Google is no stranger to cleaning house when it needs to. There are too many older web browsers out there and so the search engine giant has announced that its popular Google Reader will be ditching support for older browsers like IE6, Firefox 1.0, 2.0, Safari 2.0, 3.0, and even Chrome versions 1, 2, and 3.

Google says that the move will allow it to spend its time improving Google Reader instead of fixing issues with these old browsers. If you’re still using an old browser version, why? And hey, you better upgrade.

You’ve heard the debates on Flash vs HTML5. Steve Jobs hates flash blah blah blah. Enough bickering. From the Google I/O keynote: HTML5 support will be more or less complete on all “modern” browsers, says Google.

I’m assuming that means IE will have to wait? Is this the beginning of the death of flash? How will it affect cute cat videos? Is Steve Jobs laughing right now? So many questions.

The browser wars are heating up. Just in the last quarter, Chrome, Safari and Opera have all set new records for browser market share with 4.63, 4.46 and 2.4 percent. The period is also significant because it is the first time Chrome has beaten Safari to third place, and all of the numbers come at the expense of IE, which is losing users at a rate of 0.92 percentage points a month.

Sure, Microsoft’s 62.7 percent slice still looks nice, but projections from Net Applications suggest that it could shrink to below 50 percent by May of 2010. Net Applications monitors incoming traffic to over 40,000 websites to generate a sample size of about 160 million unique visitors per month, so if they say that it’s so, it likely is.

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.

Opera has a beta version of the latest Opera Mini browser for mobile devices, boasting some cool new features for on the go, and faster connections for those in the Americas. For starters, Opera Mini 4.2 beta has brought back the skinning features from version 3, allowing a little customization to look of the browser. Users of the newest version of this browser who also have select phones such as a new Sony Ericsson or Nokia might also have some luck getting YouTube to run on it as well.

The new 4.2 browser will also make use of the new servers available in the U.S., making browsing faster for those in the Americas and Asia-Pacific areas. Opera says this will make things faster for those in other parts of the world as well since the new servers will off-load some work from the existing servers. Opera 4.2 also has a feature to sync your notes to your Opera Desktop with Opera Link.

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?

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 …

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 …

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 …

Shortly after the iPhone was announced questions rose by many about the ability to write 3rd party applications on the OS X platform similar to what is done for the Mac. In a couple of interviews Jobs let us know that OS for the iPhone would not be open to developers to the dismay of many.

Today at the WWDC 2007 Jobs released some information and demonstrations of Apple’s new Leopard OS along with news to developers about the iPhone. Opening up the platform while still maintaining a secure environment has been a challenge for Apple, but they made what Jobs described as a “sweet” compromise. They didn’t open up the OS, but will let developers build applications that run on the Safari web browser engine on the iPhone.

This will allow developers to build web …

Not long after the release of the new MS IE, this week Mozilla released Firefox 2.0, which is the next major version of its Web browser with increased security enhancements and a number of new features having the intentions of making Web browsing a little bit more fun and a lot more intuitive. If you have been a frequent user of Firefox, the changes on the surface may not be too astonoshing, but there are some that are worth mentioning.

One of the key features included in the Firefox 2.0 web browser is Tabbed browsing, which is a component that Mozilla originally created and is now available on IE7 which allows a user to quickly switch between multiple differnt Web sites within the same program window intead of having multiple instances of the browser open. The red ‘X’ to close each web site …