Firefox on Android – and it'll soon come with H.264 support (Image: Mozilla EU/Flickr (Creative Commons))
In recent days, the tech community has been buzzing around about the fact that Mozilla has decided to relent on its open web stance and will implement H.264 on mobile devices and – although unconfirmed – speculation hints that it will soon be included in the desktop version. But why is this such a big deal? It’s just some stupid technical thing.
An early Christmas gift, perhaps? November statistics from analytical firm StatCounter shows that Google’s Chrome browser can now claim it is the second-most used browser in the world, topping previous second-place Firefox in a very, very small margin.
Despite Firefox 5 being made official to download in June, Mozilla has already started releasing what appears to be a final version of Firefox 6 through its FTP servers – but you wouldn’t have known that unless you did some digging into its servers.
Image: mr. throk/Flickr (Creative Commons)
Despite being highly reported all over the place, including the BBC and CNN, the study claiming that Internet Explorer users had the lowest IQ out of all browsers has been deemed to be a hoax. Yes, so all you Opera users, turns out you’re not that smart.
Just a few months after the release of Firefox 4, the team at Mozilla have pushed out Mozilla Firefox 5. The update doesn’t bring any UI improvements but it does feature some behind the scenes improvements for example Improved canvas, JavaScript, memory, and networking performance and as well improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL, and canvas. You can check out the full Release Notes here.
Remember Flock? The browser that previously was simply a skinned Firefox with social networking add-ons attached? No? Well, it’s kind of too late to try it out now, as Flock has decided to axe its browser, and wants its users to go to other web browsers by April 26, as support will be discontinued.
After Internet Explorer 9 got some good press for its revamp look, Mozilla – not wanting Microsoft get all the good goss – has officially launched their new version of Firefox, version 4.0. And it’s kind of obvious where Firefox got their new UI inspiration from – rival Chrome.
It’s time. Microsoft has now started a brand new push to finally get rid of the scourge known as Internet Explorer with a brand new website to promote the killing off of the once-most popular browser in the entire world (back in the year 2001).
Microsoft’s dominance of the web may be coming to an end sometime soon, with new statistics from Stat Counter coming out that highlight that Microsoft’s massive share is now less than half of the entire market.
Well, took them long enough. Mozilla has released the first beta of Firefox 4, the upcoming update to the second-most popular browser. As you can tell, it is a substantial redesign to the user interface, taking on what Google Chrome (and now Opera) has done by moving the tabs at the top. Other improvements is a new Add-Ons manager and improvements on how HD video is played using HTML5.
It the end of the month, and May sees Google Chrome topping Apple’s Safari in total market share with a 7.04 percent stake, compared to Safari’s 4.77 percent stake in the browser market share war for third place again, according to NetApplications.
Boxers or briefs. No seriously.
Microsoft’s new advertising campaign for its browser, Internet Explorer 8, has appeared on US television with a simple concept – how many people can it dupe into giving private information. This, apparently, was to highlight how vulnerable your personal information is and to focus on the security aspects of the latest version of IE. (Well, the latter might be a bit questionable, as the study showing this was funded by Microsoft).
A Microsoft add-on that was installed silently into Mozilla Firefox last February has now made Firefox, deemed to be one of the safer alternatives for Windows computers, open to an attack. The security hole also leaves Internet Explorer open to the same attack.
Microsoft has a long history of being non-compliant with web standards. For example, it took until Internet Explorer 7 to support many of the CSS attributes that were commonly supported by rivals Firefox and Safari. However, as speculation that Microsoft may not support new tags from the new HTML5 standard, looks like we were wrong. In a shock to many, Program Manager for IE, Adrian Bateman, said that the next version of Internet Explorer will be supporting the two media tags – <audio> and <video>.
The latest revision to the code that makes up the entire Web is set to drop codec requirements that would set specific formats (codecs) on video and audio files that could allow people to distribute multimedia easier as browsers fight over which format should be the standard.