Google made the unusual choice of a Facebook posting to hint at "big announcements" coming for Google TV on Monday. The company wouldn't give any clues as to its plans. It's unlikely to include any minor OS updates, since it recently updated to Android 3.2.
Google in the same breath as the Chrome 17 final release has also posted a beta release of Chrome 18. The new version swings attention to graphics and now hardware accelerates 2D elements using HTML5's Canvas spec, a common part of more advanced websites. Animations and action-sensitive websites should see the most benefit.
Mozilla and several other browser developers have voiced concern over the dominance of WebKit-based browsers, notably Safari and Chrome. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) co-chairman Daniel Glazman suggests programmers have begun to disregard alternative browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, when optimizing website compatibility.
Google wrapped up and posted the finished version of Chrome 17 for the desktop on Wednesday. The new browser update takes site prerendering beyond just search results to include autocompletion. If the autocompletion in the address bar is headed towards a likely web address, the browser will start loading content in the background to speed up the perceived load time. It can give the impression that favorite sites load almost immediately, Google suggested.
Google answered one of the longstanding calls among Android users by putting out a beta version of Chrome for mobile (Android Market) that we've had an opportunity to test. The app borrows the extra tricks of the desktop browser to run faster than the stock Android browser as well as simplifying its use. When on Wi-Fi, it can pre-cache pages in the search results to load them faster, and the engine itself was visibly faster on a Galaxy Nexus in our own testing, not to mention somewhat more responsive to scrolling and multi-touch zooming.
Android tablets are gaining share of Internet use, but they still present no competition to the iPad online, NetApplications uncovered with its January wrap-up. The combined Samsung Galaxy Tab line had just 0.42 percent of mobile Internet share, while the Kindle Fire's possibly brisk sales still saw just 0.34 percent. Although down from December, the iPad at almost 24 percent was still in no danger from Android tablets, where even Android 3.2 was at 0.77 percent.
Versions of the upcoming Firefox 12 in the nightly build phase have shown major changes coming to its interface. New tabs can now open to a hybrid portal page that mixes in features seen in Chrome and Safari. Along with seeing the most frequently visited sites and a search bar, it now has top web apps, the most recently shared apps, and a Google Talk status section to launch directly into chat.
At the Florida Educational Technology Conference on Wednesday, Google Chromebook for business and education head Rajen Sheth announced three school districts have signed on to receive 27,000 of the browser-powered notebooks. The devices will be used by students in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina. In addition, hundreds of schools in 41 states have at least one classroom with a Chromebook, Sheth added.
Tipping Point's Pwn2Own security contest is changing its methodology in a way that could break from "sensationalist" headlines, the company's security team lead Aaron Portnoy explained. When it takes place at CanSecWest in March, the hacking competition as explained to PC Advisor would partly switch to an on-the-spot contest where teams didn't have to have ready-made hack by the time they got to the show. It would become a form of "spectator sport" and reward teams based on the speed it takes at Pwn2Own itself, scoring based on the frequency of hacks each day.
LG on Thursday became the latest company steered into signing a patent license deal with Microsoft. The Spectrum designer has agreed to pay Microsoft an unknown amount for "broad coverage" both on Android and Chrome OS despite LG not yet having a Chromebook on the market. Unlike past such licenses, however, Microsoft didn't issue a boilerplate observation that LG was paying royalties, leaving the door open to a lump sum.
The team at Tom’s Hardware have run their latest head-to-head test of web browsers. All the leading browsers for the Mac and PC platforms were tested and included Opera, Firefox, Safari, IE 9 and Chrome. Coming out on top for the Mac platform was Apple’s own Safari browser, while Mozilla’s Firefox is currently the fastest browser available on the Windows platform.
Google's Chrome browser, just recently named the second most popular browser on the web, is playing a central role in a scandal involving the way Google boosted user awareness of the product. Despite claiming it has "consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers promote our products," the company was caught doing exactly that via a hired ad agency as part of an online Chrome advertising campaign, which violates its own guidelines.
Google engineers have reportedly managed to port Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) to Native Client. The move theoretically enables users to play a wide range of classic arcade games on Google's Chrome software on Windows, Mac and Linux machines.
Microsoft's claims that Windows Phone 7.5 would beat iOS in web browsing speed have already been rendered obsolete after a follow-up test run. A comparison from YouTube user 359gsm posted at My Nokia Blog of a Nokia Lumia 800 pitted against both an iPhone 4 using iOS 4.3 and an iPhone 4S on iOS 5. While Microsoft's showcase HTML5 Speed Reading test sees the Lumia beat the iPhone 4, even the older, 1GHz Apple phone and OS beat the 1.4GHz Windows Phone soundly in every other test, including Browsermark, the JavaScript-focused Sunspider test, and the generic HTML5 Test.
In spite of its device share, Android is losing ground in terms of actual use online, NetApplications found on New Year's Day. Android slipped to 16.3 percent of mobile web share in December, or the same share it had in September. Unusually, most of the loss came to otherwise shrinking platforms: Java ME bounced back to get just under 21.3 percent, Symbian returned to 5.8 percent, and even the BlackBerry recovered slightly to 3.5 percent.
