ReadWriteWeb

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.

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.

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.

In our continuing tradition of rounding up new mobile application releases we found interesting and/or exciting over the past month, we present you with this new list of apps for September 2011. There are some great game, new browser releases and innovative uses of augmented reality this month. There is also a new section for prominent updates you may have missed during the month. Check it out below.

The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.

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.

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.

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.

This week, Mozilla re-established its Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group, following last month's controversy over Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler's comment that, "Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus."

At issue is Mozilla's lack of support for previous versions of Firefox, even as it releases new versions at a feverish pace. Mozilla released Firefox 5 only three months after Firefox 4, and announced it was end-of-lifeing Firefox 4. The organization will repeat the cycle in another three months when it releases Firefox 6. The problem for enterprises is that it can take at least 3 months to test required sites and applications against a new version of the browser.

Firefox user experience designer Jenny Boriss wrote about an experience she had recently conducting usability testing with a man who had never used a computer before.

"It's very rare in San Francisco to meet a person who's not used a computer even once, but such people are amazingly useful," Boriss wrote. "It's a unique opportunity to see what someone who hasn't been biased by any prior usage reacts."

Starting August 1, Google Apps will only support functionality for the newest versions of the major Web browsers.

Google says that such as desktop Gmail notifications and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs "require advanced browsers that support HTML5." The move fits within Google's plan to bring all computer-based functionality to the Web, with its Chrome browser and operating system the tip of the spear.