Items tagged with web-browser
Web browsers are a window into the internet, and they need to blend in and be easy to use for the best experience. Mozilla Firefox took this to heart as overnight, Firefox 89 rolled out, bringing a fresh redesign and more privacy protections for all users. The major thing that both new and old Firefox users will notice in Firefox 89 is the clean-looking redesign across all versions. It brings new iconography, typography, and more to look quite distinct from prior versions. M.J. Kelly of Firefox explained that this new update is easier on the eyes and more streamlined than ever before. The toolbar and other menus within Firefox have also been decluttered and consolidated to make it easier to “get...
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Google is all about adding tools to Chrome to prevent annoying things from happening while you surf the web. Chrome already has a bunch of tools to help protect you when you are surfing the web, like telling you when traffic is HTTPS secure, blocking pop-ups, and stopping annoying autoplay videos. In coming versions of Chrome, Google will build in more protections to take the annoyance out of web surfing.Google says that one of the most common bits of feedback it receives are reports of websites redirecting unexpectedly to other places. Google says that it has found that these redirects often come from third-party content embedded in the offending web pages and isn’t an action that the website...
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To nobody's real surprise, the jailbreak community upon learning that the Apple Watch was freewheelin' it on wrists everywhere without a browser onboard set out to fill that gap. And in somewhat short order the celebrated Comex — the developer behind JailBreakMe, and a former Apple intern — has weighed in first, posting a video to Twitter over the weekend that features an Apple Watch running a Google web page via a web browser. Comex's video makes a good case for why Apple hasn't (yet) included a version of its Safari browser in Watch OS, illustrating the need to scroll over and across vast screen real estate — relatively speaking, of course...
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The latest edition of the Opera browser, Opera 21, is now available for Windows and Mac. Chief among the many changes, tweaks, and updates is hardware acceleration via Aura technology. Aura “allows us to hardware-accelerate the entire browser, including the user interface,” wrote the Opera Desktop team in a blog post. Aura acceleration promises smoother and more responsive animations. The Opera folks spent a great deal of effort simply making Aura work correctly with the browser, and as such they say they’ve just scratched the surface of what the technology can do. Interestingly, they didn’t use Aura on the Mac version of Opera 21, instead leveraging Apple Core Animation...
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You know those blank tiles on your Firefox homepage when you first start using the web browser? Mozilla is rolling out a program to make it so those tiles aren’t blank anymore; instead, they’ll be filled with ads. The company announced the change in a blog post using language that obfuscates at first blush what’s going on. “Mozilla is kicking off an exploration to transform the user’s content experience through two initial programs...The newest program is one we’re calling Directory Tiles, which is designed to improve the first-time-with-Firefox experience.” Although it’s true that Directory Tiles will technically transform the user experience,...
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With the latest update to Google’s Chrome browser, the company has added a couple of rather choice features, including better security and tweaks that users will find quite handy. Arguably the most important addition pertains to the supervised users feature that’s designed to allow parents to help their kids learn how to use the Internet safely. Once you create a supervised user, you can review and manage browser history, manage permissions for websites, and more. For any user, the new tab notifications will be a boon to daily use; with a glance, you can now see which tabs are playing audio, using your webcam, or casting to your TV. We’ve all had the experience of opening a...
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The adorably awesome $35 Raspberry Pi has proven to be a fun, flexible, and relatively powerful tool for hackers, tinkerers, and makers, but the platform has been lacking a modern web browser. That’s changing, as the Raspberry Pi team, in collaboration with Collabora, have developed an “up-to-date”, HTML5-capable web browser. The idea is that it’s a port of Web (the web browser formerly known as Epiphany), and it will offer multi-tab features, ARMv6-optimized 2D rendering, and accelerated image and HTML5 video decoding. Collectively, the teams have already finished the porting process and are hard at work on the memory footprint optimizations, which will enable the use...
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The Internet isn’t the safest place in the world. In addition to the many wonders it holds, it’s also populated by ne’er-do-wells that want nothing more than to scam, steal, or simply wreak havoc. The Google Chrome browser promises more safeguards against some of the hazards of web browsing by detecting and automatically blocking malware downloads. If the browser sniffs out malware that’s flagrant or being hidden within another download, it will pop up this message to warn you about it: You can simply click “Dismiss”, because the browser isn’t asking for permission--it’s actively blocking malware and simply letting you know about it. The new feature...
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It’s not hard to find old TV shows, movies, and other media classics these days, but software of times past isn’t always as easy to track down, and even if you do find it collecting dust in a closet or drawer somewhere, it can be hard or impossible to read the old media or emulate it. Fortunately, the Internet Archive has developed a solution. The site announced the Historical Software Archive, which is a repository of “prominent and historically notable pieces of software” that can actually be run within a web browser. Using JSMESS, a Javascript port of the MESS emulator, anyone using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Internet Explorer can explore a number of older software...
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Orbit Downloader is a nifty tool. It’s a web browser file downloading add-on, and it lets users more easily manage their downloaded files, download embedded videos, speed up downloads, and more. Unfortunately, it’s also apparently now an effective tool for delivering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The ESET security folks discovered an extra component in the Orbit Downloader code (specifically, “orbitdm.exe”) that sends an HTTP GET request to an Orbit server, and the server spits back two URLs. One points to a version of a Win32 PE DLL file that the software downloads without the user knowing, and the other “seems to generate a response via HTTP POST...
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Many long-time Mac users likely both fondly remember the Camino web browser and also have forgotten all about it in recent years, as the Safari browser has primarily taken over on Apple’s Mac OS X systems. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the team behind Camino has looked around at the current browser market and is now gracefully bowing out after about a decade-long run. Camino 2.1 Originally launched as “Chimera”, Camino was a great alternative to Internet Explorer before there was a Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. In fact, according to the blog post announcing the end of Camino, Stuart Morgan noted that some Camino developers have gone on to work on the aforementioned browsers,...
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The Opera browser has been a beloved alternative in the web browser market, although statistically speaking it’s been an also-ran in terms of market share. The company is working to change that with its latest Opera browser release, Opera Next 15. This version of Opera is a major one, as instead of tweaking the existing version the team built it from scratch, this time using the Chromium engine, which is an effort to embrace more web standards and higher performance. Speed Dial In addition to a new look, new features include Speed Dial, which is a shortcut tool that lets users organize their favorites into folders, as well as Discover, which is designed to bring you “a selection of...
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