Back in 2012, Microsoft became the first major company to enable the Do Not Track (DNT) feature by default in its web browser, but the software giant has now said that it will change the way the feature is implemented in future versions of its browsers. This effectively means that the company’s upcoming Project Spartan browser won’t have it enabled by default.

As per the Redmond, Washington-based company, the decision was taken to comply with the latest industry standard, which says that a tracking preference expression is only transmitted when it reflects a deliberate choice by the user. Read more »

The UK Court of Appeal has denied search giant Google’s request to block lawsuits from Apple Safari users in Britain over alleged privacy violations.

“These claims raise serious issues which merit a trial.” the court said. “They concern what is alleged to have been the secret and blanket tracking and collation of information, often of an extremely private nature… about and associated with the claimants’ internet use, and the subsequent use of that information for about nine months. The case relates to the anxiety and distress this intrusion upon autonomy has caused.” Read more »

Google revealed on its developer forum that the company intends to switch to Pointer Events API from the current Touch Events across the board on all versions of Chrome. This has the benefit of increasing compatibility with multiple input devices and reduce the scrolling lag on Android.

The Pointer Events specification was first introduced by Microsoft back in 2012 for Internet Explorer and was quickly adopted by W3C as a web standard due to its superiority over the Touch Events specification. Pointer Events allows the use of multiple input tools other than a mouse, such as a stylus or a finger, common on modern devices. Read more »

The name “Heartbleed” will ring a bell to almost anyone. It was center stage in a quite significant security crisys in 2014. In its essence, it was a fault that plagued the widely-used TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol, used to protect HTTP connections. That problem was quickly dealt away with by an emergency patch to the OpennSSL cryptography library which contained the vulnerability.

News has come today that researchers have found another vulnerability in the same package, which could, once again, expose a lot of critical and personal data to malicious attacks. Just like Heartbleed, the new exploit, dubbed “FREAK attack” targets the SSL/TLS protocol, widely used for securing online connections. This new exploit, however is not solely limited to servers, but could put browsers at risk as well. Read more »

Today at its MWC 2015 press event, Microsoft demonstrated the Project Spartan web browser running on a Lumia 930 and also mentioned that the upcoming Windows 10 Preview build will ship with the latest browser as well.

Project Spartan will replace Internet Explorer as the default web browser in Windows 10 and early benchmarks show it to be really fast. Read more »

Mozilla is rolling out an update for the Android version of Firefox on the Play Store. This update brings with it a new tablet interface and HTTP/2 support.

Firefox now has a revamped tab layout on top that looks just like the tab design on the desktop version of Firefox. There is also now a fullscreen tab panel, which shows a grid of open tabs with thumbnails for a better view of your open sites. Read more »

One of the best features of Safari on desktop or mobile is the Reader mode, that extracts the basic text and the relevant images from a web page and presents it in a more readable manner, free of distractions such as advertisements and odd font choices.

Google has been working on something similar for Chrome. They already added it in Chrome for Android a while back but oddly you have to mess around in chrome:flags to enable it. Now they are bringing it to Chrome for desktop and you can use it with more fiddling around. Read more »

While reporting its Q4 earnings, Twitter revealed that it added 4 million new monthly active users (MAUs) in the quarter, bringing the total number to 288 million, which was clearly short of the 292 million figure expected by analysts. But Twitter is not to blame for that, or so say its executives, who are claiming that the company lost 4 million users due to Apple’s roll-out of iOS 8.

The company says that it lost 3 million of those users after Apple rolled out iOS8, effectively changing the way the Shared Links feature in the Safari web browser works. Read more »

The upcoming Project Spartan web browsed by Microsoft will support extensions a la Google Chrome. The development team behind the successor of Internet Explorer confirmed the news on Twitter.

Extensions will arrive to Project Spartan via a future update. Read more »

A technical preview of Windows 10 was made available for download and now benchmarks of MIcrosoft’s new Internet Explorer Project Spartan web browser are available.

Done by AnandTech, the benchmark results reveal that Project Spartan is noticeably faster than Internet Explorer 11 and in some tests even outruns Chrome and Firefox. Read more »

There have been recent concerns over the security issues in the rather outdated WebView mode in Android Jelly Bean. Due to its outdated nature, it is facing security issues, which would otherwise be a non-issue on newer versions of Android.

Google has responded to these concerns by basically saying they won’t be updating the WebView in Jelly Bean. But while that may not be what people have been expecting, Google does have a reasonable explanation for it. Read more »

Just a day after updating Chrome for iOS, Google has announced the release of Chrome 40 for Android, bringing in an updated page info and content settings UI, as well as several bug fixes and performance improvements.

Although the release doesn’t bring along any groundbreaking feature, there are, however, some useful additions, including a new bookmarks manager, larger address bar with overflow button for devices running Android Lollipop, close all tabs shortcut for tablets, as well as a new zoom and view/copy URL behavior. Read more »

One of the highlights of Microsoft’s Windows 10 event today was Project Spartan, the software giant’s next generation Web browser. This will be built into Windows 10, and according to company execs you can expect to see it both on the desktop version of the OS as well as on mobile devices.

Microsoft hasn’t yet told us if Spartan will replace IE on Windows 10, but past rumors did mention they’d both ship alongside each other, so perhaps that’s what will happen. Read more »

Google will soon be shutting down two useful Chrome features In February. The first is the highly useful Chrome to Mobile extension for Chrome, which allowed you to push any open page in Chrome directly to the Chrome mobile browser. Print to My Phone is part of Google Cloud Print and worked similarly to Chrome to Mobile.

Google mentions on its support page that both the services will be shut down early February 2015 and that users should instead switch over to Chrome Tab Sync. While tab sync works, it’s not instant the way Chrome to Mobile was, where you have to open the mobile browser and wait for it to finish the background sync before your open tabs appear in the browser. Read more »

Firefox Hello is one of Mozilla’s most exciting innovations. It is an implementation of the WebRTC API that allows easy browser-to-browser voice, video and p2p file sharing all without any additional plugins.

While the standard itself is not new and Firefox Hello has been floating around as an addon for the open-source browser, version 35 bundles it straight into the core of the application and makes it easily accessible. Read more »