According to NetApplications figures for browser market shares, published on 1st January, IE9 now has 11.48% of the global market, and is closing in on second-placed Firefox 8, which has 12.28%. However, IE8 remains the market leader, with a 27.43% market share, as measured by logging visits to web sites by personal computers.

The December rankings are skewed because Google is currently upgrading users from version 15 (8.71%) to version 16 (7.07%) of its Chrome browser. Since Google more or less forces upgrades, Chrome 16 should soon have a market share of 16+ percent putting it in second place, ahead of both IE9 and Firefox 8.

Microsoft took a big risk by not developing a version of IE9 for the decade-old Windows XP operating system, which still has a large market share. XP users could easily defect to Chrome or Mozilla Firefox instead of upgrading to Windows 7. However, Microsoft decided to bet on the rapid development of IE9, IE10 and future versions rather than invest in XP, which is clearly in terminal decline.

Source: ZDNet

Measuring such things online is an inexact science, and other analysts offer slightly different assessments. But all agree on the trends, prompting questions over Firefox’s chances of keeping pace with two fiercely competitive commercial rivals.

Google’s only remaining superior in market share terms is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the leader of the browser pack now on 40.6%.

When Google released Chrome in late 2008, Mozilla’s Firefox was the only serious rival to Internet Explorer, and for a year that remained true. Firefox’s market share peaked around November 2009, when more than 32% of web traffic came from its users. Since then the trend has been downwards, at an ever accelerating speed.

The force behind Firefox’s decline is clear enough. Soon after its peak, Google began aggressively promoting Chrome, which had mainly been used by only the early adopters and developers. Its alleged speed advantage was advertised on billboards and television, and crucially, users of Google’s dominant web search engine were encouraged to download and use it.

Chrome has only been available for three years, but now has a 25.7% share of the global market, according to StatCounter, compared to Firefox’s 25.2%.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer remains way out in front with a share of 40.6%, but it’s expected that Chrome will continue to close the gap.

“We can look forward to a fascinating battle between Microsoft and Google as the pace of growth of Chrome suggests that it will become a real rival to Internet Explorer globally,” said Aodhan Cullen, chief executive of StatCounter. “Our stats measure actual browser usage, not downloads, so while Chrome has been highly effective in ensuring downloads our stats show that people are actually using it to access the web also.”

Chrome became the number two browser in Britain in August, although it has a larger gap to close on Internet Explorer than the global average. Some 42.8% of Britons online currently use Microsoft’s browser, according to StatCounter, compared to 45% in August.

Thunderbird 8 is built using the same Gecko 8 browser engine that’s used in Firefox 8, also released today.

Notably, the new version is accompanied by Lightning 1.0, an add-on under development for years that gives Thunderbird a calendar module, too.

Thunderbird 8 also includes “improvements to attachment handling and accessibility, updated Search and Find shortcuts, and several security, and stability fixes,” according to a blog post by Mozilla’s Rafael Ebron.

The Lightning add-on makes Thunderbird a more capable replacement for Outlook for those opting for an open-source approach to sending, receiving, searching, and archiving e-mail. It’s built to work with Thunderbird 8, but also supports older versions.

The Lightning add-on lets people add calendar entries, subscribe to online calendars, manage a to-do list, and more. For details, check the Lightning 1.0 release notes.

To dowload Thunderbird 8 visit the mozilla web site: www.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird

The wide-release version of Firefox 7 brings changes to the majority of Firefox users that have been available on the beta and Aurora channels for some time. These include claims of significant gains in reducing memory use, “often 20-percent to 30-percent less, and sometimes as much as 50-percent less”, a company representative wrote in a blog post based on work by Firefox developer Nicholas Nethercote.

These performance gains are the first public results of an internal Mozilla project called MemShrink, which, as the name implies, is about reducing the browser’s system impact.

Mozilla cited several specific areas of improvement in Firefox 7, including when the browser is kept open for long periods of time, when multiple tabs are open at once, and when the browser is used concurrently with other programs that also use a lot of memory. The company also noted that MemShrink was successful in part because of the rapid-release cycle that a vocal minority of Firefox users have been criticising.

Other changes in Firefox 7 for desktops include a new version of hardware-accelerated Canvas for faster HTML5 games and animations, and improvements for Web developers. These include support for the W3C navigation timing API, which allows developers to measure page load time and site navigation against factors like bandwidth, and a new set of Firefox tools for developers.

