Google Chrome and Apple Safari are seeing an increase in users. That’s good news for the respective companies, but bad for Microsoft. According to a recent report by NetMarketShare, Internet Explorer is now hovering slightly about the 50 percent mark with 52.63 percent of the desktop market. This is a far cry from 2004 when it owned 95 percent of the Web browser market. READ MORE
Google’s web browser, Chrome, jumped up to 15.5 percent of the market share as August came to a close and the browser celebrated its third birthday. READ MORE
Gmail users have several reasons to cheer: Offline Gmail has finally arrived, and Google Docs and Calendar are coming soon. There’s one small catch, though: it’s available as a Google Web Store app only for the Chrome browser. READ MORE
Walmart and Amazon have figured out how to bypass Apple’s mandatory 30 percent cut for apps distributed through the iTunes store, reports The San Francisco Chronicle. Walmart has launched an iPad version of its Vudu online video streaming service using a desktop shortcut that lets customers click an “Add to Home Screen” button on Vudu.com to install an app-style icon on the iPad desktop. Likewise, Amazon unveiled the Kindle Cloud Reader which lets customers read Kindle e-books on the iPad even without an Internet connection. Both services use the HTML5 Web browser protocol and follow on the heels of The Financial Times of London which in June launched a Web-based version for smart phones and tablets to avoid Apple’s fee. “The flexibility of HTML5 allows us to build one application that automatically adapts to the platform you’re using – from Chrome to iOS,” said Dorothy Nicholls, director of Amazon’s Kindle division, in a statement. Amazon made its Kindle Cloud Reader compatible with Safari on the iPad as well as Google’s Chrome browser, and plans to add Internet Explorer, Firefox and the BlackBerry PlayBook browsers in coming months. Read more at The San Francisco Chronicle.
Apple angered many when it instituted a hefty fee for purchases made within apps on its devices. Especially in the highly price competitive e-book industry, where the most popular books are already often sold at a loss even before paying Apple’s fee. READ MORE
Mohamed Mansour, the developer behind the Facebook Friend Exporter, has created an experimental Google Chrome extension called Hangout Pad for Google+, which adds document collaboration capabilities to Hangouts, the multi-person video chat feature available on Google’s social networking platform. READ MORE
After coming off of a tough split with Google over toolbar inclusion on Firefox, browser developer Mozilla aims to make the former ally a true competitor with their announcement of their first mobile OS. The new project, named “Gecko,” is drawing plenty of comparisons to the Chrome OS, which is coming out currently on netbooks. Gecko is an open-source project aiming to create a stronger basis for in-browser applications to be run natively on mobile devices, with the ultimate goal to expand into the greater desktop market. READ MORE
Although it’s hardly a prelude to War of the Roses, Google’s recent decision to remove support for the Firefox toolbar is likely to have some critical consequences. Google’s break-up announcement, which came in a blog post “Written by Brittney,” says Google Toolbar for Firefox will be supported only up to Firefox 4. READ MORE
How would you like your apps to anticipate your needs? Who wouldn’t, right? Mozilla Labs has launched what looks to be two promising new features. Currently developer focused, Web Activities lets web applications talk to each other; and an as-yet-unnamed feature simplifies app discovery and download. READ MORE
It wasn’t long after we started hearing about a Google Chrome extension that lets people extract Facebook contacts into services like Google+ that Facebook started blocking it. “Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by July 5th. (The extension) will no longer work for many people,” writes Mohamed Mansour, the extension developer, who says he will build and maintain a new version. READ MORE
