We have discussed Vivaldi before. It's a feature packed and very power-user friendly web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux. And from our limited experience, the browser seems pretty darn fast too.

Vivaldi 1.3 Released

Living up to its tagline "the most customisable web browser", the new update brings a whole host of new features that enhances Vivaldi's customisability. The new version comes with powerful themeing abilities for example. In our earlier review of Vivaldi web browser, we did complain about the slightly overdone color schemes and such. The new changes give you powers to tweak its looks the way you want. I especially liked the new dark themes.

Mouse gestures is perhaps one of my favourite feature in Vivaldi, even though I always prefer keyboard shortcuts. There are more than 90  browser actions that can be performed with mouse gestures now.

Also in this release, the developers have addressed some of Linux platform specific issues, which means that "tab hibernation now works as it should, and some proprietary media embedded in HTML5 content can now be enjoyed in Vivaldi on Linux without problems." 

There are other improvements on the Privacy front too with the added ability to turn off WebRTC. Overall, I'm really impressed with Vivaldi's improvements on the performance front. It is definitely faster and more responsive than before, and without any compromises on functionality. Features like 'Tab Stacks' work just as good. Both 32 and 64 bit DEB/RPM packages are available (see link below). Share your thoughts on Vivaldi. Thanks for reading.

Download Vivaldi for Linux (DEB, RPM) | Changelog and other details

Mozilla releases the first nightly builds of its next generation web rendering engine, code-named Servo. This is the first technical demonstration of Mozilla's much awaited high-performance, next-gen web-browser engine being developed for application and embedded use. The first nightly builds also come with a very basic HTML based browser UI so that you can experience the new Servo engine first hand.

Mozilla's New Servo Browser Engine
Being developed at Mozilla Research, Servo engine is also being ported to Android and ARM processors by Samsung. The project "seeks to create a highly parallel environment, in which many components (such as rendering, layout, HTML parsing, image decoding, etc.) are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks." Source code for the project is written in Rust programming language. Also according to wikipedia, Servo is named after Tom Servo, a robot from a 1980s television show, Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Downloadable snapshots of Servo available here (for Mac OS X and Linux only for now). These pre-built nightly snapshots are not anywhere near ready for regular use yet though. Happy testing.

Browser wars has been going on for more than a decade now and yet, there are no signs of a let down by any parties involved. In fact, things are only hotting up with the big three competing tooth and nail to become the leader of the pack. But that's not the entire story. A host of niche players are also in the market which are equally good and sometimes even better. Here, we'll discuss 3 superb free and open source web browsers you've probably never heard about.

Web Browser industry has always been very shaky. Whenever you think the industry has settled down and ready for consolidation, new players with innovative products comes to the fore resetting the dynamics of the industry. Firefox became a hit when IE was the defacto browser of choice. Then came Google Chrome which, along with Firefox, almost pushed IE to the brink of extinction. Will Vivaldi be the next to change the rules of the game?

Lightbeam is a Firefox extension that debuted as Collusion in 2011 and created by Mozilla software developer Atul Varma as an experimental add-on to visualize browsing behavior and data collection on the web. Watch this highly rated TED talk where Mozilla's Gary Kovacs introduces the Collusion add-on. Using interactive visualizations, lightbeam lets you see the full depth of the web today, including parts that are not transparent to an average user.

The sheer pace of changes in world of technology sometimes scares me. Four years ago, Google Chrome was a nobody. After the initial surge, which helped Chrome gain nearly 1% market share quickly in the fiercely competitive browser market, things went down a bit and everyone was busy writing away Chrome already. After 4 years of stupendous growth, latest Statcounter stats shows that Chrome is now the world's most popular web browser dethroning mighty Internet Explorer comprehensively.

Stupendous rate of Google Chrome adoption is not news anymore. But this is a defining moment. According to latest StatCounter statistics, 23.6 percent of the browsers tracked by StatCounter were Chrome 15 during the last weeks of November. Microsoft's IE 8 accounted for 23.5 percent of web browser market share in the same period, which means, Google Chrome 15 overtook IE 8 to become world's most popular browser for the very first time.

Firefox 7 beta is now the default web browser in Ubuntu 11.10 Onceric Ocelot beta and for the first time ever, Firefox scores a perfect 100 in Acid3 tests. Congratulations Mozilla!

Firefox 8 recently found its way into the nightly build channel. According to a recent study by extremetech.com, Firefox 8 is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric and has got a drastically reduced memory footprint as well.

Browser wars were supposed to be over years ago. Arrival of Google Chrome changed all that. And with the passage of time, Google Chrome growth story is gaining some serious momentum. Google Chrome might have already breached the magic 20% market share and there are no signs of a slow down.

Flock Web Browser was once a darling of the web. It was among my favorite web browsers out there until a few years ago. But then Google Chrome happened which raised the bar much higher eventually changing the whole internet space once and for all. Mozilla Firefox suddenly became *old* and had to re invent itself to survive[read Firefox 4.0]. Unfortunately, that was not the case with Flock 'Social Media' Browser.

You all must aware of the fact that both IE9 and Firefox 4 was released within a span of two weeks and both of them are considered highly improved versions their predecessors. Now here are some interesting download statistics of both the browsers. 

source: firefox wallpapers

The much anticipated Firefox 4 was officially released earlier today. This is *the* fastest Firefox ever to be released and is also the best in terms of looks and functionality as well. When the new super fast JaegerMonkey javascript engine made web browsing so much faster, innovative additions like Tab Candy(now called Panorama) is definitely going to help end user with better tab management capabilities. Not even a day has passed since the official launch of Firefox 4 and look at the download statistics. At the time of writing this article, Firefox 4 has already been downloaded for more than 2.0 million times!!

In the last couple months I've been seeing a lot of articles concerning the Midori web browser. It's a lightweight GTK-based browser that uses the WebKit rendering engine also used by browsers like Chromium and Safari. At version 0.2.9, it's relatively new (it's still a ways away from a 1.0 release), but it's included as part of the Xfce "goodies" package. It's also the browser of choice of the Elementary project. I've tried Midori before and like it because it isn't too much of a system resource hog, and it faithfully displays the webpages I visit.

In line with the predictions we had here before, IE has not only fallen below 50% market share for the first time ever, it has now become the second most popular browser in Europe. Firefox has taken the lead and is now the most popular browser in the whole of Europe. Is that what you call as the great circle of life?

Now, here is something interesting for you all. The following infographic lists your favorite browsers with interesting 'character' description. Take a look.

Google Chrome 8.0 stable is finally released for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest version, Google Chrome 8.0.552.215, include a built-in PDF viewer among many other stability related enhancements and major security fixes.

Opera does it again. Latest Opera 11 beta comes with a new impressive feature called Tab Stacking which is in many ways similar to Tab Candy in Firefox 4.0, but a lot more practical approach to the same problem.

Firefox 4 is all over over the news and the funny thing is, Firefox 4 final release has not even happened yet. Firefox 4 beta 6 was released recently and it boasts of key performance improvements and a number of new and useful features like Tab Candy. Let's do a quick look at the latest Firefox 4 in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

Alex Miller is just 12 years old, but don't let his age fool you. He just made his mark in the technology world by spotting a major security bug in the world's second most popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox.