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Mozilla has been busy over the past few months working on version 4 of its Web browser, and I’ve been enjoying participating in the beta program. It’s had its problems, but as beta replaces beta, the bugs are getting worked out. The organization released a new version of the browser earlier today, beta 11. It’s the first Firefox to include the so-called do-not-track feature.
Desecration of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” – “Tonight we sat in horror and watched what you have done to the single greatest cartoon ever made…” The Top 10 Everything of 2009 – “TIME charts the highs and lows of the past year in 50 wide-ranging lists…” Giant iceberg heading for Australia – “A giant iceberg [...]
Is Google preparing to take over the universe? Sounds like a silly question until you look at everything that Google has announced in just the last month. Google is in the process of crushing or getting-ready-to-crush a number of businesses. For example: 1) Google navigation: New Google Navigation app shows what happens when you combine [...]
Hot on the heels of Google’s announcement that Gmail (and other Google applications) has finally emerged from beta comes a new bombshell: Google is fleshing out the Chrome browser to become a fully-fledged operating system. In the official Google blog, Google executives Sundar Pichai and Linus Upson laid out the strategy behind the new product. According to them, the OS will be fast, secure and designed to support Web applications.
I’m not really surprised by this news. People in the tech industry have gossiped about the possibility of a Google-powered operating system for a couple of years now. When Google Chrome debuted, several tech journalists pointed out that the browser wasn’t just fast — it worked well with other Google products like Gmail and Google Docs. In some ways, Chrome is already an operating system for Web-based applications. But it exists as an application running on top of another operating system like Linux, Windows or Mac OS.
Firefox 3.5 was officially released yesterday, and it’s already doing nicely. In fact, as MG Siegler at TechCrunch pointed out, it was being downloaded at a rate of nearly 100 downloads per minute yesterday. You can see how it’s doing for yourself at the Mozilla download tracker. In terms of individual countries, the United States is the only country with more than a million downloads. Germany, Japan, France and the United Kingdom round out the top 5.
Seth Rosenblatt at CNET said the latest Firefox “represents the best Firefox we’ve yet seen from Mozilla.” There are some new features; this is the first Firefox to have the Private Browsing feature, which keeps private information from being stored in the browser’s cache and history. If that’s going too far, there’s also an option to clear your browsing history. In Firefox 3.5, you can specify about how long you’d like to erase the records…
Las Vegas is hosting yet another tech conference this week. This time it’s MIX09, a Web development conference hosted by Microsoft at the Venetian Hotel. Between thrasing fake guitar riffs in the Rock Band elimination tournament and snacking on free food, developers will get to attend workshops and listen to keynote speeches delivered by Microsoft bigwigs. This morning, Dean Hachamovitch will be one of those keynote speakers. Hachamovitch leads the team responsible for the design, development and release of Internet Explorer 8.
IE8 has been out in the wild for a while now. First you could download it as a beta build and later as a release candidate. But this morning everyone expects Hachamovitch to announce that the final build for IE8 will debut online today. It’s free to download, so expect Microsoft’s servers to get crazy amounts of traffic later on.
In a recent test performed by CNET UK, Internet Explorer 8 proved to be about 6.7 times faster than its predecessor, IE 7.
There’s no doubt about it, Google loves the beta phase of product development. For the uninitiated, a product is in beta when the provider offers users the chance to test it before its finalized. It may have stability issues among other problems. Google tends to slap the beta label on its products and leave it there. Just look at Gmail, a product Google announced back in 2004 that still carries the beta label.
But Google’s browser, Google Chrome, was different. Google released the beta version in September 2008. They announced the browser by releasing a comic (which even featured a panel with HowStuffWorks.com). In December, Google removed the beta label and proclaimed that the company had achieved its goals with the browser. For those of us used to Google keeping products in beta perpetually, it was a strange and frightening world.
Well guess what? There’s a new version of Google Chrome out now.
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