Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #31

August 04, 2008

Flock 2 Beta 2 available now

Flock has released the second beta of its forthcoming Flock 2, the Firefox-based web browser that features tight integration with most of the most popular social web services including Flickr, Facebook, digg, YouTube and many others.

Flock 2 beta 2 is based on Firefox 3 (3.0.1 actually) code base bringing along all the performance improvements and new features including Places, tagging, malware protection, the new location bar, web content and protocol handlers among others.

Font Embedding on the Web

We made significant progress this week, when one of the USA’s most prestigious font companies announced its support for the Embedded OpenType format for font embedding on the Web, and launched a new website to promote other browsers to support it in addition to Internet Explorer (which has had EOT support built-in since 1996).

Embedded OpenType (EOT) is currently before the W3C in a submission to make it an open Web Standard. The format was previously proprietary to Microsoft. We created it to enable font embedding within Microsoft Word documents in the early 1990s, and it was later extended for use on the Web by Internet Explorer.

Commercial Mobile Browsers To See Strong Growth

While open source mobile browsers will gain popularity, ABI Research says offerings from companies like Opera can still garner significant revenue.

The market for commercial mobile browsers will grow despite the increased popularity of browsers based on open source coding, according to new data from ABI Research.

In its report “The Mobile Browser Market,” the research firm said the demand for more complex HTML-based browsers on handsets will lead to pre-installed revenue of $492 million by 2013.

Read more…
© InformationWeek, 22/07/08

Japanese browser maker takes on IE, Firefox

A Japanese software company is stepping up international promotion of its Web browser in the hope of carving out a 5% share over the next few years of a market dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The Sleipnir browser is well-known among Japanese technophiles, many of whom value the high level of customization that the browser allows. At the center of this customization is the ability to select either the Trident or Gecko layout engines for each Web site visited. Trident was developed by Microsoft Corp. and is used in Internet Explorer while Gecko is used in Mozilla’s Firefox.

about:mozilla - Executive Director, Air Mozilla, Labs meetup, Firefox 3.1, Community Calendar, and more…

Firefox 3.1: Support for text attributes and spell checking. Marco Zehe writes, “Friday’s nightly build will include one big new feature in accessibility for Firefox 3.1: Text attributes and spell checking support.” This means that assistive technologies will now be able to get information about the font-family, font-weight, underline style, style, color, and background color of text, and also the language that the text is in, among other things.

Firefox 3.0.1 released. As a part of Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 3.0.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from getfirefox.com.

Firefox 2.0.0.16 released. In addition to the release of Firefox 3.0.1, Firefox 2 has also been updated, and Firefox 2.0.0.16 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a free download from http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html.

Safari browser flaw: Session fixation attacks possible

Another day, another unpatched Safari browser vulnerability. According to this flaw warning found on the NVD (National Vulnerability Database), Apple’s flagship browser is vulnerable to session fixation attacks because of the way it handles cookies in country-specific top-level domains.

Maxthon Providing Online Help to Olympics Visitors

Maxthon International, developers of the Maxthon 2 Internet browser and a Chinese company with a worldwide presence, is providing free help services for visitors to the International Olympics in Beijing. More than 300 Maxthon users have signed up to staff Maxthon’s Online Volunteer Web site [...]

Maxthon 2.0 is a free Internet browser. It has been downloaded nearly 160 million times just from Maxthon’s own site [...]. In China, Maxthon has about 30 percent of the browser market, beaten only by Microsoft Internet Explorer. The company has only recently begun to actively market the browser in the United States, but already it is making strong inroads into a market that has been dominated by Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox Browser.

First look: Ars reviews Firefox 3.1 alpha 1

Mozilla took a big step toward Firefox 3.1 yesterday with the release of the first alpha. It includes important improvements to both the user interface and to Firefox’s underlying Gecko rendering engine.

Much of Firefox’s internal architecture was overhauled during the 3.0 development process. This means that Mozilla now has a much stronger foundation to build upon. The features planned for 3.1 will continue pushing the browser forward and will leverage some of the new infrastructure that was put in place for 3.0. The new release will also include some features that were deferred during the 3.0 development cycle because of time constraints. Additionally, some of the experimental features from 3.0 will be refined and improved for 3.1 based on feedback from users.

IE8 Beta 2 getting heavy performance, crash-recovery tweaks

More details about Microsoft’s next version of its ailing browser have been released, in the build-up to the second beta release due next month. The first beta, released in March, was aimed at web developers. It brought much-needed improvements to standards compliance, along with negligible reliability and inconsistent performance.

With IE8, Microsoft is attempting to solve one of the most annoying problems with today’s multi-window, multi-tab browsers; namely, the disastrous effect that a browser crash has. It is an unfortunate feature of most browsers that a crash in one tab takes down the whole browser instance. Whether the cause is a bug in the browser itself, a malicious script, or a badly-written plug-in, the effect is the same; not only does the tab that caused the problem disappear, so does the tab with your half-composed forum post, the train timetable you need to get home, and the audio stream you’re listening to.

IE8 tackles this by separating each tab into its own process, a feature it calls “Loosely Coupled IE.” Starting IE8 actually creates two processes; one process for the window frame, address bar, toolbar, and tab bar, and a second process for the tab itself. Subsequent tabs may also open in new processes. Running a tab in its own process allows that tab to crash (for any reason) without disrupting any other tab.

Microsoft Seeks Beta Testers For Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is widening the testing program for the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 and is actively seeking the public’s help in putting the browser through its paces prior to release. In a blog post, IE8 program manager Allison Burnett promised that the second beta version of the browser is “right around the corner” and invites Web surfers to apply to become an official tester.

Firefox 3 chipping away Safari market share, summer browsing patterns reverse IE decline

Two days ago, we posted an article on the trend that Firefox, on a daily basis, has been exceeding a market share of 20% more often than ever before in July. Net Applications today published the July result earlier today, which does not show quite so dramatic numbers. Apparently, IE7 reversed its decline into a marginal sequential growth most likely due to a change in audience mix during the summer months, while Firefox grows further on the heels of the recent Firefox 3 release, chipping away market share from Safari.

In July, IE recorded a 73.02% share, up marginally from 73.01% the month before. It appears that many IE users made the switch from IE6 to IE7 during the month as IE6 lost 0.64 points over the previous month, but IE7 gained 0.65 points in the same period.

Firefox’ share of the market throughout July was 19.03%, down 0.19% from 19.22% in June. If we compare changes in FF2 and FF3 market shares during the June-July period, we notice that FF3 gained 3.36%, while Firefox 2 lost 3.11%.