Firefox 7 for Android includes a full list of changes, including the ability to select text in a Web page for copying and pasting. Long-tap on a site, and the Android-style drag handles will appear. There’s a new Quit feature under Preferences/More to force an exit from the browser, the WebSocket API now works on Firefox for mobile devices, and image rendering has been improved on Tegra-powered tablets and phones. The browser also now auto-detects your system default language if it’s supported, and a new Preferences option enables you to change the language displayed in the browser on-demand.

Source: CNET

Changes in Firefox 6 are largely under the bonnet but include extended CSS and HTML 5 support, such as the ability to create an HTML 5 progress bar and better display for web sites using iframes. It also enables WebSocket support – previously disabled due to security concerns – and adds a plug-in compatibility checker to the add-ons manager. It also brings a new ‘Data Management Window’ to give users more control over which websites have access to personal information such as cookies, passwords and location information. It is accessible by typing ‘about:permissions’ in the address bar.

The release on Tuesday also coincides with the launch of the Firefox 7 beta as Mozilla continues on its accelerated rolling release schedule.

Some enterprise users of Firefox have complained that the fast-paced releases make it impossible to deploy in large environments.

For future release Firefox 8, which moves to the ‘Aurora‘ channel on Tuesday, will add new features which provide extra security from unwanted or malicious add-ons being added to the browser without a users’ knowledge.

Source: ZDNet

It is now the second most popular browser, overtaking Mozilla’s Firefox and quickly gaining ground on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE), the current market leader.

IE’s market share is still falling despite the programme being pre-installed on almost every computer sold in Britain.

According to new figures, Chrome accounts for 22 per cent of the British web market compared to 45 per cent for IE. Apple’s Safari is number four with a nine per cent share.

Chrome is also the number three browser worldwide, with one in five users preferring it, according to Statcounter, a web metrics firm.

Chrome’s growth comes on the back of Google’s domination of the search engine market, which it is led for years.

Google said Chrome’s surge in popularity could be explained by its speed, security and a new national advertising campaign. Chrome was the first Google product ever advertised on British television.

Lars Bak, the Google engineer responsible for Chrome, said the company’s aims was speed. He said users should “never be happy” with existing speed.

Source: The Telegraph

Although there is some time before the final release of Firefox 4, the beta product is considered to be stable and safe enough for daily use.

Mozilla is aiming to sign up to 4 million users in an interactive process to shape the final release. Feedback opportunities are prominent in the user interface, with users encouraged to submit their thoughts to the developers.

The popular browser is undergoing many changes, both visible and under the hood. The Windows release has seen the most apparent refinements, with tabs moved above the address bar as well as a single Firefox button to replace the menu bar.

Universal changes include a Smart Location bar, updated add-ons manager, replacement of the bookmarks bar with a bookmarks button, support for high definition WebM video, extra privacy protection and crash protection against media plug ins.

For web developers, the main feature to embrace is the new HTML5 parser – which has full support for drag and drop, audio, video, file handling, and in-line SVG and MathML support.

Taking a leaf from the book of Chrome, the rendering of web pages is instantaneous and video sites such as YouTube load up in record time.

Source: Guardian newspaper

The builds, announced by programmer Armen Zambrano Gasparnian on Friday, do not yet have an installer, though that work is under way. The software is still one of the very raw “nightly” builds for developers. Support for 64-bit processors is one of the planned Firefox 4 features. Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 by the end of November.

The transition to 64-bit computing often offers a modest computing performance boost, but the main reason for the transition is getting around the 4GB memory limit of 32-bit computing. Since relatively few applications today require that much memory – or even whatever fraction remains after the operating system and other applications claim their share – the 64-bit change for desktop computing has taken years.

Source: ZDNet

“Given that Microsoft is staking their future in mobile on Windows Mobile 7 (not 6.5) and because we don’t know if or when Microsoft will release a native development kit, we are putting our Windows Mobile development on hold,” Stuart Parmenter, mobile team technical lead for Mozilla, said in a blog posting.

Mozilla had been working on a version of Firefox that would run on Windows Mobile 6, part of a years-long effort to bring its browser to Windows CE. As for the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft has thus far said that applications for that operating system have to be written in either Silverlight or XNA, rather than in native code.

ZDNet