It looks like a fresh batch of the Internet Explorer TV ads and videos targeted at hipsters were not enough to accelerate the growth of Microsoft’s web browser, at least in a short term.

According to the latest report from StatCounter, Google Chrome has recently surpassed the IE and became the most popular web browser.

However, earlier this year, Microsoft has stated that they prefer HitsLink over the StatCounter, which, of course, still shows IE dominating the market with 50% vs. 17.41% respectively. Personally, we find it strange that there is such a difference between statistics.

Example:

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Still, with the launch of Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8, we expect to see the Internet Explorer trend reversing in the near feature. Do you?

Brings tab syncing and bug fixes.

After the six week release cycle of Firefox, it looks like Google has decided to slow down a bit and has announced the stable build Google Chrome 19 seven weeks after the previous release.

Keeping new features to a minimal level, the following version includes a one nice feature, which will allow you so synchronize tabs across a variety of different devices, from your PC to a cell phone.

In addition to that, Google Chrome 19 includes a healthy amount of security related fixes and that’s about it.

Google Chrome 19 Stable Changelog

Windows XP edition.

Despite very positive Windows 7 reviews, it still remains the #2 operating system, right behind everyone’s beloved Windows XP. And although trend favors Windows 7, it does not mean that the XP users should be left behind. Since Internet Explorer 9 won’t run on this OS, guys at TomsHardware have decided to test IE8 against the top 4 web browsers.

Web Browsers

Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702
Google Chrome 18.0.1025.142m
Firefox 11.0
Opera 11.62 (build 1347)
SafarI 5.1.4 (7534.54.16)

Benchmark Results

Startup

Continuing battle across a variety of different fronts, the search giant has issued an update for its Google Chrome web browser.

Still available for the Android Ice Cream Sandwich users only, the following Beta release brings a couple of welcome changes, including:

- Ability to view the desktop version of a website
- Ability to add bookmarks as shortcuts to the home screen for a quick and easy access

In addition to that, Google Chrome Beta for Android is now available in 31 more languages, which is a welcome change for those, who are eager to try it.

Soon to release Google Chrome 20.

With the recent announcement of Google Chrome 18 Stable, the search giant has also revealed its plans for the upcoming build. Turns out, Google Chrome 19 will allow users to access their tabs from a variety of different devices.

How does it work?

Once you sign in to Chrome with your email address, click on the “Other devices” menu and you should see something like this, which is self-explanatory:

Your dreams come true with Google Chrome.

If you always wanted to use a stylus or even a joystick to steer your web experience, now you can as the latest Google Chrome release includes a support for two mice or any other devices that can be plugged to your computer.

Thanks to a new multitasking feature, two users can surf the web at the same time and on the same computer. If that doesn’t sound too exciting, you can always play a video game while pretending to do something productive.

You can download Google Chrome Multitask Mode from the following web site and yes, it was April fools joke, the most useless day in all year.

Back in 2009 we have published an article on battery life, where Internet Explorer 8 pretty much dominated other web browsers; now, it’s time for a rematch.

By comparing top 5 web browsers battery life on a HP Pavillion laptop, 7tutorials found out the following…

Tested web browsers

Internet Explorer 10 Beta
Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 11
Google Chrome 18
Opera 11.62

Results

Conclusion

As seen in the results above, Internet Explorer 9 and 10 is still in the lead, followed by Opera, Firefox and lastly, Google Chrome.

So here you have it folks, switching from Google Chrome to IE10 alone would extend your battery life by you as much as 23 minutes.

The latest stable build of Google Chrome is here.

Continuing its release cycle, the search giant has pushed the version 18 to its stable channel. While there is nothing too exciting in terms of features, Google Chrome 18 does include some performance improvements.

Thanks to GPU accelerated Canvas2D, gaming and various web applications will be smoother than ever while users with older PCs will now be able to the basic 3D content due to a software backed WebGL implementation.

As always, for even more details, security and other fixes, check the following posts.

It’s no secret that Google has been aggressively pushing its Google Chrome web browser across a variety of its services and partner’s web sites.

Now, Neowin reports that the search giant has decided to spice the things up and advertise on Microsoft’s search engine as well.

Once user types phrases to download different web browsers, such as, “get firefox”, the following ad will appear:

While it’s nothing spectacular, once you combine all the advertising campaigns, one can only wonder how many millions of dollars Google is actually putting into the Google Chrome promotion, but hey, at least its working.

For one day only.

Just after Microsoft’s post about the inaccurate market share reports from StatCounter, the company behind one of the most popular monitoring sites has published a report of their own.

However, it has nothing to do with the HitsLink vs. StatCounter, in fact what they did is revealed that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been overtaken by Google Chrome for the first time in history on Sunday 18 March.

While IE remains the number one web browser as of today, Aodhan Cullen, CEO of web Statcounter said that Google Chrome usage peaks over the weekends when people don’t work and can freely choose what web browser to use.

With the upcoming release of Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox Next, which might have IE pre-installed, it will be interesting to see how IE’s market share changes over the course of next year.

Mozilla announced today, the release of Firefox 11, the next version of the popular web browser. The new version brings in quite a lot of new features for end users and web developers alike.

For the end user, Firefox 11 introduces add-on sync. Add-on sync uses Firefox’s built-in sync feature to ensure that all your Firefox installations are in sync with the installed Firefox add-ons, in addition to the bookmarks, open tabs, history and passwords.

Opera looking into it.

