Articles about Browser

If you’re looking to preserve your privacy online then there are already a host of free tools and services queuing up to offer you a new IP address, so discovering yet another, in the shape of SafeIP, didn’t exactly fill us with excitement.

The program doesn’t stop there, though. It also claims to block cookies, conceal your referrer and browser agent, block ads and prevent you from accessing known dangerous sites. And all for free, no adware or similar catches. Perhaps SafeIP was worth a look, after all.

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When you need to know more about the websites someone is visiting (you want to make sure your kids haven’t been straying on the darker side of the web, say) then checking their cookies has always been one option. But the information you’ll get is often very limited, maybe just to a domain name, and so won’t always be particularly useful.

Google Analytics Cookie Cruncher may be able to help, though, by focusing on Google Analytics cookies. These contain much more data, and in a standard format, so with just a little work you may be able to see the sites someone has browsed, the search keywords used to locate them, the date and time of the last two visits, and the number of times a site has been visited in total.

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To Microsoft's credit, it knows it has to be constantly vigilant with its public image. Internet Explorer has been raked across the coals for years, and no matter what Microsoft does, people seem to be unhappy. This is not to say the browser hasn't earned a lot of this criticism with security vulnerabilities and web standards problems, but sometimes the relentless onslaught of negativity in web comment sections is too much to handle.

Microsoft's latest video shows that sometimes the best a company can hope for is for people to hate them less.

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Google has updated the iPhone and iPad version of its famous browser, adding support for Passbook and allowing users to open PDF files in other applications. Google Chrome for iOS 23.0.1271.91 also includes a number of tweaks and bug fixes.

The update is joined by a minor stability update to Google Chrome for Android 18.0.1025469, which Google promises to resolve issues with “frequently occurring stability issues”.

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Network testing and security analysis firm NSS Labs has released the third part of its comparative browser vulnerability study, this time focusing on phishing protection. The previous installations, released last September, focused on general malware blocking and click fraud.

NSS Labs observed Safari 5, Chrome 21, IE10, and Firefox 15 for ten days and found that the general phishing URL catch rate was pretty good across the board. In fact, the group said there is so little difference in the average block rate between the different browsers that one must "consider other factors, such as socially engineered malware blocking capabilities for qualitative differences in the security effectiveness of the browsers."

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Software developer Piriform Ltd has announced the release ofCCleaner 3.25, the latest build of its Windows freeware cleaning tool. Version 3.25, which is also available in portable form as CCleaner 3.25 Portable, adds Google Chrome Extension management to its feature roster amid a number of compatibility and cleaning improvements.

The update follows hot on the heels of Recuva 1.44, a new version of Piriform’s free data recovery tool, which offers improved recovery of large files and Outlook Express messages as well as a host of other minor tweaks and improvements.

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If you’d like more information on the low-level details of how a particular web page works -- for security or web development reasons, say -- then the usual route is find and install a few extensions. Firefox alone has more than 1,000 addons in its Web Development section which could prove very useful.

But if researching all of those seems too much like hard work, you might prefer to simply download the free Sandcat 3.0, a penetration-oriented browser with plenty of advanced functionality already built it.

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Parent company Mozilla announced that Firefox for Android now supports older green droid devices using ARM v6 architecture. The latest update allows the open-source browser to run on smartphones such as HTC Status, Motorola Fire XT or Samsung Galaxy Ace, but also looks to the present with improvements for newer versions of Android.

Mozilla claims that limiting Firefox for Android to run solely on the ARM v7 architecture would eliminate "roughly half of the nearly 500 million Android phones", obviously making a dent in its market share and popularity among green droid users. The minimum hardware requirements now involve an 800MHz ARM v6 processor accompanied by 512MB of RAM. What about less "ancient" devices?

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Firefox 17 FINAL isn't the only browser news of the day. Opera 12.11 also is available. This minor release is a maintenance one, promising better security and stability through the implementation of a number of bug fixes, and follows on just two weeks from the more notable launch of version 12.10.

Opera 12.11 is available as a freeware download for PC, Mac and Linux. A separate 64-bit build is also available for Windows users.

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Mozilla has launched Firefox 17 FINAL, the latest stable release of its open-source, cross-platform web browser. Version 17 has one major new feature -- click-to-play blocklisting, which prevents vulnerable plugins from running without the user’s permission.

Other changes include a slight tweak to the Awesome Bar, additional developer tools and web standards, plus fixes and performance improvements. The new release comes on the same day that rival browser Opera 12.11 gets a minor update.

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When Microsoft first announced that Internet Explorer 10 would be part of Windows 8 most users assumed that this would also mean a release of the browser for the version 7 operating system. The first version of Internet Explorer 10 was released publicly with Windows 8's Developer Preview back in 2011, and then updated whenever new versions of preview builds released. Microsoft at that time was tight lipped about the future of IE10 for Windows 7

October 2012 came and brought along Windows 8's launch. It was in the week prior to the release of Windows 8 that the company shed some light on the future of IE10 for Windows 7. A blog post indicated that Microsoft had plans to release a  preview version for Windows 7 in November 2012.

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Microsoft has announced the availability of Internet Explorer 10 as a Release Preview edition, in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, for Windows 7. (And yes, only Windows 7 users with SP1 installed need apply. Windows Vista and XP are left out of this one.) Changes are mostly under the hood, but the upgrade does deliver some major performance improvements which you may like to try.

In our first tests, the new Release Preview installed much like any other Windows update. It downloads a few files, and whirs for a while before demanding a reboot. Which takes a little longer than usual as various core files are replaced.

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That was fast, if it ever was. Don't blink or the so-called PC era will pass you by. For years, I've called it the cloud-connected device era because of the deeper meaning: Context. But more appropriately, the new epoch is contextual computing, which really extends a transition underway since the World Wide Web opened to the masses about 20 years ago. During the two earlier computing eras, mainframes and PCs, location defined the user. During the contextual computing era, the user defines location. If you listen to analysts obsessed with selling services to enterprises or companies like Apple, post-PC is all about devices. It's anything but.

Context is everything today. I started writing about the concept circa 2004, borrowing from my boss of the day -- Michael Gartenberg. The concept is simple: People are satisfied with what they've got on hand. In context of the airport, a hand-held game console is good enough, while at home the person prefers Xbox and big-screen PC. But because of the cloud connected to an increasing number of mobile devices, context is a much bigger, broader and badder technology trend.

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The kids grow up so fast, don't they?

It seems like only yesterday I began using Firefox, but Mozilla has reminded us that today is the eighth birthday of its Firefox browser. Those eight years, while seeming to have flown by, have had their smooth parts as well as their bumpy. The story of the "little browser that could" all began on November 9th 2004.

"The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced the worldwide availability of the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser." wrote Mozilla on this day in 2004.

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The only thing that ever stood in the way of my becoming a major international singer/songwriter was my inability to sing. Or write songs. I took guitar and piano lessons as a kid, and am pretty handy at Rock Band, but I’m not a great musician, so I never really get invited to jam with more musically-minded friends.

However, that might change, if I can persuade some of them to give Google’s latest interactive Chrome experiment a try.

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