Opera, the most neglected browser of the world has finally come up with a breakthrough as it has just released the revised version of Opera 11.60. Codenamed as “Tunny” (which is another name for tuna fish) is said to be the full and final version of 11.60 which has brought about some of the latest features and security and stability related improvements.

Notably, the company had originally decided to bring out its version 12 as its next stable version but it changed its plans and came out with some of the improved features in the interim release itself which brought out this edited release.

Opera 11.60, the revised edition works much faster than its predecessors. It opens and closes at a much faster rate. It is pretty fast on the secure pages and offers wonderful web compatibility, and it utilizes quite a lesser memory compared to its former versions.

Talking about its features, it offers a revamped address bar that has a special Star button which has the ability to add new pages to your bookmarks or Speed Dial instantly and at the same time the email client of the browser comes along with a cleaner and offers a more instantaneous design.

The press release of the Opera’s new 11.60 version claims, “Almost 50% of the world’s population has never tried a new browser — people in your own town, maybe even someone you know. Why not help them discover something better this year? A new browser is a gift that keeps giving all year round.”

Along with the claim, it mentioned a list of several reasons why you should download the browser. The browser seems to have made lots of interesting improvements but in spite of making so many wonderful offers, it has much-much far to go to have a better market share which it has been struggling to have for quite a long time.

According to market researchers, Opera has a 2% market share across the globe right now. At the same time Firefox which had been doing wonderfully well for last three years has finally got a back seat with the success of its contender Google’s Chrome which has grown its market share from mere 4.66% (which it had two years back) to 25.7% today. Firefox now holds 25.23% of the market and Internet Explorer still rules the browser market with more than 40% share.

Firefox has been an amazing internet browser indeed. Way back in 2003, it was Firefox that got the internet users fed up of monotony of Internet Explorer 6 all on its own, when there was no other way out. It then made a great place for itself among the other internet browsers.

However, it was just the last week when it was found to have gone down the ladder and as Google’s browser Chrome has taken a place above it as it has now got about 25% market share compared to mere 3% market share that it had two years back. This latest figure matches with the usage of Firefox across the globe.

Now with this incredible success of Google’s Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox has got the setback of getting their market share reduced. But the worst effected one is Opera as it already had quite a small market share and now its market has shrunk further. And in the meanwhile Apple’s Safari has made a better place for itself.

Talking about the Mozilla and the development plans of Firefox, it seems that it may have to go through a rough path as it mostly depends on the revenues that it gets from the browser’s built in Google Toolbar. Mozilla itself informed that more than 80% of its income for the years 2009 and 2010 came up from the partnership of the company with Google which got it about $100 million for each of the years.

The interesting twist in the scene is that with Chrome’s success, Google may cut down its expenditure on its Firefox-Google deal which recently got over this last November itself and now it is up for a renewal. Google may not look forward to a deal with it competitor and may instead go for the leverage of its own browser.

But then there is one more twist in the scene that even Microsoft has come up to show itself in the scene. As by the end of October itself it started offering “Firefox with Bing” and in fact Mozilla has become its new favorite even when it is a competitor of its Internet Explorer.

Taking a look at the mobile browsing world, Firefox just couldn’t make its presence felt in the smart phone world which is the pulse of the time and where all its competitors have already made their dominion if not lot much, still quite a bit. Safari has its place on iOS, Chrome on Android, and Opera Mini can also be found on various different platforms with some success. And now Microsoft is also busy making its IE competitive with placing it as a browser choice for Windows Phone users and eyeing upon having it presence on tablets with the arrival of Windows 8.

With all these circumstance around, will Firefox be dead in the coming future? Firefox has surely fared bad in the mobile front and it didn’t do anything to stay above Chrome in the desktop browser battle.

Now how will it be faring in future depends on funding. Will Google be funding it? That’s a question which hasn’t yet got any answer. And if Google resolves not to turn up, will Microsoft really come to help out Mozilla with funding? Researchers consider Facebook and Amazon as two other possible parties that may come up in funding Firefox, but this only the time will clear out, whether or not the things suspected by the researchers will really happen. However for now, Firefox continues to hold 25% market share.