When Google and Mozilla renewed their search royalty deal earlier this week, they didn't reveal that Google will pay $300 million per year, AllThingsD learned. For this amount of money, Google will be the default search engine in Mozilla's Firefox browser. The numbers are a sharp increase from the previous arrangement because of the new competition from Yahoo and Microsoft.
Google kept Firefox active after Mozilla said that it was renewing a deal to make Google the default search in Firefox. A "significant and mutually beneficial" deal will keep Google as the default for a minimum of three years. Neither side would reveal what the terms of the deal were.
Google kept up its development track by posting the finished, stable version of Chrome 16. The release centers on the multiple account support from the beta and lets more than one user share the same browser. Bookmarks, extensions, web apps, and more will carry over from device to device.
Google Chrome's Native Client has received added functionalities in the form of new programming interfaces and better JavaScript support. It now supports hardware-acclerated 3D graphics from OpenGL ES 2.0, mouse locking, full-screen modes, and more. There are enough changes that games such as Supergiant's Bastion can now run in Native Client.
Windows saw a rare increase in its share of the web in November, NetApplications found on Thursday. Microsoft bounced back slightly from a low in October to just over 92.2 percent. The increase pushed the Mac down half a point from its all-time high, although still giving its second-best result to date at 6.46 percent.
A presentation from Google developer evangelist Paul Kinlan at the Develop Liverpool conference has revealed that the Chrome browser, and by extension Chrome OS, should get plugin-free support that will be much more conducive to gaming. The browser should get support for common USB peripherals and allow for console-style gaming with a gamepad, Edge heard. Likewise, it would open the door to more seamless video chat, augmented reality, and body tracking.
Foursquare picked Tuesday to show a heavily redesigned version of its main website. The page depends on HTML5 and uses it for a fully location-aware map; users can browse nearby areas without having to search for them or use their phones. The interface is also suited to the iPad, although users can't yet check in.
The HTML5-based web app that is Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader is now available for Mozilla's Firefox browser. The web app lets users access their Kindle e-books , adding to the already avaialable Chrome and Safari versions. It can now be viewed for all of these supporting browsers, as well as Safari for the iPad.
Google has posted its beta release for Chrome 16 with a view to tackling multi-user computers. The browser can now take on multiple Google accounts, each with their own syncing intact. The simple change lets a family or guests get access to all their bookmarks, themes, and web apps without the regular user having to sign out.
Google has updated Google+ to more tightly integrate the app with two other web and desktop apps, YouTube and Chrome. For YouTube, the company has added a "slider" to make it easier for an individual to share personal videos with members of their circles. Google has also added a +1 button and notification button to Chrome to help users stay in touch with their circles as well.
Google has just announced some key changes made in its latest release of the Chrome web browser. They're largely meant to enhance the app experience, with a new tab page that is said to make it easier to access and organize apps in selected sections of the page. Adding apps is done by clicking the Chrome Web Store icon.
Microsoft continued its patent campaign against Android on Thursday by striking a licensing deal with contract device builder Quanta. The Taiwan firm will pay Microsoft keep making computers, smartphones, and tablets for other companies. A boilerplate statement from Microsoft didn't give terms other than to confirm the expected word that Quanta would pay royalties.
Google has incorporated WebGL into Google Maps. The improved app, Google MapsGL, leverages computer-based hardware 3D graphic acceleration to provide richer visuals and animations. The functionality, availabile as a beta, initially will be supported on Chrome 14+ or Firefox Beta.
Google is previewing Dart, a new programming language for building web apps. The language has been designed to be flexible, meeting the needs of a one-person project, without much structure, and scaling up to a large-scale project needing formal types in the code. Initially the code will support at least Chrome, Safari 5, and Firefox 4 browsers, but not Internet Explorer.
The Mac hit a pair of record highs in web share during September thanks to the back-to-school effect, NetApplications found in its monthly roundup. The Mac saw one of its sharpest gains in the past year and was up nearly half a point in desktop share to 6.45 percent. Helped by the new leap, Apple's stake in computers has grown by nearly a quarter in the past year, the close look found.
The Google Chrome 15 Beta browser is now out for download and gets a redesigned new tab page and a newfound ability to synchronize the address/search bar history in multiple installations. The new tab page requires users navigate between apps, commonly visited sites, and recently closed windows rather than on a single page, as before. Bookmarks let users access favorites, and apps can now be arranged into customizable sections like work and productivity simply by dragging and dropping.
Google concluded the week with the final release of Chrome 14. Following a month after the beta, it represents the first version of the OS with support for Mac OS X Lion's native elements. It uses full-screen mode and the 'invisible' scroll bars while also mending crashes from the earlier release.
Apple broke through a symbolic barrier at the start of September as a study of desktop market share from NetApplications revealed that it had broken through the six percent mark in desktop usage share for the first time. The Mac hit 6.03 percent in August and had gained nearly a full point over the course of one year. Although it had yet to dislodge Microsoft from its dominant spot, almost all the gain was at Windows' expense, as the OS dipped from nearly 94 percent last August to 92.9 percent.
