While there are a raft of bells and whistles -- a new welcome page, curvy Australis tabs, Flash and HTML5 support, for starters -- it's the browser's newfound speed that is getting the MVP treatment.
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Specifically, Microsoft committed to make available for five years (i.e. until 2014) in the European Economic Area a "choice screen" enabling users of Windows to choose in an informed and unbiased manner which web browser(s) they wanted to install in addition to, or instead of, Microsoft's web browser.
ENGADGET: EU antitrust commission charges Microsoft over browser selection 'breach'
On the iPad, I tested it in Apple's Safari browser as well as Google's Chrome browser.
But Netscape's employees and the browser's source code did not simply disappear.
The Yandex browser platform has through a technological partnership with a key long term partner been expanded to incorporate Opera Software's Turbo technology, which allows to boost the browser's page loading capacity even with a slow connection.
ENGADGET: Yandex launches its own browser targeting Russian market
The company's cloud-based safe browsing technology, together with Kaspersky Lab's security solution, enhances the browser's safety by warning the users about potentially malicious websites.
ENGADGET: Yandex launches its own browser targeting Russian market
To get around Safari's default blocking, Google exploited a loophole in the browser's privacy settings.
WSJ: Google Tracked iPhones, Bypassing Apple Browser Privacy Settings
Web Workers, for instance, is an emerging system for isolating a browser's individual tasks into separate "threads, " making it easier for a browser-based program to perform a computationally intensive task such as photo-editing in a background tab while the user is attending to something else, like e-mail, in the foreground.
In a patent app made public this month, RIM's lab geeks describe setting up a proxy server right on the phone that would intercept the browser's web requests and bundle, compress, and send them to a gateway on the other end (BIS, we presume) that would know how to deal with the packet.
ENGADGET: RIM patent app will have you barely browsing the web at incredible speeds
To catch up, the first thing Google did was abandon the browser's traditional architecture.
ECONOMIST: Google goes in search of an instant operating system
The experiment-happy company has created the Chrome Web Lab projects to show off the browser's processing power.
Google exploited an exception to the browser's default setting to place a temporary cookie from the DoubleClick domain.
Drag it up to your browser's toolbar and it will search pages like Facebook for songs and videos to import.
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Google's engineers contribute code to Firefox and pay the foundation a share of advertising when people search Google in the browser's toolbar.
The software can import the passwords you've already stored through your browser's Autofill tool or it can generate replacement passwords that are difficult for hackers to crack.
But we have failed adequately to protect the two- or three-foot channel between the browser's display and the brain of the human who uses it.
Stop websites passing on cookies by changing your browser's security preferences.
The browser's user interface is based on the open-source Chromium code.
ENGADGET: Yandex launches its own browser targeting Russian market
Despite these promises, the FTC charged that Google placed advertising tracking cookies on consumers' computers, in many cases by circumventing the Safari browser's default cookie-blocking setting.
Supercookies are stored in different places than regular cookies, such as within the Web browser's "cache" of previously visited websites, which is where the Microsoft ones were located.
On Monday, Microsoft said a newly discovered security hole in Internet Explorer 5.0 could allow malicious webmasters to seize control of a computer through the browser's ImportExportFavorites feature.
The bulk of mobile data requests sent to Akamai's platform saw Android's Webkit browser and Apple's Mobile Safari come in nearly neck-and-neck at 35.3 percent and 32.6 percent.
How about account information for the App Catalog (a sign of paid apps to come), a Select All option in the browser's edit menu, and some changes in GPS location services.
One is a new, extra-speedy Javascript interpreter, found in the latest browsers from Google and Apple, that allows programs in the browser's standard language to zip along faster than ever thought possible.
Basically it's a USB security key that supposedly encrypts data stored to the thumb drive using AES, provides remote encrypted storage, creates a secure connection to the internet, and deletes your browser's cookies and history files.
Even with his wimpy DSL connection, pages are rendered quickly enough once the website's servers (and all the other computers along the route, plus those used to host adverts, graphics and miscellaneous layout bits) start giving his browser's request some attention.
ECONOMIST: The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
The new browser has plenty of these soon-to-be-ubiquitous features, such as the ability to bookmark a page with a single click and the "Smart Location Bar" that uses the browser's URL field to help users rifle through their bookmarks and browsing history.
As if on cue, the very first thing the user tests is the browser's multitouch support, revealing that performance could be an issue here -- even on the phone's OMAP3 core -- but the good news is that the presence of Blur doesn't seem to cause the home screen to stutter like we've seen on the CLIQ and DEXT.
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In its ideal form, it is an impressive product: Using a small, easily downloaded application that resides in a user's browser, Netflix detects the user's bandwidth and streams a movie at optimal resolution to avoid pauses to reload.
People end up on Netscape's site because it is the default home page for Netscape's browser, which still edges out Microsoft's offering, Internet Explorer, in popularity.
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