Chrome seems to be overpowering Firefox this is what the latest reports on Global Web Browser Usage from StatCounter and Net Applications are saying. If the reports are to be believed, especially the one from StatCounter, Google Chrome has already over taken the usage share of Firefox. And Net Application places Firefox by 4% points, whichever reports you choose to follow or believe; Chrome seems to be taking the second spot right behind IE soon.

Chrome has taken 25.7% of the global market compared to 25.23% of Firefox according to StatCounter report. This is a direct rise of 4.66% from the share it had two years back. Even though the difference is marginal, yet there’s a difference which one can notice. At the same time, the report from Net Applications suggested a gain of 0.7% to 18.2% in November by Chrome and a drop of 0.4% to 22.1% by Firefox during the same time. If this estimation is to be believed, there are enough chances of Chrome’s overpowering Firefox by March 2012.

StatCouter Global Brower Usage report has found that the Internet Explorer from Microsoft still has a very powerful hold in the market globally which is something between 40.63% and 52.63%. Opera tried pretty hard to come up as an alternate browser for the Firefox and Chrome users but unfortunately it couldn’t exceed its 2% global market share.  Safari has made its place with 5 to 6% market share when you consider the desktop browser usage but it largely dominates the mobile browser space with 55% share.

Again while considering the mobile browser space, Opera Mini was left behind by Android browser this October by putting to the second place slot but interestingly, in November Opera Mini made better place again. So now the browser space shared by them respectively is 20.1% and 16%.

Net Applications Global Mobile Browser Usage has found that mobile browsers still occupy a smaller part of the market compared to the desktop browsers. Nevertheless, it is notable that with the increase in the usage of smart phones and tablets, mobile browsing is expected to rise soon. Net Applications found that browsing through the personal computer in the month of November took as high as 92% where as it is only 6.7% through the mobile devices.

Mozilla Firefox won’t be stopping its mercurial speed of releasing the new versions as it has just come up with its fourth extensive release after its debutant appearance of Firefox 4.0 last March. Firefox will be officially available form today onwards, however Mozilla silently got it available a few days before the actual release in preview mode.

Last Saturday itself, Mozilla made Firefox 8 available to its FTP servers for PC, Mac and Linux users. This latest version includes several interesting features and improvements but what attracts the user’s attention the most is the Twitter search integration. Users will get a special drop down search box built right into the browser which makes searching Twitter quick and easy. Again, there will be another special possibility that is to simply highlight the text on the screen and right click and then just select ‘search Twitter’.

There is again an incredible feature that makes all the third party add-ons disabled by default for making your browser safer and more secured. You can then go for re-enabling the add-ons manually that you want to use.

Tabs are also loaded in a different way, so you get to choose how your tabs are going to load.    So if you want to reopen only one tab right from a previous session, it is as much possible as opening all of them. You even get specific performance optimizations, and you can even think of handling the tabs while you move the pages inside or outside your active window.

After Google Chrome’s resolution of launching the updated version at a super fast rate, Firefox has also resolved to bring out the updates at a quicker rate. So, it was just one and a half months back when it came up with Firefox 7 and now we have the Firefox 8.

Some of the other exciting features include better tab animations while you move, reorder, or simply detach the tabs; enhanced performance and the handling of the memory while you use audio and video aspects; CORS supporting the cross-domain textures in WebGL;  enhanced CSS hyphen supporting many languages; improvement in the WebSocket support; additional HTML5 context menu support; etc.

Along with the additional features mentioned above, you’ll also find that lot many stability issues have been solved.

This new version promises better performance and more security to the users. Hope that Firefox will soon be out with another update with still more improvements made till then enjoy Firefox 8, the latest version from Mozilla!

Mozilla is doing excellently well in taking up new ventures from time to time, as its regular updates are hitting the browser pretty frequently, here Mozilla is looking forward to release a brand new Firefox browser for Android 3.0 tablets pretty soon.

