Web Browser

Nearly all companies with a big Web presence, and search engines in particular, are known for gathering the user's browsing history and other personal information to improve on the services they offer, such as by offering better targeted advertisements. A preliminary report compiled by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) addressing the lack of transparency and user control over how companies gather Internet browsing data from their users, proposes a "Do Not Track" feature for Internet browsers that would allow users to opt out completely and protect their privacy. Read More

Despite many of us willingly letting the online world have regular glimpses into our so-called private lives through social media portals, most would cry foul if such information was collected without our consent or knowledge. Researchers have just completed a study of scripting code contained within the documents used to display web pages in browsers and found evidence of something called history sniffing. This is where website owners gain access to browser history to track your progress around the web. Read More

Last month Seattle programmer Eric Butler exposed the weaknesses of open Wi-Fi networks with his Firesheep add-on for FireFox. The program intercepts browser cookies to identify users and allows anyone running it to log into sites such as Facebook and Twitter as the legitimate user. While Butler wanted to encourage the use of HTTPS to combat such vulnerabilities, users can now combat Firesheep with another Firefox add-on – BlackSheep. Read More

Looks like the legions of iPhone users are pretty keen to get Flash video on their device with news that Skyfire 2.0 mobile web browser has effectively “sold out.” Within five hours of being released on iTunes, the Skyfire Flash video solution shot to the head of the top grossing app list and third highest paid app overall and overloaded the Skyfire servers, leaving potential buyers staring at the “Please Upgrade Flash” message while the folks at Skyfire Labs scramble to increase capacity. Read More

The next revision to the web document creation language has generated a lot of excitement in web circles, the most headline-grabbing change of course being the option for creators to choose how audio and video are delivered to a user's computer. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has just announced the results of a browser test where all of the top players were pitted against each other to see how well they cope with HTML5. And the winner is... Read More

Adobe is not the only company preparing for the heralded death of Flash on the web. Sencha has announced the developer preview of a new CSS3-based animation tool for the creation of rich media animations in HTML5-enabled browsers. The new desktop application is said to allow developers to bring web animations to life without having to mess around with hundreds of lines of complicated code. Read More

At the Toorcon 12 hacker conference in San Diego on Sunday, Seattle programmer Eric Butler introduced his Firesheep add-on for the Firefox Web browser in an effort to bring attention to the weakness of open Wi-Fi networks. In a practice known as HTTP session hijacking (or “sidejacking”) the add-on intercepts browser cookies used by many sites, including Facebook and Twitter, to identify users and allows anyone running the program to log in as the legitimate user and do anything that user can do on a particular website. Read More

In the not-too-distant past most of those who wanted to get online would do so using Internet Explorer. These days though, we are somewhat spoilt by the number of different browsers on offer. But for some that's still not enough - we need to personalize our browser experience. Instead of just skinning a browser to fit in with a particular style or mood, Mozilla Labs is proposing stripping away the user interface (UI) layer altogether and replacing it with a flexible platform where a user can create a new UI using a little web technology savvy. Read More

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have announced the availability of a developer preview of Kamra, a mobile browser based on open web standards. The first augmented reality browser for the KHARMA (KML/HTML Augmented Reality Mobile Architecture) development platform, Kamra offers users multiple simultaneous augmented content overlayed on top of a live video scene. Read More