Technologizer

Five Reasons to Celebrate Firefox’s Fifth Birthday

Monday, November 9, 2009

Mozilla’s Firefox 1.0 officially became available on November 9th, 2004–which means that the Little Browser That Could officially turns five today. It’s not the world’s dominant browser–while market share estimates vary widely, all show that Internet Explorer still has a sizable lead–but it’s surely the most beloved browser on the planet. (It’s definitely the dominant browser in [...]

Microsoft’s Odd (and, in One Case, Utterly Revolting) Ads for Internet Explorer

Monday, June 29, 2009

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Internet Explorer 8 is a decent browser, but there’s a new ad for it (showing only online, according to Idsgn, which is where I read about it by way of Daring Fireball) that not only doesn’t make me want to use IE, but has me contemplating going door to door, beseeching my fellow human beings [...]

Europe Gives Internet Explorer the Boot from Windows 7. Big Deal!

Thursday, June 11, 2009

8 Comments

Looks like any lingering question about the European Union’s antitrust case against Microsoft delaying the release of Windows 7 just ended. Earlier today, Cnet’s Ina Fried reported that Microsoft will release versions of the new OS that are sans Internet Explorer for sale in Europe. Microsoft has confirmed its intentions. The Europe-only versions of Windows 7 [...]

Google Makes Chrome Speed Boost Boast. Who’s Next?

Thursday, May 21, 2009

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Google is boasting that an update to Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and Webkit browsing component has yielded a significant improvement in performance. Yippee. Now, who’s next? The renewed browser war resembles more of a game of leapfrog than the big-bang releases of the 1990’s when one version of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator could change the [...]

War of the Firefox Extension Developers

Monday, May 4, 2009

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Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul has posted a good piece on an alarming story: The developers of two popular and useful Firefox extensions, NoScript and AdBlock Plus, descended into an ugly squabble that involved each one attempting to interfere with the other’s operation–and which eventually led to NoScript having secret features designed to futz around with [...]

Microsoft Does Its Own Browser Benchmarking

Thursday, March 12, 2009

9 Comments

In recent months, the hottest topic in the world of Web browsing has been speed. Apple says its beta version of Safari 4 is the world’s fastest browser. The first thing Google tells you about Chrome is that it’s “faster.” Better performance is a key feature in Mozilla’s upcoming Firefox 3.5. Opera says that its [...]

Flock: Goodbye Mozilla, Hello Chrome?

Monday, March 2, 2009

3 Comments

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington (who’s back from his month-long blogging hiatus) is reporting that one of my favorite products is going to undergo a radical change. Flock, the browser with built-in support for Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites, will supposedly dump Mozilla, the platform that’s most famously used by Firefox, and build a [...]

One Windows. Multiple Browsers. Bundled. I Like It!

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

7 Comments

Once again, those wacky Europeans are making life difficult for Microsoft. A site called EurActive is reporting that Microsoft’s ongoing antitrust tussle with the European Commission will result in the company being forced to help European Windows users opt for a browser that isn’t Internet Explorer. The details are yet to be worked out–the OS [...]

Is Internet Explorer a Goner? Will It Ever Be?

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

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“Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE.” That’s the headline on a story by Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb, reporting on browser market-share numbers from Net applications that have IE being used by 67.5 percent of Internet users, down 7 percent in a year–and down from 90+ percent a few years ago. Marshall’s [...]

Internet Explorer RC1: The Technologizer Review

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

1 Comment

By any standard, Internet Explorer remains the planet’s dominant Web browser. Even after serious shrinkage over the past few years, estimates of its market share range from around 70 percent to 80 percent, a figure that just about any player in any business would happily take. Yet IE is a beleaguered giant. It’s got companies [...]

Microsoft Nudges Internet Explorer 8 Closer to Release With RC1

Monday, January 26, 2009

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It’s been almost eleven months since Microsoft first released a preview edition of Internet Explorer 8. It’s still not shipping in final form, but it looks like we’re getting close: Microsoft has given me a heads’ up that it’s unveiling a Release Candidate 1 version–that is, a nearly-final one–today. Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch [...]

Opera on the iPhone? Maybe. Someday.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

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Some of the reports today on Apple’s approval of new browser-related iPhone apps make it sound like the company has opened the floodgates for Safari rivals to make their way onto iPhones. Not true–the new apps all use Safari’s WebKit rendering engine and are therefore piggybacking on Safari rather than trying to replace it. But [...]

Apple Lets Alternative Browsers Onto the iPhone. Sort of!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

3 Comments

The single worst thing about Apple’s capricious iPhone App Store policies has probably been the fact that it’s rejected some applications on the grounds that they compete with Apple’s own offerings–including third-party browsers. Now the company is approving some alternative browsers, including Edge Browser (a browser without space-hogging navigation bars), Incognito (private browsing), Shaking Web (which compensates for shaky hands by [...]

Google Ships Chrome 1.0–Now For the To-Do List

Thursday, December 11, 2008

6 Comments

Well, that was quick! Yesterday, my colleague Dave Worthington wrote about the news that Google planned to take its Chrome browser out of beta soon. Soon, it turns out, is right now. The little “BETA” label is gone from the Chrome logo, and you can download version 1.0 from the Chrome site. Assuming, that is, [...]

Report: Google Polishes Off Chrome

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

1 Comment

The browser was are heating up– again. Google vice president Marissa Mayer said that company’s Chrome browser is on the verge of coming out of beta, according to a report by TechCrunch. Chrome made its debut as a beta on September 2nd; for Google, a beta period of only a few months is a surprisingly [...]

Google’s Latest Browser Venture: Yet Another Plug-In?

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

1 Comment

Flash…Java…Silverlight…Google Gears…Yahoo BrowserPlus…it seems like the list of additional stuff you need besides your browser just to use the Web keeps on growing. For better or for worse, Google’s latest project announcement adds another contender. Native Client is Google’s latest plan to change the Web, and this time it comes in the form of a browser [...]