Supposedly Microsoft is working on a Google Chrome OS counter. This could be the Gazelle browser, which wants to treat the browser itself more like an OS. The Gazelle prototype supposedly will to do things like protect webapps from each other, and isolate different browser tabs (like Google Chrome does and Firefox is going to do).

It’s just one of many research projects Microsoft is working on, but it would make sense for them to unveil this one next week, to show that they’re not taking a backseat to Google. It won’t replace IE, at least not for awhile.

Firefox 3.5 includes the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which is said to be more than twice as fast as in v3.0 and ten times faster than Firefox 2, together with native integration of Ogg Theora video, and Location Aware Browsing.

There’s also some new privacy controls, including a “private browsing” mode that keeps no history, as well as a “Forget this Site” feature that clears all the temporary files, passwords, stored logins from a particular domain. The browser market has been heating up lately, with Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 8, Google’s Chrome getting several updates and Apple debuting a new version of Safari at WWDC 2009 etc.

Anytime I am looking to buy some new hardware for my computer it seems like I spend hours comparing prices to find the best deal. Sometimes I get sick of looking and just buy without doing all the comparisons I know I could do and then I end up thinking in the back of my head I could have got it cheaper.

I ran across a new add-on for Firefox called Dynamite Data that is cool and will help find the lowest prices for any product you are shopping for. Once the add-on is installed all you need to do is go to a product page on any website and the add-on will show you how much the product costs from other websites.

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8, its latest version in the browser battle. This latest version comes loaded with a set of new features designed to make browsing the internet more convenient, fast and secure. The latest IE browser is also the latest blow to rival Mozilla’s Firefox in the quest for online browsing dominance.

Microsoft added a number of security features to IE8, such as increased protection against malware, cross-site scripting attacks, click-jacking, and protection against installing malicious Active-X controls. In addition, they’ve added an InPrivate browsing mode which will track no history of your browsing activities, negating the need to delete the history after the fact.

Opera on Tuesday has announced the final release of the latest and greatest version of its mobile browser, Opera Mini 4.2. We saw the 4.2 version go into beta release only earlier this month sporting some new features including skins, additional servers and faster performance, video and Notes sync.

The final v4.2 release that we downloaded today appears to be very similar, if not exactly the same, as the beta version we got a couple of weeks ago. Opera boasts increased speed of as much as 30 percent, support for multiple languages, the ability to skin the browser to match your preference and of course the ability to play mobile-targeted YouTube videos (provided you have a newer Sony Ericsson or Nokia phone, for now). Users can also sync up notes between the mobile browser and the Opera desktop browser with Opera Link.

Mozilla CEO, John Lilly has hinted in an Interview that we may be seeing Firefox Mobile in a few weeks time. If the reports are true, we may see an alpha version of Firefox Mobile very soon. An excerpt from the interview:

“We want to make sure that the Web on mobile is more like the Web than what the mobile industry offers today, which is closed, separate networks and not a very good information-getting experience for the user. The first thing is to bring Firefox to mobile devices. We’re working on that, and we’ll see some alphas in a few weeks.”

It’s now official. Firefox 3 has been officially entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most downloaded software in a 24-hour period. Last month on the first day of its release Firefox 3 was downloaded over 8 million times; 8,002,530 to be exact.

Of course, Firefox3 didn’t exactly have any competition since this was a new world record category that they just made up, but we can’t deny that over 8 million downloads in a day is an impressive feat in any case.

“The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world.”, said Mozilla Marketing head Paul Kim.

Firefox …

Mozilla has announced that they have set a new world record with over 8 million downloads of the Firefox 3 browser from Tuesday to Wednesday of this week, and they are just waiting for the Guinness folks to come around and verify the numbers. While we do like Firefox here at the ‘Brick and use it as our default browser, we did have a few questions about this record attempt in general.

For starters, there was really no Guinness record for the most number of downloads to begin with, so beating a record that was not there was a shoe-in for the company. Also, if someone wants to shoot it down it just might not be all that hard since Adobe says that 8 million Flash Player installs is just an average day. YouTube servers out over 100 million videos each day and what is the torrent download count at, like over 5 billion?

Skyfire is a new mobile browser that promises a nicer browsing experience on your mobile phone as well as speed and simplicity. Right now it’s in private beta mode and just available to those with a US phone number.

