If you've been unhappy with Firefox's somewhat stagnant design rece

Ever wanted to create a simple theme for the web browser of your choice? Then BT Engage, an interactive skin creator by Brand Thunder is a tool you’ve been waiting for.

The process is pretty straight forward. Upon starting, user is presented with a web browser screen that can be customized according to your individual needs, from backgrounds and logos to widgets.

However, if you are not keen on trying such activity, feel free to check ThunderThemes, which includes over 40,000 already created skins.

Your middle-click mouse button—also known as your scroll wheel—can be an effective tab management tool in both Chrome and Firefox. Here are two shortcuts it can perform. More »

There is something about Google Chrome which I have not seen in any other browser. It is one of the fastest growing browsers across the world and currently has around 20% usage world wide.

Many tech related websites around the world are seeing that Google Chrome has been overtaking Firefox. Last year both TechCrunch and Techmeme reported that Chrome was the most users on their site which prompted me to write the article; Why is Chrome Winning and Firefox Losing Market Share?. Back then, Chrome’s market share was around 10% was constantly growing on our site too.

Recently, I wrote an article on How Chrome is Growing in India and Hurting Microsoft and Mozilla. In that article, I delved upon how Chrome has been dominating Indian markets even though the internet usage there is around 15% of the population. This definitely showed how much impact Chrome has had on the browser market.

Recently, I was checking the browser market share for Techie Buzz and found that Chrome has overtaken Firefox by a small margin. Last month, Chrome was behind Firefox by 2%, so the month over month growth is pretty impressive. This means that almost 1+ million out of the 3.5+ million users on the site were using Google Chrome to visit Techie Buzz.

One of the reasons for Google Chrome’s growth is the heavy advertising Google is doing for it. I see many ads which pitch users to play Angry Birds on Google Chrome and I can swear that those have converted many users to switch to Chrome including my own brother who is a big Angry Birds fan.

Google is also landing some punches on rival browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer by stopping development on certain products while providing plugins for them too. Recently, Google has decided to stop development of Google Toolbar for Firefox 5. This has sent Mozilla in a frenzy because lot of users are not upgrading to Firefox 5 from Firefox 4 because of the incompatibility of the add-on.

Google also provides Internet Explorer users with something called as Google Chrome Frame to bring Google Chrome’s technology to Internet Explorer. As you can see from our browser stats, we have around 0.13% IE users who have installed the Google Chrome Frame.

Additionally, Google has also been blocking several features in their products on Opera. Our in-house Opera guru Pallab has always been finding problems using Google’s features on Opera including the recently introduced Google Instant.

So is Google intentionally doing all these things to switch users to their own browsers? It could very well be possible, however, they are also backing that up with an excellent browser and I for one have been using Google Chrome as my primary browser since it launched and yes some of the new features in it including the Multiple Chrome Profiles are definitely good.

What do you think about Chrome’s dominance? Is it good or bad? Do you use Google Chrome as your primary browser? If not which one do you prefer to use? Please let me know through your comments.

Dear Lifehacker, More »

<!-- videoId: 0C4smeQ0Io4 --><!-- /videoId: 0C4smeQ0Io4 --> Sometimes you're browsing along the web and you want to open a page but not bother t

Firefox: SelectionSK is a Firefox extension that offers language translations, highlighting, and multi-engine search to

With the release of Firefox 5 and Opera 11.50, TomsHardware took 5 most popular web browsers and compared them against each other.

Internet Explorer 9
Google Chrome 12
Firefox 5
Opera 11.50
Safari 5

What are the results? Let’s check them out.

Startup Time

Page Load Times

JavaScript

Silverlight

JSGameBench

Psychedelic Browsing

Memory Usage

Battery Life

Conclusion

Conformance Testing

Standards Conformance

When it comes to summarizing all the results, Google Chrome 12 takes the crown and is followed by IE9, Firefox 5, Opera and Safari.

So here you have it folks. Whether or not Chrome will continue to be the king of the hill with the upcoming releases of Internet Explorer 10, Firefox 6 and Opera 12, remains to be seen.

Chrome/Firefox/Internet Explorer: If you're loving Google+ but finding it to be virtual ghost town while your friends slowly trickle in, the Google+Facebook browser extension incorporates your Facebook feed to your Google+ stream. You can also post status updates and replies directly within Google+.More »

Firefox/Chrome/Opera: Right before Google announced Google+ the company changed the bar across the top of all Google pages black. That bar now has links to your often-used Google services, and the Google+ Enhancer userscript makes it more useful by adding unread item counts to the ones you use. More »

As Internet Explorer is heading towards the 49% market share mark and Firefox continues its downtrend, we see interesting times are approaching indeed, but as for now, let’s focus on what had happened over the course of June.

