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Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer to become the number one browser in Europe, reports analytics company StatCounter. According to December figures, Firefox had 38.11% of the European market share, compare to IE's 37.52%.

It's the first time that IE has been knocked out of the number one position in a major geographical area, says Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter's CEO, who points to the growth of Google's Chrome as the reason for the shift. It isn't that Firefox is gaining steam, but rather than IE is losing users to Chrome.

The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first tests to ascertain browsers' conformity to HTML5.

And in a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome 7, Firefox 4 beta 6, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0, the tests found that the most compliant browser currently available is IE9.

Opera just launched the first alpha version of Opera 11, the company's first version of its desktop browser with support for extensions. As the browser wars continue to heat up, Opera remained one of the few players without a vibrant extension ecosystem. This new version aims to change this and while there are currently only a few extensions for Opera 11, the company promises that adapting existing extensions for Opera should be rather easy for a developers who have already written similar extensions for other browsers.

Mozilla has released the first beta of Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo. Also known as Fennec, the mobile version of the browser is built on the same platform as the desktop version and includes features like Firefox Sync, Add-ons, and the Awesome bar.

According to a blog post announcing the beta release, Mozilla says it has made two big changes from the alpha version, namely with Electrolysis and Layers. The former splits the browser into two processes: one for the user interface and one to render the web content. The Layers architecture helps in performance and in graphic areas such as scrolling, zooming, and animations.

I went to use Firefox the other day after months of loyal Chrome use, and I was astounded - what had formerly been my favorite browser suddenly felt like it was getting in the way, with multiple bars of menus and icons. It was eating up all of my precious screen real estate. It made me realize that, in many ways, the modern browser is working harder and harder to do more, while getting out of the way of the user's experience of the Web.

Today, Microsoft is releasing the latest beta version of Internet Explorer 9 and it looks like they got one big thing right - the browser has slimmed down, got a new wardrobe and stepped out of the way.

Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions that have a cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance.

As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology would be when Chrome was first introduced just two years ago.

We're getting the first glimpses of today Google's Google I/O developer conference and already some exciting news is leaking from within the walls of the conference center. According to Fortune's Seth Weintraub, we should expect to see Chrome for Palm webOS in the very near future.

Ubuntu, the open source operating system, is ditching the system tray, the bar at the bottom of most browsers that is supposed to act as a notification area. The rationale for the change, according to Matthew Paul Thomas, an Ubuntu contributor, was "its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior."

The proliferation of notification icons, that are not really associated with the delivery of any kind of notification, has added to the ineffectiveness, junking up the tray and making it harder to read at a glance.

In December of last year, augmented reality (AR) browser makers Layar chose to pull its iPhone app from the App Store due to frequent crashes reported by users. They thought it was better for their brand to remove the application than to promote a faulty product. As we've mentioned in the past, Layar had hinted that a revamped iPhone app would be out near the end of February, and earlier this week they released just that.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've discussed the use of third party APIs when building an integrated online product, highlighting the disadvantages such a decision could entail. One topic on the flip side of that is the question of whether providing an open public API versus a closed private one is in your product's best interest. Massively viral services like Twitter have rapidly expanded their capabilities and brand awareness by releasing an open API for third party developers to build on, but for companies in fledgeling industries, like mobile augmented reality, the API decision isn't as clear.