According to the site, the browser can go anywhere and get anything, which would make it a nice step up in mobile browsing. Supposedly it just like browsing on your PC. Check out a demo of Skyfire after the jump. If it’s even half as good as they claim, users are going to be very happy indeed. At least it has a cool name. Things always sound cooler with fire.

Mozilla has decided to get down to business about developing a mobile browser and have recently hired two developers experienced in mobile Linux-based applications to start building a mobile version of the Firefox browser. The company didn’t give any dates on when they thought the new browser would be available and it might be a little early to know what types of phones it would be able to run on, but they did let us know it wouldn’t be this year.

We would love to see something in the way of mobile from Firefox soon and hopefully sometime next year. The longer Mozilla takes the stiffer the competition will become and already the company will have challenges getting into mobile devices with Microsoft and Apple. Both of these companies run their own browser on their respective platforms which integrate nicely, but that certainly hasn’t stopped Firefox from swaying a chunk of users already with desktop browsers. Here at the ‘Brick we currently see over 38% of our readers using a Firefox browser and that percentage continues to rise. Opera Software will be another tough competitor having had a mobile browser in the market for a number of years already, but Mozilla feels there is till room for another and possibly better option.

According to the Spread Firefox blog over 400 million downloads of the Firefox web browser have occurred since it’s launch just 3 years ago in November of 2004. The post spelled out a little history of the spread of Firefox, citing 25 million downloads in the first 99 days of the browser being available. Within a year they had over 100 million and another 100 million the year after that.

This 400 million downloads doesn’t necessarily mean that there are 400 million installations of the browser running out there, but it is nevertheless impressive considering Microsoft pretty much had a monopoly on the browser market just a few years ago with Internet Explorer. In fact the last 30 days here on the ‘Brick show that 42% of our readers are using Firefox which is up from 35% about a year …

Opera has released the Opera 4 Mini Beta browser for non-smartphones to be able to surf the internet seeing pages how they are and not distorted or requiring special “mobile” web pages. Users can download the browser now for free and follow the instructions on your phone to get it installed. There is also an Opera Mini 4 Beta for Palm and Blackberry devices that require a manual installation.

The Opera Mini 4 works by gathering pages through the Opera servers and “shrinking” them down to be viewed in full with their original format on your mobile phone. The new browser comes with a number of cool features to make navigating the web and individual pages easier for phones without a lot of extra controls for navigation.

‘X marks the spot’ zooms in on the likely beginning point of the page and expands the …

It looks like our estimate of thousands of downloads of Apple’s Safari web browser for Windows was a little bit on the conservative side. Apple has confirmed that there was over 1 million downloads of the browser withing 48 hours of its release last Monday. While this may sound impressive for most companies this product has a lot to live up to, even in cross-over world of PC’s since it’s iTunes sibling has had over 500 million downloads for use on Windows machines.

Safari as a whole also has a long way to go in the browser market as well. According to Apple the browser has about 5 percent of the market compared to the 15 percent of Mozilla and the strong 80% lead that IE continues to hold. A rocky start with some security …

It was only Monday that Apple announced and released the Safari web browser for Windows touting unmatched security and speed. While these features may hold true for Safari on the Mac, within hours of the release significant vulnerabilities started cropping up from three different independent researches testing out the browser in the new Windows environment. When all was said and done, eight different security risks were uncovered in the Safari 3 public beta for Windows.

The good news is that Apple was quick to respond in addressing the issues and pushing out a new version of the Safari 3 beta only four days later with version 3.0.1 available to download through the Apple website.

The new version is a recommended update to avoid security risks through using the web browser, but unless you really need the …

Yesterday among a number of other announcements Steve Jobs unveiled the release of the Safari web browser for Windows as a public beta version. The browser had previously only been available for the Mac. If you were one of the likely thousands like me that downloaded the browser to try out on a Windows box, you may want to be careful with it for a little longer.

Within only a few hours, (some within a few minutes) of its release as many as six bugs were found in the browser were found and reported by independent researchers. The flaws included memory corruption errors and denial of service crash’s. All three of the reports were on Windows based versions of the Safari browser, but it was neither confirmed nor denied if these same flaws existed in the …