Android 4.0 is a dynamic update to the leading smartphone operating system.
What is new with Ice Cream Sandwich? Well, Google is playing to Android's strengths with ICS by creating new multi-tasking capabilities, resizable widgets, improved voice controls and quicker communication controls. Android has also tied its browser to the cloud, which will drastically improve how it renders and saves pages. Check out what is new with Android 4.0 below and how Android now stacks up against its competition.
When Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet last month, it sparked discussions among most tech enthusiasts and bloggers over things like whether or not they'd buy one and whether the new device should be seen as a competitor to Apple's tirelessly dominant iPad. One detail about what Amazon unveiled was cause for concern for some.
Silk, the Web browser that will ship with the new tablet, utilizes Amazon's powerful cloud computing infrastructure to help serve up Web pages faster and even predict your browsing habits. Naturally, this split architecture and its potential to capture private user data caught the attention of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who inquired with Amazon about the privacy implications Silk presents.
Mobile browser Opera announced today new versions of its Android browser with new features that will help users control the amount of data they use while surfing the mobile Web. Opera Mobile 11.5 and Mini 6.5 uses cloud technology to reduce the size of Web pages by up to 90% and is another entry into the trend of using the cloud to offload data traffic, something the new Amazon Kindle Fire tablet will do with its "Silk" browser.
Opera will show you exactly how much data you have used and how much you have saved with a dedicated page in the browser. The goal is to help users save money on pay-as-you-go data plans. It can also be helpful to the millions of users who face data caps and throttling coming from the carriers. Check out the video of Opera's new Android browser below.
Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters, automatically detects the visitor's browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points.
Not suprisingly, Microsoft's own Internet Explorer 9 gets a perfect score. The latest stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, however, each score 2.5 and 2 points, respectively. Other browsers like Safari are not able to be analyzed by the site, which returns a message saying "We can't give you a score for your browser." Presumably, the domain yourbrowsermattersunlessyoureamacuser.com was too long to be marketable.
Google's Chrome Web browser could become the second most popular browser on the market before the end of the year, according to data from StatCounter, a Web analytics company. The three-year-old browser would knock Firefox from the second place slot behind Internet Explorer.
The coup would be quite an achievement for Chrome, which was just released in 2008 and has been growing rapidly ever since. By comparison, Firefox was first launched in 2004 and took much longer to attract significant market share.
Alongside its Kindle Fire tablet device and new line of Kindle e-readers, Amazon introduced another new product today: Amazon Silk, a mobile Web browser that rethinks the way browsers have traditionally worked.
Silk essentially splits the architecture of the Web browser in half, relying on both the computing power of the hardware and on the remote servers that comprise Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It relies on the cloud to call up certain elements of a page, acting sort of like a content delivery network built right into the browser. The company claims that this unique approach will offer a much faster browser experience to end users.
We have been waiting most of the year to hear news from Facebook about an HTML5-based Web app store that would circumvent the native application ecosystems of the Android Market and the Apple App Store. Yet, according to Facebook's CTO, there is not going to be a central repository of HTML5 Web apps coming to the platform any time soon.
In the meantime, a Brazilian company called Movile has launched a new version of its Web app store, Zeewe 2.0, which incorporates some key HTML5 features and could provide a roadmap for U.S. developers, like Facebook, in creation of a Web app store.
The Google Chrome team announced a new beta version today with some significant interface changes. The New Tab page - where users launch most visited sites, Chrome Web apps and bookmarks - now displays one grid of icons that can be rearranged by dragging and dropping. The user navigates between the sections by clicking a narrow bar along the bottom or arrows on either side.
The New Tab page in the current stable release of Chrome displays large click targets as well, but all three sections are on the page, and the other two collapse into narrow strips while one is displayed. The new design is much easier to navigate. It would also work great on a tablet. Just saying.
