Internet monitoring firm Pingdom on Monday released a new report on global Web browser share by browser version. The company found Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 to be the most popular browser in North America with a 21.2% share, and it was closely followed by Google Chrome 18 at 20.2%. Internet Explorer, however, featured a combined total of 40.4% of the North American browser market. Globally, Pingdom found that Chrome 18 is the most popular browser with a 25.6% share, leading Firefox 11 with 15.8% and Internet Explorer 9 and 8 with 15.7% and 14.6%, respectively. Microsoft’s browser has the largest worldwide market share when all versions are combined, followed by Chrome and then Firefox.

Read

Web analytics firm StatCounter on Wednesday announced that Google’s Chrome web browser overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer last Sunday to become the most popular weekend browser, Reuters reported. “While it is only one day, this is a milestone,” said Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s chief executive. “At weekends, when people are free to choose what browser to use, many of them are selecting Chrome in preference to IE.” On March 18th, a total of 32.7% of all browsing was done using Chrome, while Internet Explorer had a 32.5% share. When people returned to their offices on Monday, however, Microsoft’s browser increased its share to 35% and Google’s share slipped to 30%. “Whether Chrome can take the lead in the browser wars in the long term remains to be seen, however the trend towards Chrome usage at weekends is undeniable,” Cullen said. Google’s web browsing market share continues to surge, nearly doubling from 17% in March 2011 to 30.8% in March 2012. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, has continued its downward spiral from 45.1% a year ago to 34.8% so far this month.

Read

Russian university student Sergey Glazunov was able to hack into a secure Windows 7 machine using a remote code execution exploit in Google’s Chrome web browser in five minutes, ZDNet reported Wednesday. The exploit was found during CanSecWest’s Pwnium hacker contest, a competition similar to the popular Pwn2Own contest. Google offered a total of $1 million dollar in prize money to hackers who could exploit the company’s Chrome web browser. Glazunov was rewarded $60,000 for his exploit, which found a way around Chrome’s sandbox using vulnerabilities in the extension system. “It didn’t break out of the sandbox [but] it avoided the sandbox,” said Justin Schuh, a member of the Chrome security team. “It was an impressive exploit. It required a deep understanding of how Chrome works. This is not a trivial thing to do.” At Pwn2Own, the VUPEN team was able to hack all four major browsers — Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox — with Chrome, which was hacked within five minutes, being the first to fall. This is the first time in four years at the competition that Google’s web browser has been hacked. The company is already working on an update that will fix the vulnerabilities uncovered at Pwnium and Pwn2Own.

Read

Google on Monday responded to a new round of finger pointing, this time from Microsoft, which claimed Google was using falsified cookie policies to bypass certain security features in the Internet Explorer Web browser. The new accusations followed an earlier revelation that Google and other advertisers were using “a special code” to bypass Safari’s third-party cookie policies. Google had apparently heard enough, however, as the company issued a response to Microsoft’s allegations late Monday evening. Read on for more.

“Microsoft omitted important information from its blog post today,” Google wrote in a statement. “Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (known as ‘P3P’) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form. It is well known – including by Microsoft – that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other websites.”

In the end, Google’s stance is essentially, no we don’t comply with the policy but it’s outdated and most other companies don’t comply with it either. “Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational,” Google wrote. “A 2010 research report indicated that over 11,000 websites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft.”

Last week, it was revealed that Google and other leading advertising companies had been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of unknowing Safari users. The Mountain View-based company maintained its innocence and claimed it “used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled.” Microsoft is now claiming that the search giant has used a similar technique to bypass privacy settings in Internet Explorer. By default, IE blocks third-party cookies unless the site provides a “P3P Compact Policy Statement” indicating how the cookies will be used and agreeing to not track the user. Microsoft claims that Google is improperly representing certain cookies, which allows them to pass through IE’s security without disclosing the company’s intent. Google has not responded to Microsoft’s claims.