Ian Barlow, the user experience designer of Mozilla mobile device made aware of this by posting some mock-ups of the browser on his personal blog.

It’s been just a little while that Mozilla brought out Firefox for Android smart phones. It first came out in its beta version but then was released in its full version. However, the version for Android tablets doesn’t offer as rich an experience as desktop version. This is because in order to create a better phone version, many of the UI elements had to be kept off by Mozilla so that the space on small screens can be made free. Notably, many of the popular features of the desktop variant of the browser are found on the larger tablets as they don’t have any space restrictions like the smaller tablets and mobiles.

Barlow has announced that the Firefox for tablets is going to have many new enhancements made compared to its predecessors so that it can utilize the benefits of the larger screen size of the tablet.

One of the UI that will be coming back will be the tabs, which are generally kept hidden in the smart phone browser for the space restriction. Usually, the tabs on the tablets work in two ways. They are either in the landscape mode; in this case the tabs are visible on the screen’s left side as small thumbnails of each of the open page; or in the portrait mode, in which the tabs are placed in the drop-down style menu groups that increases the usability.

The minimalist design of Honeycomb will be utilized by the tablet version of the Firefox but still some of the most popular elements will be included by Mozilla such as its distinctive tab shape, Awesomebar URL entry field, and oversized back button.

But it is hardly known how long one will have to wait for it as the release date has not yet been announced.

Mozilla Firefox 7 is now obtainable in its Beta version for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Right in the beginning of this week, it brought out its version 6 (which itself was a release much before the proposed date) and now the beta version of the next version is also available within no time. It is believed that this version will sort out the frequent issues related to memory leakage that has troubled the software for really long time.

This new version of Firefox is going to introduce MemShrink, a special enterprise that started up this June with an aim to stamp out the problem of browser memory inconsistencies. Firefox will be using lesser memory than its last three versions. It will be as less as between 20% to 50%, Nicholas Nethercote, Mozilla developer claimed.

Firefox 7 is not only introducing MemShrink, it is also featuring advanced JavaScript garbage collection. It will take up substantially less memory and when the users will use the multiple tabs it will free up some more memory. It will also be using up Azure Direct2D for Canvas which helps in increasing the canvas-based animations in HTML5.

Users will also get to use the tools built into this upcoming version of the browser which will let them measure the load times. Boomarks and passwords synchronization are claimed to be faster as well.

Mozilla is bringing out the latest versions of its browsers at a rapid fire speed as it came up with Firefox 5 just in June and brought out the version 6 last Monday though it was scheduled to be released sometimes later and now it has got the beta version of Firefox 7 which will soon be out in its full-fledged version.

Mozilla’s browser has been under severe criticism as it is believed to require large amount of RAM. Again, it is said that it doesn’t free up the memory even after the windows or tabs are closed. Mozilla developer Nethercote also agrees with these shortcomings. However, he believes that the trouble came into being only after the release of Firefox 4 as this version introduced all its new features that include image decoding, fierce JavaScript garbage collection, etc.

The full and final version 7 of Firefox will be out by the end of next month, it is speculated to be sometimes by September 27.

Mozilla is soon to bring out its own special web based operating system that will run on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

The operating system that it is currently working on will be called Boot to Gecko as it will directly boot into Gecko, the web engine that works behind several projects from Mozilla that also includes its Mozilla Firefox web browser.

The Gecko engine that it will be using will be made completely open source and for its future development, the updating task will be done in the real time. Andreas Gal, a Mozilla engineer has indeed promised to keep the further developmental task to be in the real time. He calls it to be a “standalone operating system for the open web”.

It seems as if the system will be having a lot in common with Chrome OS from Google, which again is a browser based system and runs the web apps.

Though this OS from Mozilla is based on Android kernel, it won’t be following Google’s system. Mike Shaver, who happen to be a noted technical strategy vice president confirmed this by saying that they intend to use as less of Android as is possible. As a matter of fact, they are going to use only the kernel and the drivers and not other things like graphics APIs.

