Initially Mozilla took a firm stance when it came to HTML5′s video tag – only open-source video codecs are welcome, proprietary stuff like h.264 will not be supported. Now however, their position has softened – Firefox will support whatever media codecs the host OS has in addition to Theora (which was there from the start).

The change will first be implemented in their experimental Boot 2 Gecko mobile OS (which we saw in action at the MWC) and later added to the Android version of Firefox. Desktop Firefox might prove a bigger challenge, however. Read more »

Oh, Firefox 10, we hardly knew ye. Also, 9. And 8. And 7, 6, 5 and 4. Thanks to the new rapid release cycle, Mozilla is just flying through the version numbers for Firefox. And so as expected, v11 has just been officially released.

So what’s new in this one? Quite a few things, actually. First of all, Firefox now recognizes Chrome if it is installed on your machine along with Opera and Internet Explorer and will ask you if you want to import bookmarks from it. If Mozilla intends to win back some of its old users from Chrome, this new feature is in the right direction to make the process of jumping over that much easier. Read more »

Google revealed they are busy at work to create a Metro version of their popular desktop browser Chrome for Windows 8. Microsoft’s new OS is a strange beast with two different environments – Windows 7-style desktop and the new Metro interface – which will run separate apps.

While the current browser will work just fine in desktop mode, it won’t be accessible in Metro, which is the preferred UI for tablets. Google is specifically looking to improve touch support for the Chrome on Metro. Read more »

Opera Software just announced the availability of its Opera Mini 6.5 mobile browser on yet another platform. The native version of the popular data-saving browser just hit the BlackBerry App World and, if you happen to have a BlackBerry OS smartphone, you can have it right away.

You need to be running version 4.2.1 or later of the BlackBerry OS, no matter your carrier or country. This means that Opera Mini will be available on every half decent BlackBerry device, but the PlayBook tablet. Read more »

Opera has long held the top spot in mobile browsers and is still highly popular (especially Mini, which is the browser of choice in developing countries). According to StatCounter its reign has come to an end, with the two popular smartphone OSes battling for first spot.

StatCounter has Android’s browser on top, but they treat iPhone and iPod as separate. Add them up and Mobile Safari climbs on top. Read more »

Opera has released a new beta of the world’s most popular mobile browser, called the Opera Mini Next. This will give you a taste of some of the new features added in Opera Mini, which will arrive in the stable version later this year.

The changes you see will differ depending upon whether you have a feature phone or a smartphone. On feature phones, you will see a new homepage, along with your usual speed dial page. This new homepage will give you quick access to all your social networks and other information such as news, weather forecasts, sports, entertainment and more. The speed dial list is also updated and can now contain an infinite number of items. Read more »

Chrome Beta browser for Android has received its first update. The biggest improvement is added support for more regions. The updated list now also includes Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Poland, India, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden and Switzerland. As before, however, the browser is only available on devices running Ice Cream Sandwich, and it’s going to stay that way.

Other changes include the addition of Android Beam support, which means you can now beam URLs to other NFC-enabled Android devices by simply touching them. Lastly, there are some bug fixes and some performance updates. Read more »

Opera Mini is still a wildly popular mobile browser no doubt, but there’s always room for growth. The newest territory that the browser has conquered is a group of Samsung feature phones.

The Samsung Star 3, the Star 3 Duos, the Samsung Champ 2 and the Champ Duos come with Opera Mini out of the box and there will be more to come in 2012. Read more »

The Talk Maemo forum is buzzing with news that the Nokia N9 will be getting Firefox browser and, even better, it will be Flash certified. Apparently, Flash will be enabled only in Firefox, not in the default browser or the new Opera Mobile.

It’s a bit of a weird this situation – the Nokia N900 had full Flash support, while the N9 didn’t. Mozilla’s mobile Firefox browser doesn’t support Flash on its other platforms either. Read more »

Following the launch of Chrome Beta for Android, Google has updated its desktop browser to v17 (17.0.963.46, to be precise). Among the new features over the previous stable version include the ability to prerender pages to speed up your browsing. Now, when you type a URL in the Omnibox, Chrome will automatically start prerendering the website it thinks you are mostly likely to open, which means when you hit Enter, chances are the page will open instantaneously.

Another new feature is the ability to check files to see if they’re malicious. When you download an executable file, such as .exe or .msi, Chrome will try to match the file with its online database to see if it is genuine. Read more »

Google Chrome. Google’s web browser didn’t waste any time in becoming a hit on desktop PCs and in a matter of just a few years placed second in the browser rankings. That’s crazy even for Google, but they pulled it off.

With the release of Google Chrome beta for Android, the search engine giant will attempt to redo the browser’s success but this time on mobile.

But as you know – mobile isn’t the same as desktop. And now we are going to take a deeper look at Google Chrome beta for Android and see if the Chrome team has pushed the right buttons to shoot the browser in the right direction. The path to Android’s new default browser that is. Read more »

Google just unveiled the Android-ready version of its Chrome web browser and made this a huge day for the Chrome users, who have a smartphone of the droid variety. The app is still in beta, but it already looks like one of the best browsers on the platform (and as you know there’s no shortage of quality web browsers on Android).

With great performance and simplified user interface, the Chrome browser for Android [Check our review] still has plenty of eye-candy to offer. It lets you sync just about anything between your desktop browser and your smartphone/tablet – from bookmarks to current browsing session, so you can continue on your smart device exactly where you left off on your computer. Read more »

Eager to get the latest and greatest browser of the Mozilla Foundation? Well you’ve got your chance now as the company has made Firefox 10 available for download.

Bringing a few UI changes and some nice performance tweaks, Firefox 10 is still unavailable for an automatic update, but you can download it manually. Read more »

The hit mobile game Cut the Rope has now landed on your desktop browser. The game developers have partnered with Microsoft to release the game for their Internet Explorer 9 browser. Having said that, the game works just fine on other browsers too.

This version of the game seems to be identical to the one that we saw for Windows 8. It uses a landscape layout unlike the mobile versions. Right now, you only have 25 levels available, with the last seven only available if you pin the game through IE9 to your Windows 7 taskbar. Additional levels are expected to arrive soon. Read more »

There is a good reason why companies like Mozilla can give away their software for free. That’s because they get a lot from search engine providers to include their search engines inside the browser. So far Google has been the default search engine in Firefox and now they have signed another three-year contract with Mozilla to keep their position at the top of the search box.

This time however, they are paying a lot more to Mozilla than they did last time, almost three times as much. Google will be paying around $300 million per year for three years, which is close to a billion dollars. So how did Google suddenly become so generous? The reason is Microsoft. Read more »