Read

A new research report from Chitika Insights suggests Chrome, Firefox and Safari are eating away at Microsoft’s dominant share of the web browser market. Internet Explorer’s overall share dropped from 56% in July to 54% in August while Firefox’s market share increased from 19% to 20% and Safari’s share grew one point to 9%. Between July 2010 and July 2011, however, Microsoft’s browser share remained steady at 56%. Google’s Chrome web browser saw its share increase from 9% to 16% year-over-year at the expense of Firefox and Safari, which lost 5% and 1% of the market, respectively. Chitika said it expects Firefox’s share to increase as Mozilla continues to release frequent updates to its web browser. In addition, Internet Explorer’s share will “stabilize from its recent losses” when Microsoft releases Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10.

Read

According to the analytics firm StatCounter, Google’s Chrome web browser now has a 20.7% grip of the web browser market — seven times more than it had just two years ago. The boost comes at the cost of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, which now has less than a 50% hold on the market. Mozilla’s Firefox web browser has a 28% share of the browser market, down from 30% two years ago, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer share fell to 44% from 59% two years ago. According to Reuters, StatCounter gathers its data from more than 3 million websites with more than 15 billion page views.

Read

Microsoft on Monday announced the availability of its next-generation desktop Web browser, Internet Explorer 9. “The best experience of the Web is on Windows with Internet Explorer 9,” said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Windows Internet Explorer, in a statement. “Today, the Web can unlock the power and performance of the best PC hardware through Windows and Internet Explorer 9. Websites also can act more like applications within Windows 7, with features such as Pinned Sites.” Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser is one of the oldest still available, having launched in the dark ages of the Internet. Thanks to its inclusion on nearly all Windows computers sold, it is also still the most popular browser by a wide margin. Market share tracker Net Applications shows that IE’s browser market share sat at 56.77% in February. The next closest browser, Mozilla’s Firefox, owned 21.74% of the market. Hit the break for the full press release and download IE9 via the read link.

Microsoft Announces Global Availability of Internet Explorer 9

AUSTIN, Tex. — March 14, 2011 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the launch of the latest version of the world’s most-used browser with the release of Windows Internet Explorer 9 in 39 languages at an event at the SXSW Interactive conference. Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft’s most-downloaded browser beta of all time, with more than 40 million downloads, and it has already has gained more than 2 percent usage on Windows 7. Already more than 250 top sites from around the globe are taking advantage of the capabilities in Internet Explorer 9 to deliver differentiated experiences to their customers, with many featured on http://www.BeautyoftheWeb.com. Together, these partners reach more than 1 billion active Internet users on the Web.

“The best experience of the Web is on Windows with Internet Explorer 9,” said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president, Windows Internet Explorer, at Microsoft. “Today, the Web can unlock the power and performance of the best PC hardware through Windows and Internet Explorer 9. Websites also can act more like applications within Windows 7, with features such as Pinned Sites. In less than a year, Internet Explorer 9 went from early preview to final release with the help of hardware partners and the Web community.”

Top Sites and Designers Take Advantage of Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 9 is designed to bring sites front and center through Windows 7, enabling a more immersive, more beautiful Web experience. Features such as Pinned Sites and Jump List enable people to put their websites directly on the Windows 7 Taskbar, as though they were native applications, and then to quickly and easily perform tasks related to those websites, such as check their inboxes, change the music station, accept friend invitations or see breaking news.

In addition to 250 top sites, more than 1,000 other sites and designers are taking advantage of these new features with Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7. These sites include not only the largest sites on the Web, such as Facebook and Amazon, but also leading experiences from across the Web and the world.

• In social and information networking, Internet Explorer 9 partners include category leaders such as Facebook, Twitter and WordPress — the No. 1 global blogging platform — in addition to leading professional networks in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Korea and Latin America.
• In e-commerce, partners include not only the leading worldwide shopping site, Amazon, and the No. 1 worldwide auction site, eBay, but also the leading site in the emergent “daily deals” space, Groupon.
• Video and streaming partners include three of the top five video-on-demand sites in the U.S. — Hulu, Break.com and Dailymotion — and leading Internet radio sites Slacker, Pandora internet radio and Jango. In addition, partners include top global broadcasters CBC and CTV in Canada, Wat.tv in France, and CNN in the U.S.
• News website partners in the U.S. include the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Huffington Post, as well as dozens of leading news sites globally across all major geographies.

