Browser Wars News & Articles

With the home computer browser wars in full swing, the fighting has been taken to the mobile front. Bitstream has entered the melee with a public beta release of BOLT -- a loud, in all CAPS (yet lightweight) mobile browser full of speed and attitude.

The mobile browser war has been waging on with recent releases from the likes of Mozilla, Opera and Skyfire. And while each has been keeping up with functionality and developments in their own right, last week the contender likeliest to come out on top stepped onto the battle field and got blown to bits.

What we’re referring to, of course, is Mozilla’s pre-alpha release of Firefox Mobile, a.k.a. Fennec. The early test version was made available to HTC Touch Pro, but to the dismay of many an excited mobile enthusiast, wouldn’t load any Web pages.

Attention! The mobile world’s cluster of hopeful operating systems just got slightly bigger thanks to Azingo, who recently announced the Azingo Mobile Platform 2.0. Based on Linux and other open source innovations, the platform enters our ring of competitors bravely with dukes up, sporting a powerful browser and Web Runtime for easy Web application play.

HTML, the core syntax markup for the web, is in transition. With new browsers, new technologies, the realization that updates and changes are needed has taken hold. A new version of HTML is in the works. And Adobe has joined the ranks of Opera, Mozilla and Apple to help out.

As the browser wars rage on, third-party extensions, plug-ins and add-ons have become key players. With Google Chrome out of beta, Microsoft Internet Explorer is working hard towards a full public release. Here to help them on their way is OneRiot’s Hot Topic Web Slice.

Google Chrome is a good browser. A speedy, delightful little browser. Sure, the themes and fancy applications that Mozilla offers aren’t there, but the crash rate is much lower, the dynamic tabs are sweet and you’re warned when you may be visiting a harmful website. In fact, perhaps it’s the no-frills approach that has kept Chrome as functional as it is.

Whatever the case, no-frills is still no-frills, and in an era of endless options there will always be those that try to add a little “flava” to the things that lack it. As a result, add-ons to Chrome are available via browser bookmarklets. Because of popular demand, you can now even employ them in order to manage two new ways to work with RSS feeds.

With security issues plaguing the end of 2008, the browser wars are back in full swing. This time Google steps up to the plate, opening the new year of battle with their Chrome 2.0 pre-beta trial.

If Macworld wasn't enough to excite you all, worry not, the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off today in Las Vegas and runs through January 11. The all-star lineup includes our dear friends at Opera who, aside from a few exciting happenings around their mobile broswer, remained relatively quiet in 2008. But because they spent the bulk of that down time working on their new SDK (unveiled at CES), we're willing to forgive and forget.

As the ever popular browser battle wages on all over computers around the world, a mini version, equal to its predecessor in casualties and bloodshed, is going on somewhere just as close to us — our cell phones.

As browser wars continue, Old Faithful fights back by adding some new components to its first beta version of Firefox 3.1, now available for download. The beta is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering system, and new features include Geolocation API, @font-face support, and audio and video tag support.

Obviously created with developers and designers in mind, here are some detailed descriptions of the features and why they’re awesome.

Flock, the self-proclaimed Social Web browser, recently released version 2.0 with a few notable upgrades, including the integration of their most requested service, MySpace.

That’s right, you read that correctly, the browser that relies on social networking for popularity and downloads just integrated the biggest social network of all.

Opera Software announced the release of the newest version of their Web browser, Opera 9.6. With as much gusto as we imagine a software company can possibly muster, their Web browser boasts not only speed and performance improvements, but also a variety of new features.

And the browser wars continue. As a recent reaction to all the privacy issues surrounding Google Chrome, a German software company SRWare has released a free alternative called Iron.

Aside from the obvious metallic element similarity, Iron is also based on the Chromium source code, with the controversial bits removed.