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.

Slightly more than a year after announcing extensions, Opera’s add-ons directory has just surpassed the 1000 mark and is slowly edging towards the next milestone.

In addition to such announcement, Aleksander Aas, community manager at Opera Software, has unveiled that the new Opera’s API’s and features (as you might expect) are in development as well.

Unfortunately, no further details were revealed

Visit Opera Extensions home page.

As with every minor browser release, Opera 11.61 includes a variety of stability, security and usability fixes, that are always welcomed.

Although it’s been officially announced, it looks like there are some issues with at least one of the mirrors, which does not yet have the latest version uploaded.

Opera 11.61 Changelog

• New web handlers tab in the Site Preferences dialog cut off, dialog not wide enough
• Crash when clicking “Use master password to protect saved passwords” checkbox
• Occasional crash when clicking a link or opening a new tab
• Opera crashes when closing a tab that has the Star Menu opened
• Can’t close Star Menu after opening Folders
• Opera crashes while closing feeds tab while dialog is open
• Opera loses advanced download settings after restart
• Opera Turbo Tooltip repeated multiple times
• Wrong new reload icon
• Zoom factor lost after selecting another message
• Bookmark star icon is not refreshed when the page is removed from the bookmarks
• Drop support for Fallback Background = 0 and Fallback Foreground = 0 in skins, fixes layout in mail window with some 3rd party skins
• Ampersands on main menu in WinXP with Zune Theme
• Titlebar remains when entering fullscreen mode (XP)

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

Download

Opera 11.61

If for one reason or another you would like to go back to the previous page without waiting for it to reload, here is a setting to speed up your browsing experience:

Paste the following code to your address bar
opera:config#History%20Navigation%20Mode
Set “History Navigation Mode” to 3
Done.

That was easy, wasn’t?

[Via: reddit]

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]

Silk, the Amazon Kindle Fire web browser, has been successfully ported by one of the XDA developer’s nicknamed TyHi and can now work fine across a variety of different Android devices.

As Electronista points out, the Silk web browser has gained attention from the various groups that are interested in Opera’s Turbo like cloud technology.

Although TyHI has not yet published a list of compatible devices, check the XDA forums for download and installation details.

[Picture Source: MSNBC]

It’s that time of the month again when we look at the market share results for the last month. How your favorite browser did finish the 2011 race? Let’s find out.

Already broken through the 50% barrier, Internet Explorer share continues the downtrend, this time it has decreased by 1.19 point, from 48.95% to 47.76%.

It looks like more releases did not really help Mozilla as Firefox is going in the same direction as IE, down from 20.58% to 20.09% (0.49 point decrease).

With every month passing by, Google Chrome is gearing towards the #2 spot in the market and has now increased its share by 0.68 point, up from 16.90% to 17.58%.

Thanks to Apple device sales, the happy days continue for the Safari web browser as its share has grown from 8.35% to 8.67% (0.32 point increase).

Despite overall downtrend, Opera has managed to rebound some of its losses and is now up by 0.11 point, all the way from 1.55% to 1.66%.

Opera Mini on the other hand has been doing well for quite some time and saw a generous 0.36 point increase, up from 1.53% to 1.89%.

That’s all for now, folks. What are your predictions for 2012?

Testing notes: both builds have identical build numbers and were tested with default installation settings.

What started as optimistic first run with SunsSpider has left us confused. As in all but one benchmark, the 64 bit version of Opera 12 web browser scored less than its 32 bit sister.

We are not exactly sure why this has turned out the way it did, considering that every other web browser offered significant improvements when running a 64 bit flavor.

Christmas are coming early for Opera fans as for the first time ever, there is a 64 bit version of Opera 12 web browser available for download.

Now, before you start screaming like a little girl, keep in mind that this is a very early build, which can be downloaded from Opera Labs only, in both 32 and 64 bit flavors.

What else is new? Out-of-process plug-ins for Windows and Mac (apparently, it’s already available in Linux builds), a long awaited and much needed feature for any web browser.

By running plugins as a separate process, it will enhance Opera’s security and stability.

So here you have it folks. Be sure to check the following post for more details.

Download Opera 12 64 Bit (x86-64) – Windows
Download Opera 12 64 Bit (x86-64) – Mac

[Thanks, Toxigen]