Articles about Browser

Websites are, on the whole, vertical experiences, whereas laptop screens and desktop monitors are, in most cases, horizontal ones. Despite the relatively limited amount of vertical space available, browsers tend to further reduce this by placing tabs, menus, toolbars and more at the top of the screen. But Microsoft is ready to try something different.

The company has announced a number of new features that are coming to the new Chromium-based version of Microsoft Edge. Among these features are vertical tabs which make more efficient use of screen space.

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Google's decision to hide the start of website URLs from Chrome's omnibox was a little controversial. While replacing https://www. and http://www. with icons indicating whether the site was secure or not, many people preferred being about to see that the HTTPS protocol is being used through the presence of those five letters.

If you're one of these people, there's some good news: Google seems to have been listening. Having previously implemented an experimental option to show full URLs on a one-off basis, preview builds of Chrome for macOS, Windows and Linux have a new "Always show full URLs" option.

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Avast-owned Piriform is best known for its CCleaner software, a tool designed to help you clear out the crap from your computer. Now, after a preview period, the company has launched the Chromium-based CCleaner Browser 80.0.

Promising "no ads, no tracking, no junk[and] built-in security" CCleaner Browser is billed as a fast browser that gives users easy-to-use privacy tools that help to reduce digital footprints.

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Mozilla has released Firefox 74.0 for desktop, along with Firefox for Android 68.6.0 and Firefox ESR 68.6.0.

Firefox 74.0 ships with several new features, none of which are jaw-dropping, but all of which serve to further improve the browser’s privacy, security and usability. In addition, the Facebook Container add-on now gives users control over which sites are blocked from reporting back to Facebook.

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Microsoft may be making great claims about the speed and security of Edge, but a recent study found that the browser is one of the least private. Douglas J Leith from the School of Computer Science & Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, tested six web browsers to determine how often they phoned home, and what data they were sharing.

He pitted Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser against each other, and the results were rather damning of Edge. Among the findings was the disturbing fact that all URLs typed into Edge are shared with multiple Microsoft sites, as are unique hardware identifiers, opening up the possibility of history tracking.

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Since switching to the Chromium engine, Microsoft Edge just became a whole lot more interesting -- and development has sped up dramatically.

As well as speeding up Edge, Microsoft has been busy adding new features such as a Potentially Unwanted Apps blocker, support for Chrome extensions and more. One of the latest changes does nothing to add new features, but it is important for anyone concerned with aesthetics; there is now support for Chrome themes to change the look of the browser.

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Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer 10 -- the default browser of Windows 8 when it was initially released -- in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard in February 2020.

Microsoft notes that "all updates, paid assisted support options, and technical content updates for Internet Explorer 10" are discontinued as of February 11, 2020; this means that Microsoft won't release security updates for Internet Explorer 10 on the March 10, 2020 Patch Tuesday.

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Opera Software has released Opera 67.0 (also known as Opera R2020), the latest major update to its Chromium-based web browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. The new release focuses on improving user experience.

The headline feature is the introduction of workspaces to help users keep their browser tidy and organized. This is accompanied by the addition of a new Sidebar Setup panel, plus two new tab management tools.

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The new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge web browser shares many features with other Chromium-based browsers such as Google Chrome, Vivaldi and Opera.

Google started to integrate native lazy loading support in Google Chrome recently (in Chrome 76 to be precise), and it appears that Microsoft added these capabilities to Microsoft Edge as well.

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Users of the new Microsoft Edge web browser may soon be able to synchronize extensions and collections using the web browser's built-in sync functionality.

Microsoft started the rollout of the feature in the latest Microsoft Edge Canary version, currently at version 82.0.425.0. While it is not available for all Canary users yet, it is expected that the number will increase in the coming weeks and that the options will be pushed to the Beta and Stable channels of Microsoft Edge eventually.

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Anyone using the Dev or Canary builds of Microsoft Edge gets to try out all of the latest features and improvements early, and Microsoft says that the latest builds boast huge speed improvements.

The enhanced performance is significant. Microsoft claims improvements of up to 13 percent -- meaning that this is the sort of speed boost that should be noticeable in use, not just measurable in tests.

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Microsoft-related news over the last few days has been all about Windows 7 reaching end-of-life, but today marks the day that the company starts to push the Chromium-based version of Edge to Windows 10 users after beta testing. For businesses and organizations that do not feel ready to make the transition just yet, there is no need to panic.

Microsoft says there are no plans to push the browser to commercial or enterprise devices, and there's a Blocker Toolkit available to disable automatic delivery of Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, anyway. But for Home and Pro users, there is likely to be disappointment for anyone hoping that the rollout of the stable version of the browser would mean it was feature complete. There are in fact several things missing.

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The new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge web browser will be released on January 15, 2020 (a day after support ends for Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system) and Microsoft plans to provide it as an upgrade that will replace the classic version of Edge.

Since the new Edge is based on Chromium, it is clear that some things have changed. You can follow development of the new Edge here on BetaNews or on the official Edge Development blog.

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When Mozilla released Firefox 72 yesterday, users were happy to find that the company had tamed the popup messages that ask whether a website should be allowed to send notifications. Now, with Chrome 80, Google has done the same.

Google notes that while the option to receive notifications from sites can be useful, they are "also a common complaint as many websites request the notification permission on first visit rather than at contextually relevant moments in the user's journey". But rejoice, for there is a solution!

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Mozilla has released Firefox 72.0 for desktop, along with Firefox for Android 68.4 and Firefox ESR 68.4.0.

Mac and Linux users gain the picture-in-picture video feature introduced for Windows in Firefox 71. Fingerprinting scripts are now blocked as standard with this new release, while intrusive pop-up notifications from websites have been confined to the Address Bar to prevent disruption when browsing.

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