Although it was previously known that Firefox will include a Metro like UI, the team behind Mozilla’s web browser only recently started the development. However, turns out, Google is also developing a Google Chrome Metro version, which will be available for the Windows 8 consumers.

In addition to Google’s announcement, the search giant has also confirmed that they will work on a touch optimized version of Google Chrome for the desktop.

What about other web browsers? Safari remains silent, however, ArsTehnica contacted Opera Software and received the following statement, “Unfortunately we can’t comment on any specifics yet, other than we are currently looking into Windows 8. The new OS and the Metro UI offers an interesting new platform and we know users will want to run Opera on it.”

We are curious to find out, how exactly will Google Chrome and Firefox differentiate themselves from the IE10 Metro, UI wise.

From left to right Jim Hebert, Cris Necker, Justin Schuh

Just 24 hours after reporting the critical vulnerability in Google’s Chrome web browser, the search giant has already released a patch to address the issue.

Identified as a bug CVE-2011-3046, discovered vulnerability is described as “UXSS and bad history navigation”, with no additional details revealed.

Having said that, the latest stable build of Google Chrome (17.0.963.78) also fixes earlier reported issues with the Flash games and videos.

Security contests prove to be useful.

Just as some might have thought that Google’s Chrome sandboxing feature is bullet proof, Sergey Glazunov, a security researcher who have found quite a few vulnerabilities in the fast, has enriched his life with a $60k reward, received for a “Full Chrome” exploit, which bypassed the sandbox feature. Although Google Chrome was previously known to withstand various attacks in Pwn2Own and similar contests, this time it was the first to fail.

Justin Schuh, Chrome’s security team member said, “It was an impressive exploit. It required a deep understanding of how Chrome works. This is not a trivial thing to do. It’s a very difficult and that’s why we’re paying $60,000.”

The second exploit was executed by a team from VuPen Security, which took about 6 weeks to write and test. According to Chaouki Bekrar, the co-founder of VuPen Security, they wanted to demonstrate that Chrome not as unbreakable as some might have though.

While details about exploits were not revealed, he said, “We had to use two vulnerabilities. The first one was to bypass DEP and ASLR on Windows and a second one to break out of the Chrome sandbox. It was a use-after-free vulnerability in the default installation of Chrome [which] worked against the default installation so it really doesn’t matter if it’s third-party code anyway.”

After last month’s interesting results, it’s time to see how did the February turned out for your favorite web browser.

For the second month in a row, Internet Explorer continues to increase its market share and is now up by 0.76 point, from 48.16% to 48.92%.

Surpassing the 20% mark, Firefox has no intentions of changing the trend, down from 19.35% to 18.97%, 0.38 point decrease.

After last month’s drop, Google Chrome has pretty much recovered from the drop, up from 17.20% to 17.48%, 0.2 point increase.

Slowly edging towards the 10% market, Safari’s market share has increased by a 0.01 point, up from 9.27% to 9.28%.

After some consolidation, Opera’s market share went up from 1.54% to 1.60%, reaching the level last seen on July 2011 (0.06 point increase).

After the previous benchmark results that tested the latest stable versions of web browsers, people expressed their interest in the beta or alpha build results as well. Well, today is your lucky day, folks.

Tested web browsers

Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) Platform Preview
Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) Metro Platform Preview
Google Chrome 18 Beta
Firefox 11 Beta 5
Opera 12 Alpha

What’s the difference between Metro and Desktop IE? As mentioned earlier, “IE Metro (aka Immersive web browser) uses the 64 bit libraries by default.”

Benchmark results

The keyword here is “up to”.

As if the Pwn2Own contest was not enough, Google will be holding its own competition at the CanSecWest security conference.

Called Pwnium, contest attendees will be asked to exploit the Google Chrome web browser and in return, will be rewarded as follows:

$60,000 – “Full Chrome exploit”
$40,000 – “Partial Chrome exploit”
$20,000 – “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”

So where does this $1 million reward come from? Well, Google will be giving away money not for the first two or three hackers, but for pretty much everyone, who manages to compromise their web browsers security.

As simple as that.

With the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, guys at Neowin have managed to benchmark the latest version of IE10, which is Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 5, running in both desktop and Metro modes.

What’s the difference between IE10 Metro and Desktop? IE Metro (aka Immersive web browser) uses the 64 bit libraries by default.

Tested browsers

Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) PP5
Google Chrome 17
Firefox 10
Opera 11.60

Benchmark results

With all the privacy and tracking talks going on, it looks like Google will finally be joining the ranks of other web browsers who support Do Not Track feature.

Introduced years ago, Do Not Track allows users to opt out of tracking by advertising, social and other web sites that enjoy such data.

However, it’s not coming anytime soon, according to the report, Google Chrome is likely to introduce Do Not Track feature by the end of this year, which is 8-10 months away.

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president said, “This agreement will not solve all the privacy issues users face on the Web today. However, it represents a meaningful step forward in privacy controls for users. We look forward to making this happen.”

Google Chrome 17.0.963.46 Stable

Following the release of Google Chrome for Android, the search giant has pushed a long awaited updated to the Stable Channel, tagged as version 17.

As reported earlier, the following build introduces a couple of new features that will improve the overall browsing experience.

Google Chrome 17 Changelog

First of all, it will pre-load the web sites that you are likely to visit when typing them in the URL bar before even hitting the Enter button.

Finally, am improved feature from the Google Chrome 12 will protect you from the malicious downloads with a simple notification.

However, those are not the only changes, Google Chrome 17 also includes a new Extensions APIs and about 20 security bug fixes.

Download

Google Chrome 17 Final (Stable)