“What people care about on the Web is their sites, not their browser. That’s why Internet Explorer 9 is about making those sites shine. The browser is the theater, and the sites people visit are the play, and that is what Internet Explorer 9 makes better — your favorite sites,” said Ryan Gavin, senior director, Windows Internet Explorer, at Microsoft.

eBay is the world’s largest online marketplace and a leader in mobile commerce. With pinning and Jump List features in Internet Explorer 9, everyone’s favorite eBay experiences are just a click away. “eBay’s integration with Internet Explorer 9 is like having a storefront on your desktop,” said Robert Chatwani, senior director, eBay Internet marketing. “We’re pleased that new functionality within Internet Explorer 9 allows us to innovate and bring new experiences to our customers, making shopping and selling on eBay more engaging than ever.”

Pandora Internet radio is announcing a new dynamic Jump List for Internet Explorer 9. Tom Conrad, chief technical officer and executive vice president of product for Pandora, said, “This new feature allows our listeners to have immediate access to their personalized Pandora stations right from the taskbar with Internet Explorer 9, which will make for an easy-access listener experience.”

Partners such as Gilt Groupe are already seeing early results indicating that Internet Explorer 9 customers who pin the Gilt homepage to their taskbar show a higher purchase rate than those on other browsers. “While results are early, customers using Internet Explorer 9 appear to purchase more per order when compared to earlier versions of Internet Explorer and other browsers. Given that our business model is providing dynamic new shopping experiences online every day, the value of Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7 is potentially very exciting to us and our customers,” said Chris Maliwat, vice president of product management, Gilt Groupe.

Many partners are announcing special offers for Internet Explorer 9 customers that will be available in the coming weeks, including the following:

• Slacker. A free monthlong subscription for customers who pin the Slacker site to their taskbars
• Groupon. $5 in Groupon Bucks when making a first purchase from the Internet Explorer 9 Jump List
• Hulu. A free month of the Hulu Plus subscription for users who pin Hulu
• eBay. Offering coupons or eBay Bucks for bids or purchases made using the Internet Explorer 9 pinning and Jump List features
• Gilt. A series of product bundles for customers who make purchases of specified amounts via the Jump List

Fast Is Now Beautiful: Internet Explorer 9 With Hardware Acceleration

The new version of Internet Explorer takes advantage of the power of modern Windows PC hardware to improve all-around Web browsing performance. It is the only browser with hardware-accelerated HTML5 spanning all graphics, text, audio and video. Internet Explorer 9 harnesses the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), unlocking 90 percent of the PC’s power that went previously untapped by Web browsers.

Developers can now build faster, more immersive websites that feel like native applications using HTML5, as well as runtimes such as Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, both of which will take advantage of the hardware acceleration in Internet Explorer 9 in their next versions.

“Internet Explorer 9 has moved the bar in hardware acceleration, enabling Flash Player to tap into the GPU and creating a win-win situation for our mutual customers who want fast, rich content experiences,” said Paul Betlem, senior director, Flash Player Engineering at Adobe. “With Internet Explorer 9 and Flash Player taking advantage of the GPU, we continue the collaboration with Microsoft to further optimize performance. Both companies are also working closely to advance and streamline controls for managing Flash Player privacy and security settings in Internet Explorer 9.”

“The next-generation Web is here today with Internet Explorer 9, accelerated by AMD’s incredible computing platforms — our award-winning AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units with DirectX11-capable graphics and AMD Radeon graphics cards,” said John Taylor, director of Client Product and Software Marketing, AMD. “The next generation is defined by immersive gaming, rich video and fast, compelling, application-like experiences, validating the fact that GPU compute power and the ability to remove barriers between the CPU and GPU are highly relevant to the day-to-day computing performance that consumers expect and demand.”