No surprises here, Internet Explorer has lost some of its market share again, down from 54.27% to 53.68% (0.59 point decrease).

After slightly increasing its share in the month of May, Firefox resumes its downtrend as it goes down again, down from 21.71% to 21.67% (0.04 point decrease).

In the expense of other web browsers, Google Chrome share continues to climb higher, up from 12.52% to 13.11% (0.59 point increase).

It looks like WebKit web browsers are on the roll, as Safari managed to increase its market share by another 0.2 point, up from 7.28% to 7.48%.

Opera took another big hit (-15% this time), losing 0.3 point of its market share, as it went down from 2.03% to 1.73%.

Firefox/Chrome/IE: Swidget is a browser add-on that swaps banner and box ads for useful widgets, like the weather, news headlines, or even your Facebook feed. More »

With the release of the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2, Microsoft has decided to post results of the JavaScript Standards Test, which scores are available below.

The following web browsers were tested:

Internet Explorer 10 (Platform Preview 2)
Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 5
Google Chrome 13 (13.0.782.41)
Google Chrome 12 (12.0.742.112)
Safari 5.0.5 (7533.21.1)
Opera 11.50

As you can see from the results, IE10 has scored 99%, followed by Firefox 5.0, IE9 and Google Chrome 13 Beta. Surprisingly or not, Opera 11.50 has scored only 65%, lowest of all the web browsers.

What is test262?

test262 is a test suite intended to check agreement between JavaScript implementations and the ECMA-262 Specification (currently 5th Edition). The test suite contains thousands of individual tests, each of which tests some specific requirements of the ECMAScript specification.

Surprised, excited or both?

Firefox/Chrome/Opera: Interfacelift is one of our favorite sites for high-resolution wallpapers, but the added clicking required to get to the right size is a pain. InterfaceLift Resolutions Links is a userscript that adds direct links to each resolution right on the download page. More »

Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android: Mozilla has released Firefox 5, the first update for its new rapid-release three-month development cycle.

Recently, Google has announced a couple of interesting new features for its search engine designed to enrich the overall experience.

The first one is called “Search by Image” which allows Google Chrome and Firefox (extension is required) users to search by using an image.

All you have to do is drag and drop the picture into the search box and that’s it, Google will figure out the rest (including location) and display somewhat relevant search results.

Private browsing is great for more than just porn (not that we're judging), but you can start a session or enable it really fast directly from the keyboard in any browser. Well, any browser except Safari.More » 

During the Ubuntu Developer Summit – Oneiric, we reported that there were discussions about Chrome (or rather, its open source version, Chromium) replacing Firefox as the default browser in Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”. That did not happen and Firefox remained as the default browser for Oneiric.

In an interview with Network World, Mark Shuttleworth confirmed that Canonical is looking to replace Firefox with Chrome in Ubuntu. Shuttleworth said that he is a big fan of the browser from Google and confirmed that there was discussion on the feasibility of Chrome (or Chromium) replacing Firefox in Ubuntu 11.10. That did not happen and the switch will, in all probability,  not happen in Ubuntu 12.04 as well because it is a Long term Support (LTS) Release.

So, it may take one year for Chrome to replace Firefox, but Shuttleworth said that it is a real possibility that we may see Firefox being replaced in Ubuntu 12.10. However with the pace of Chrome’s development and Mozilla adopting an accelerated development cycle for Firefox recently, thing could change a lot in a year.

Shuttleworth said that one of the best thing to have happened for Chrome on Linux has been Chrome OS. Because Chrome OS is basically Chrome running on a Linux, Google has invested a lot in optimizing the performance of Chrome on Linux. That has resulted in Chrome on Linux outperforming the other platforms – Mac and Windows.

Whatever the default browser is, users are free to install the browser that suits their need, just like Chrome users do today. So, in essence choosing Chrome/Chromium as the default browser will not affect anything. It will simply be an acknowledgement of the progress that Google Chrome (or Chromium) has made in the last two years.

Which browser do you prefer? Firefox or Chrome/Chromium?

If your browser's default start page is feeling a little ugly and boring, DeviantART user flatmo1 has created a great-looking start page inspired by Windows 8's tiled interface, ready to get you to your favorite sites with just a click. More »