Opening the mobile OS space is the main aim behind this project. Gal further said that their intension behind this project is to bring uniformity in the application development field and to systematize the overall user experience. Users feel fragmentation throughout while using different devices. With the successful release of Boot to Gecko, users will get seamless experience while working on their laptop, mobile phone, tablet, or any other device.

IE9, Firefox4, and Chrome 11 are all available in the market and the second browser war is catching the fire. Here are the market share figures of the major web-browsers for last month.

Between the months of April and May, Internet Explorer observed a drop of 0.84% points which is slightly more than what it observed the previous month. However, Firefox got to see a growth of 0.08% points, which happens to be less than the loss that it had seen the last month. Ad interim, Chrome has made a gain of 0.58% points, which made it the biggest winner for the last month. At the same time, Safari went up with 0.13% points and Opera went down by 0.11% points.

IE has indeed hit a new low once again by being at 54.27 percent. The most advanced and distinguished browser that Microsoft has brought out happens to be IE9 but it captured no more than 4.19 percent of the market last month which made it up by 1.78% points. IE8 went down by 1.78% points; interestingly, it still holds the title of the world’s most popular internet browser. IE7 lost 0.31% points and IE 6 went down 0.49 % points. It looks apparent that it will fall further and will go down the10% mark in the next month.

Firefox, on the other hand is at 21.71%, even then it hasn’t reached the peak that it had touched the last year, i.e. 24.72%. It seems that Mozilla has not yet got much help from its Firefox 4 in regaining an all encompassing market share, even though Firefox 4 captured the market by an exulting 10.08% last month making it up by 4.65% points. In the meanwhile, Firefox 3.6 and 3.5 have lost 4.88 and 0.20 percent points respectively.

Chrome has made a new record at 12.52% by being a browser which is known to be used by 1 in 8 of all the internet users. The main reason behind the popularity it has gained is its built-in updating system. Chrome 11 has captured 9.73% and gone up by 9.23% points. However, Chrome 10 and 9 have fallen 8.71 and 0.06 percent points respectively.

With all these data, Firefox stands First, IE stands Second, Chrome is at Third, Safari is at Fourth, and Opera occupies Fifth position in the current browser war.

Mozilla has announced the dates and the details of its new development model. The current development plan suggests that Firefox 5 will be out on June 21, 2011 and it will then be releasing Firefox 6 on August 18, 2011. The company might change these days but so far it’s confident enough in claiming that the release will be done by these dates.

All the changes that are made to the Firefox source code are first combined in the Mercurial repository of the Mozilla central. The changes that have to be made are imported from Mozilla central to any of its three channels. This process takes place as per the scheduled intervals which are generally of 6 weeks. In case an entirely new project has to be started or larger features are to be added, they are developed in the other repositories at the initial level and then are tracked by Mozilla central.

It has been scheduled that there will be Firefox (experimental), Firefox (beta) and Firefox (release) channels apart from Mozilla central which is right now considered as nightly. And all these channels will be backed by their own Mercurial repository. However, these names are just the placeholders and there are chances that Mozilla changes them.

It has been planned that many new features will be added to the Firefox experimental channel at regular intervals but if it is found that the features need some more work, they will be disabled. The features that the company slates for the next release of Firefox will be added to the beta channel and it is planned that these are going to be quite few in number. As it has always been done, new features won’t be added to the experimental and the beta channels of Firefox. The process involved in developing each of the stages as well as in going through the activity that has to be done for a particular version takes around 6 weeks. But in this case, there will be development overlap, so one can expect the release of a new version in every 6 to 12 weeks. Interestingly Firefox 5 will be different from its future releases as it doesn’t have any development overlap with Firefox 4.

Mozilla made an official announcement last month that all its new versions Firefox 4 through Firefox 7 will all be brought out in 2011 which appears quite impossible as Firefox 4 had faced delays which the company had originally planned to release by the end of last year. But one can’t say anything with that surety until it actually happens; let’s hope that the company manages with its plans.