It’s February already as we look at the January’s browsers marker share numbers. As it turns out, there were few substantial differences for major vendors.

For the first time since eternity, Internet Explorer has actually increased its share from 47.76% to 48.16% (0.4 point jump). Is IE cool again?

Continuing its steady downtrend, Firefox has now less than 20% of the market share as it dropped from 20.09% to 18.97% (1.12 point decrease).

Just as we thought that Google Chrome will continue to grow forever and ever, its market share has deceased for the very first time ever, down from 17.58% to 17.20% (0.38 point decrease). Such change deserves this:

With all the iPhones and iPads sold that include Safari, Apple’s web browser user base grew by 0.6 point, up from 8.67% to 9.27%.

After few shaky months and market share increase last time, Opera’s user base grew by 0.01 point, up from 1.66% to 1.67%.

What about Opera’s mobile web browser? Actually, Opera Mini is doing quite well, this time its share increased by 0.1 point, up from 1.89% to 1.98%.

That is all for today, folks.

While the following build has not yet been officially announced, you can already download it from the official mozilla.org servers.

So what’s new? Not much, really.

As reported earlier, Firefox 10 will now hide the forward button in case it’s grayed out. Excluding few fixes and web standards improvements, release notes look pretty bleak.

Firefox 10 Final Changelog

- The forward button is now hidden until you navigate back
- Most add-ons are now compatible with new versions of Firefox by default
- Anti-Aliasing for WebGL is now implemented
- CSS3 3D-Transforms are now supported
- New bdi element for bi-directional text isolation, along with supporting CSS properties
- Full Screen APIs allow you to build a web application that runs full screen
- Added IndexedDB APIs to more closely match the specification
- Inspect tool with content highlighting, includes new CSS Style Inspector

For a complete list of changes, see the following post.

Download

Firefox 10 Final (Windows)
Firefox 10 Final (Linux)
Firefox 10 Final (Mac OS)

[Thanks to everyone who sent this]

If everything goes according to the plan, Rust, Mozilla’s experimental programming language that has been in development since 2006, could slowly replace C++, which is currently used by the open source organization.

Just like Google’s Go programming language, Rust syntax is similar to that of C and C++ and destined to provide memory safety, greater security and good concurrency support.

Although Mozilla still has a long way to go, if you are curious enough, feel free to download the alpha version of Rust 0.1 compiler, which has been just released.

With Google, Mozilla and Microsoft developing their own programming languages, it looks like the future of web browsers will be very exciting.

Firefox 13 Features

Download Manager

Let’s start with some bad news. Even though the panel based download manager was pretty much confirmed for Firefox 12, it looks like you won’t see it till the Firefox 13 is released.

Update Improvements

There are two update improvements that will take place in the future and those are:

- Updated workflow for users who have incompatible add-ons
The update procedure will differ on user basis depending on the extensions that they have installed. For example: if you have 1 incompatible add-on, Mozilla will not ask you to update Firefox for 7 days, unless developer fixes the issue. After the grace period is over, an update notification will be displayed, informing user about the issues and also offering to either update the Firefox web browser or remind later.

- Silent Update: Background updates
Instead of updating web browser upon the launch, Firefox 13 will do so during the current active session, which means that after the restart, you’ll be set.

As Mozilla explains, such behavior will improve user experience:

Yesterday, Johnny was about to leave home to go to work but he wanted to check his Facebook one last time before heading out the door. He launched Firefox but rather than being taken right to Facebook, he was presented with a 15 second delay, staring at an updater progress dialog. It wasn’t terribly long, but after seeing this same thing happen every six weeks, Johnny decided he hated Firefox and moved to IE.

With the new and improved Firefox, with this feature implemented, Johnny is never frustrated with updates ever again.

And that is all for today. We’ll let you know in case there are any changes or additions.

According to Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox Engineering, the company has been quite busy at brainstorming and implementing new ideas to improve Firefox’s security,

First in the list is the JIT (just in time) compiler hardening, which should protect users against JIT spraying attacks.

“The reality is that the way our JIT engine is built makes it somewhat resilient to JIT Spraying attacks,” Johnathan said. “But there is still work we can do on that class of vulnerability to just get it out of the realm of even the theoretical — and that work is ongoing.”

In addition to that, it looks like Mozilla is looking at the Google’s Chrome sandboxing feature, which significantly browser’s security. However, the mentioned term usage has been somewhat vague and with no mention in implementation date,

“Sandboxing has some real benefits, but it’s not a silver bullet, it is something that our platform team is looking at really closely.”

As far as updates go, Nightingale has stated that Mozilla will be improving the way Firefox handles security updates, which should require little to no interaction from the end user aka Silent Updates, which we detailed sometime last year.

So here you have it folks and in case you are wondering about the release date of Firefox 10, which will not include the mentioned features, it’s January 31st.

[Thanks, Ichan]

[Via: eSecurityPlanet]

According to the open source organization, ESR (Extended Support Release) version of Firefox will continue to receive various security updates but will leave Web or Add-ons platform with no changes whatsoever.

While additional details will be revealed within a week, you can check the ESR wiki page for mailing list subscription.

With the Firefox 10, Opera 12 and Internet Explorer 10 releases just around the corner, guys from TomsHardware have decided to test the latest stable builds of the top 5 web browsers on both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion.

How did your favorite web browser perform? Let’s find out.

Tested versions

Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 9
Google Chrome 16
Opera 11.60
Safari 5.1.2

Startup Time Performance Benchmarks

JavaScript Performance Benchmarks

HTML5 Performance Benchmarks

Harware Acceleration Performance Benchmarks

Conclusion

Even though Firefox did not beat other browsers most of the time, its consistency and strong score average has demonstrated how solid Mozilla’s web browser actually is. Therefore, as concluded by the TomsHardware journalists, the winner this time is Firefox 9, followed by Google Chrome 16 and Opera 11.60.

As far as Mac OS X benchmarks go, Safari still remains the web browser of choice.

[Thanks, Ichan]

Even though there are “unofficial” 64 bit versions of Firefox floating around the Internet, none of them have gained any significant attention from the general user base.

Thanks to Waterfox, a highly optimized version of Firefox specifically designed for the Windows x86-64 users, this 64 bit flavor might gain some momentum.

Why is it so special?

First of all, Waterfox is fast as it has no troubles outperforming the 32 bit version of Firefox and there are no compatibility or update issues WaterFox will update itself when there is a new release of Firefox and best of all, the add-ons you have installed will continue to function properly as it uses the same profile as Firefox 32 bit.

Since all major plug-ins are already available in the 64 bit flavor, there is pretty much no reason not to try it out, unless you are not Windows user that is.

Download WaterFox 9.0

Download Adobe Flash 11 64 Bit
Download Microsoft Silverlight 5 64 Bit
Download Sun Java 64-Bit

Picture source: 10 Artistic Web Browser Photos

[Thanks, Ichan]

Originally submitted back in July of 2011, a bug #670967, which was marked as resolved just a week ago, aims to “fire a memory-pressure event when the amount of available virtual address space or physical memory is low”.

The second one, which has been submitted in April of 2011 and resolved today, aims to compress all the cache items that are compressible, reducing the memory cache usage.

Although the implementations are ready, we are not exactly sure, which Firefox version will receive them.

[Thanks, Shane Bundy]