“Thanks to how Internet Explorer 9 taps into the power of the GPU, the Web is now more visual, more immersive and more powerful with NVIDIA GeForce. We are incredibly excited that consumers can now experience their favorite sites re-imagined and accelerated. It’s a whole new Web,” said Drew Henry, general manager, GeForce Business Unit, NVIDIA.

Improving Privacy and Security Online

Because the Web is increasingly less secure and private, Internet Explorer 9 is designed to be a trusted browser because it contains a robust set of built-in security, privacy and reliability technologies that keep customers safer online.

In December, Microsoft introduced Tracking Protection in Internet Explorer 9, which puts people in control of what data they are sharing as they move around the Web, by enabling consumers to indicate what websites they’d prefer not to exchange information with. Consumers do this by adding Tracking Protection Lists to Internet Explorer 9, and partners such as PrivacyChoice, TRUSTe, Abine and Adblock Plus have already published these lists.

Malware is now the No. 1 risk to people’s security online, and Internet Explorer 9 provides the first Download Manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection. The browser also introduces SmartScreen download reputation, a groundbreaking browser feature that uses reputation data to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files and show more severe warnings when the download has a higher risk of being malicious. Studies show that Internet Explorer 9 blocks 99 percent of socially engineered malware attacks, five times more than Firefox and 33 times more than Google Chrome.

Raise Expectations for a Better Web

Partners from around the world are re-imagining their websites using the capabilities of Windows and Internet Explorer 9, creating new experiences that make the Web feel as native as PC applications. The result is a more beautiful Web experience.

“I love the Web for the kinds of joyous experiences it can create!” said Ze Frank, who is launching new features within the social gaming site, Star.Me, in coordination with the Austin event. “HTML5 is a huge step forward for the browser because it brings the Web back to a unified platform for creation. By integrating HTML5 into Internet Explorer 9 and hardware accelerating the browser, Microsoft has signaled its commitment to pushing the Web forward, and that is certainly worth celebrating.”

“HP and Microsoft have a long history of bringing meaningful innovations to our customers. Today, we celebrate with Microsoft the launch of Internet Explorer 9, a new milestone in enabling faster and more visually compelling Web experiences,” said Tony Prophet, senior vice president of operations, Personal Systems Group, HP. “Internet Explorer 9 is really an outstanding browser, and we’re pleased to make it available on most of our consumer PCs.”

“At Dell, we are focused on driving cutting-edge innovation in our consumer devices, and Internet Explorer 9 is the first browser to offer a richer, more immersive Web experience on our hardware,” said Michael Tatelman, vice president and general manager of North American Consumer sales for Dell. “We know customers will see — and experience — the difference, and we’re delighted to be working with Microsoft designers and developers around the world who are building this new, more beautiful Web.”

Read

Safari just got served. At this year’s Pwn2Own conference, security firms and enthusiasts are doing their very best to discover and deploy exploits to some of the world’s most popular browsers. Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, they’re all on the menu for conference attendees and some have definitely faired better than others. Google issued a challenge, promising $20,000 to any person or team that could crack Chrome on the conferences opening day, but the two teams scheduled to take a swing backed down. Firefox is, for the time being, still standing, and, per usual, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was taken down without much fuss. But which browser faired the worst? That would be Apple’s Safari. A French security research firm named Vulpen managed to break into Safari running on a MacBook Air in a cool five seconds. The company noted that the Safari update issued by Apple yesterday — version 5.0.4 — fixes some of the vulnerabilities, but not all. The takedown of Safari 5.0.3 used exploits that are still available in the updated code base. Go ahead Apple detractors, have a little fun in the comments section.