Google has begun rolling out a new Chrome browser app that brings offline access to several Google Apps. The update, detailed online, will go live over the next week, and allows users to view their inbox even when they lose their Internet connection. The Gmail Offline Chrome Web Store app is now available.
Google has updated its Chrome browser with a new feature that allows users to take advantage of voice commands for Google Maps. Rather than using standard text entry in the search field, a microphone button now initiates a computer's integrated microphone to receive spoken search queries. The option is said to be geared for finding hard-to-spell places or asking for directions without typing.
The latest developer build of Chrome implements several important features for Macs, accounts say. Among these is the use of Lion-style multitouch gestures, meaning that people can now swipe left or right to go back and forth through page history. Unlike Safari though, Chrome has yet to add pinch or double-tap zoom commands.
Google is turning to the WebKit community to create a more functional, Chromium-like browser for the Android platform, TechCrunch reports. The project will involve removing a previous but incomplete Android port of WebKit and all Android-specific code out of the existing browser, which shares a codebase with Chrome (the company's full-fledged WebKit-based browser) but is developed by a separate team. The new browser will be entirely open-sourced, a change in direction.
Mozilla has preempted its own official launch with finished versions of Firefox 6 on its FTP server (Linux, Mac OS X, released on Tuesday but, as is becoming the case in Firefox releases, is already online to help coordinate the release. The interval between the FTP posting and the public debut may be to catch any last-minute bugs.
Today's release of a new beta of Google's Chrome 14 web browser brings three major changes -- the first to Mac users, the second and third to users on all platforms. Included in the new beta is the much-requested Print Preview for the Mac version, but more importantly the updated beta features encryption of all synchronized data, and the first preview of a technology that will eventually envelop Chrome itself, called Native Client.
Amazon has quietly provided an end-run around Apple's App Store rules. Kindle Cloud Reader brings a touch-friendly reading app that provides all the settings, highlights, bookmarks and other features of native apps in a device-independent form. The page takes advantage of HTML5 to work entirely offline and thus can keep going even during a flight or another moment where no Internet connection exists.
Chrome OS is vulnerable both to extensions and, to some extent, to Google's own approach to security, WhiteHat Security experts led by Matt Johansen revealed in a presentation at the Black Hat conference this week. Because extensions have to reach outside sites and the OS depends on this code for extra features, it's possible to compromise the OS itself by installing a malicious extension. While not an issue by itself, CNET noted that extensions have shown up in Google's own Chrome Web Store explicitly meant to steal information, and others get deep access that could be misappropriated.
Lion users who want to take advantage of Mission Control and true fullscreen support in Google's Chrome browser can download an experimental "Canary" build of the program that includes fullscreen, a "curtain" mode (hiding the toolbar) and the ability to minimize the app from the menu bar, reports MacStories. The "Canary" builds of Chrome are outside the normal beta channel and based on untested nightly Chromium builds.
Google and Mozilla have teamed together on a proposed API to bring an aspect of Android to web apps. Web Intents, like those on the phone, would let a web app signal what it wants to do on a basic level, such as editing or sharing content, and link it to any relevant service without having to either create the service or implement the hooks on a case by case basis. Web apps would just need a handful of code to achieve much more complicated tasks that could pass between sites.
Google on Tuesday posted the finished, stable version of Chrome 13. The new version formally adopts Instant Pages and potentially speeds up search. By aggressively pre-caching likely search hits on Google, such as the top result, it can cut the load time to little or nothing.
Apple hit new highs for market share of the web in July, Net Applications found on Monday. The Mac saw a sharp uptick and hit 5.59 percent of OS traffic online. iOS saw its own boost and reached 2.98 percent, almost triple what it had a year ago.
Google is seeding a new developer channel build of Chrome for the Mac, v14.0.835.0. In the release the browser notably gains support for two-fingered gestures in Lion that respect system preferences. This means that two-fingered swipes left or right will go backwards or forwards through browsing history, while three-fingered swipes will obey Lion's normal configuration for switching between fullscreen apps.
Google is in the middle of updating Chrome to better support OS X Lion, says the company's senior VP for the browser, Sundar Pichai. Reports note that while Chrome technically works on Lion, there are glitches with the scrollbar, gesture-based navigation, and operating in fullscreen mode. Some fixes are already available through Canary test builds, and a polished update is coming, according to Pichai.
The web versions of Apple's WWDC 2011 session videos are being blocked for browsers outside of Safari, according to complaints. Both the stable and Canary versions of Chrome, for instance, are unable to access the videos. Similarly, neither Firefox nor Opera will work, regardless of whether the browsers are running on a Mac or Windows system.
Google delivered a possible snub to its partner Adobe on Tuesday by posting Swiffy. The Google Labs project converts SWF files into HTML5 that will run in browsers that also support JavaScript objects, SVG (scalable vector graphics), and CSS3. The resulting pages work in any modern browser, desktop or mobile.
Opera's creator Jon S. von Tetzchner surprised the industry on Friday with word he was leaving the company. The web browser developer is due to leave June 30 and will do so on friendly terms. He has made no public mention of why he will be leaving but currently has "ideas about new projects" that are being kept secret.
