For all the wonders of Apple's iPad, one feature that's always been a little underwhelming is its native Web browser. Like on the iPhone, Safari for the iPad definitely gets the job done and is overall a pretty solid browser in terms of performance, but there are few features that are inexcusably absent.
Fortunately, there have been a number of third party browsers that have made their way into the App Store. Atomic Browser and Opera Mini are both very popular, streamlined browsers that support tabbed browsing. Skyfire offers rich social integration and can even play Flash videos. The newest entrant into this space is Dolphin HD, a tablet-optimized version of the popular Android browser, which just launched for iPhone a few weeks ago.
One of the beautiful things about the Android ecosystem is that third-party functionality is not just highlighted, but wholeheartedly endorsed. Nothing shows this better than the third-party browser ecosystem.
A good portion of the innovation done in with Android browsers is being driven by two factors. 1) The native Android browser is considered subpar and 2) HTML5 performance. The race to the top will be which of these browsers offers the most bug free experience folded into the evolution of new browser experiences.
Google just shipped a new stable release of the Chrome browser that includes two new technologies: Native Client, which allows execution of C and C++ code within the browser, and the Web Audio API, which brings advanced audio capabilities to JavaScript. These features were released in the beta channel in August.
The update also contains some long-awaited improvements for users of Mac OS X Lion, which did not get along well with Chrome previously. In addition to fixing "many crash bugs" and adding "some all-around visual polish," this release adds Lion's new scrollbars and support for its full-screen mode.
In a blog post published today, Mozilla user experience designer Ian Barlow previewed the user interface their Mobile Team is in the process of building for a tablet version of Firefox.
Firefox for tablets, which does not yet have a release date, will be optimized to run on Honeycomb Android tablets. The browser will include features from the desktop version of Firefox such as tabs, themes and the Awesomebar, an adaptation of a feature launched with Firefox 3 that enables quick access to bookmarks and browsing history. Items synced from the desktop can also be accessed there.
Mozilla makes the popular browser Firefox but the organization has a whole lot of other projects as well. The Mozilla Labs website has long been a tangle of different projects that were hard to find and hard to keep track of. Today, Mozilla Labs announced that it has launched a new version of its site that better organizes its many experiments and lets users "follow" particular projects of interest to them. The new site is at beta.mozillalabs.com and users there can sing up to follow updates on projects, people and events.
The new beta Labs site is powered by the same social network technology as Mozilla's innovators' social network Drumbeat. Drumbeat seems relatively well adopted, but at launch the new Labs site is sparse, incomplete and a little challenging to use. Hopefully the new site will help more Labs projects get more consumer engagement, more developer support and thus lead to more innovation for web users.
Mozilla has released a new update of its Firefox browser for Android that brings user interface improvements for consumers and new developer tools to create rich mobile Web applications. Google, Apple, Research In Motion and others should take heed of what Mozilla is doing because it is the evolution of the mobile browser and is a signal of what is to come for smartphone consumers and developers.
The new Firefox for Android app is faster and sleeker than its previous version. In a few words, it actually works. That was not always the case with previous Firefox for Android builds that were difficult to navigate. It is designed to look and feel like an Android application and has a new home screen page, buttons and easy to use features like Firefox sync, add-ons, tabbed browsing and bookmarks. In preliminary testing, the app is more responsive, pinches and zooms faster and generally looks cleaner. Outside of optimization, Mozilla is pointing the way that mobile browsers could and should go in the near future.
The developers of two of the most influential open-source Web browsers are working together on a feature that should make Web apps play together much more nicely. As we covered on ReadWriteHack yesterday, Google's Chromium engineers announced that they're working with Mozilla on a framework called Web Intents, the brainchild of Google developer Paul Kinlan. Firefox announced its project last month.
Web Intents, based on an existing capability in Google's Android mobile OS, will let Web apps express a simple call for an action, like 'share' or 'edit,' which receiving apps will be designed to use, without either app needing to have specific knowledge of the APIs of the other. This way, instead of having to code for each specific Web app one might want to access, developers can just use these simple requests, which will be built into the browser. The Chrome and Firefox teams are each building this functionality for their own browser, but they're combining their proposals to use a single API for Web app developers to reach both platforms.
After making the rounds on the Internet for a few days, a news story about research purporting to show that Internet Explorer users tend to have low IQ scores was revealed this morning to be a hoax. Evidently, the study, the press release and the supposed company that released it were all fake, a fact that, once revealed, forced dozens of news outlets who ran with it to concede that they were duped.
The hoax was perpetuated by an entrepreneur living in Canada named Tarandeep Singh Gill. He's the founder of a comparison shopping Website called AtCheap.com. In an email with ReadWriteWeb moments before he publicly revealed who he was, he told us that he hoped to lure a few people away from Internet Explorer, but he did not expect it to get the level of coverage that it did.
"I was really surprised that most media outlets fell for it," he said.
Ask any power user, blogger, or journalist which PC web browser is the fastest or the most secure, and the answer will almost always be, "Google Chrome." That's because Google has done a masterful job positioning Chrome as the high-performance, secure browser.
But a bumper crop of poorly performing, quickly coded Google Plus extensions for Chrome threatens to damage the reputation Google engineers and marketers have worked so hard to establish.
Today, Google has pushed three new features to the latest stable version of its Chrome browser. Instant Pages pre-renders certain pages in the background, like top search results or the 'next page' link in an article, when the software can reasonably predict that the user will go there next. A pre-rendered page will appear to load instantly.
Instant Pages builds on Google's instant search results and previews to further reduce the time users spend finding what they're looking for.