Read

Last month, we reported on the demise of cross-browser, bookmark-syncing service Xmarks. This month, we are happy to inform you that is looks like Xmarks will live on. According to a recent blog post by the company, an outpouring of support from users has drastically changed the company’s plans. As Xmarks explains:

The past ten days have been an amazing lesson in the power of community. Not in the “web 2.0 social graph” sense – I’m talking about old school community with users speaking up, speaking out and banding together. Thank you Xmarks users. You told the world it was simply unacceptable for our service to shut down and it worked. Thanks to your passion, Xmarks now has multiple offers from companies ready and willing to take over the service and keep making browser sync better and better!

The company does note that no deal has been finalized, but they are confident with multiple offers on the table Xmarks will be able to stay open for business. At time of publishing, over 35,000 users had pledged to pay between $10 and $20 per year for the service. Hit the read link to read the full post.

Read

Having long reigned as the king of the browser world, Internet Explorer continued its downward slide in April as its market share fell to a ten-year low. Market share for the Windows-based browser dropped 0.7 percent in April. to 59.95%. Despite its unhealthy losses, Internet Explorer still remains the dominant browser with double the market share of its closes competitor, Firerfox, which made a modest gain of 0.07% to finish the month at 24.59%. While IE stumbled, Chrome was on the upswing, grabbing 0.6 more percentage points to capture an overall market share of 6.73%. Apple’s Safari made a 0.07% gain at the expense of Opera which lost 0.07%. Next month’s figures should prove to be interesting as they may reveal whether the precipitous drop is the result of the EU’s mandatory browser ballot, now in full swing, or merely a bad month for Microsoft.

[via Ars Technica]

Read

MIX10 is going strong and this year, the Microsoft conference has been filled with big announcements. Yesterday, we learned about Windows Phone 7 Series development and today, we get a glimpse of what is coming in Internet Explorer 9. The latest web browser from Microsoft stays competitive by supporting several HTML 5 specifications including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and both embedded H.264/MPEG4 video and MP3/AAC audio. Microsoft’s latest web browser also includes a new and improved JavaScript engine that combined with its GPU-accelerated graphics promises to deliver a rich browsing experience. You can test drive the latest browser via an online demo over at Microsoft’s new IE9 website or, if you enjoy living life on the edge of a system collapse, you can download and install the Internet Explorer 9 platform preview.

Read

Browser market share data for January 2010 has hit the streets, and it looks like Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari have gained a little — and we do mean a little — ground. Chrome posted a 5.2% hold of market share in January, up from 4.6% in December of 2009. Apple’s Safari came in with a 4.51% share, up from 4.46% the previous month. Firefox and Internet Explorer both lost a tiny bit of ground in January; IE 62.2% which is down from 62.69%, Firefox 24.41% down from 24.62%. Opera was lumped into “other” on our chart, but registered 2.38% of the browser pie. Per usual, IE and FF still dominate the browser landscape with over 86% of market share. Anyone out there switch browsers recently? If so, which browser did you move to?

[Via ZDNet]

Read

You either love it or hate it, and ever since Chrome and Safari upped their games, we’ve been getting a little burned out by Firefox. Hopefully that will all change now with version 3.6 — new and improved (fingers crossed) and beta label gone. It’s now more customizable with additional add-ons and extensions, and it also features something new called “Personas,” which allows you to change the look at theme of your browser if you feel so inclined. Firefox 3.6 also has improved Javascript support as well as better support for HTML5 video, perfect for YouTube addicts excited about the recent introduction of HTML5 vids. If you haven’t abandoned Firefox for Safari, Chrome or IE8, you can download Firefox 3.6 starting today.

Read

Google’s Chrome browser has only been on the market for 16 months, but it has already taken a good share of the market and beat out Safari for the number three spot. Safari, for the first time ever, is now ranked fourth. By the end of December, Chrome was up at 4.63% market share whereas Safari fell to about 4.46%. Of course, the big boost likely came from the fact that Chrome Beta became officially available for Mac and Linux. Top dogs are still Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, with IE8 still at the top but failing to see any real growth. So tell us, what browser are you currently using and why (speed, extensions, apps, etc)?

Read