browsers - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Firefox 4 regains speed mojo

  With the release of Firefox 4 Beta 7, Mozilla returned to near the top spot in browser performance rankings.

• Chrome browser set to become 'wicked fast'

  Earlier this fall Google promised that hardware acceleration advances were going to make Chrome 7 as much as 60 times faster than its predecessor, and now the company is working on a new feature that could boost the browser's speed even more.

• Mozilla Firefox celebrates 6 years

  Mozilla is celebrating the sixth birthday of its Firefox browser today, and it's inviting users of the popular free and open source browser to help by sending in a postcard for display in Mozilla's Mountain View or Paris offices.

• iPhone's Safari dials calls without warning, says researcher

  A security researcher is asserting that Apple has made a poor security decision by allowing its Safari browser to honor requests from third-party applications to perform actions such as making a phone call without warning a user.

• Rockmelt: The Facebook of Web browsers

  A new Web browser, Rockmelt debuts in limited beta Monday and aims to help you keep tabs on your Facebook friends, your favorite sites, and make your Web searches faster. Backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, Rockmelt was first reported on by The New York Times in August 2009. At the time, Rockmelt was supposedly going to be a next-generation Web browser designed to take advantage of new Web applications and services.

• RockMelt social browser faces tough sell

  The odds are stacked against RockMelt, a new browser designed to serve as a social networking hub, industry analysts said today.

• Google promotes Chrome with free in-flight Wi-Fi deal

  Google today said it will sponsor free Wi-Fi on three major U.S. airlines during the last six weeks of the year to promote its Chrome browser.

• 20 must-have IE and Firefox shortcuts

  I spend hours and hours exploring the Web. At times all that mousing around makes my right hand hurt. So I try to use keyboard shortcuts at least some of the time. At the very least, using different muscles in the hand relieves some of the strain, and sometimes those shortcuts save time compared to the corresponding mouse commands.

• Firefox 4 Beta for mobile still rough around the edges

  The latest Firefox 4 Mobile beta for Android and Maemo promises more speed and a fresher look, but it's still not ready to replace the default browser.

• Mozilla's new Firefox beta for Android improves speed, size

  Mozilla has released an faster, smaller beta version of its Firefox 4 browser for Android-based smartphones with an improved user interface, according to a Thursday blog post.

• No HTML5 crown for IE9 yet, W3C says

  Following the flurry of reports early this week that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 had bested key competitors in the browser arena on early HTML5 compatibility tests, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has cautioned that the results of those tests are far too preliminary to form any kind of basis for conclusions.

• Facebook users squint at font size change

  Before you make an appointment with your eye doctor, it's not your eyes. It's Facebook.

• Google quashes 12 Chrome bugs, gives users early Flash fix

  Google today patched 12 vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, all of them rated as high-level threats by the company's security team.

• What you need to know about new IE zero-day

  Internet Explorer is under attack again. Microsoft has issued a security advisory explaining a newly-discovered exploit impacting most versions of the Internet Explorer Web browser. The security advisory contains details about the threat, as well as some guidance to protect vulnerable browsers pending a patch from Microsoft to fix the hole.

• Hackers exploit unpatched IE bug with drive-by attacks

  Microsoft today warned that attackers are targeting Internet Explorer (IE) with an exploit of a critical unpatched vulnerability in all current versions of the browser.