This months browser share statistics are out thanks to Market Share by Net Applications.
August has panned out like another typical month, with Internet Explorer dropping to 66.97% in August, from 67.68% in July.
Firefox jumped slightly to 22.98% from 22.47%, while Safari remained the same at 4.07%.
Google Chrome also increased its share from 2.59% to 2.84%, while Opera was also up from 1.97% to 2.04%.
The Chrom dev team have finally released early builds of Google Chrome for Mac.
The builds, which are still only in the dev channel, is now stable on Mac, but is still lacking features with the dev team not recommending the browser for every day use.
“Google Chrome for Mac OS X Developer Release is a very early release version and does not yet have some of the functionality that a full general release version would have. Many of the features still under development affect the privacy behavior of Google Chrome for Mac OS X. The issues marked in bold text below will be resolved prior to releasing Google Chrome for Mac OS X to the beta channel for broader consumer use” says the note from Google.
A download link is available from the Early Access Release Channels on the Chromium website.
Google has fixed 3 Chrome security holes, two which were rated as high severity, and the other as medium.
The first issue was in the V8 JavaScript engine, which could “allow specially-crafted Javascript on a web page to read unauthorized memory, bypassing security checks.”
The second issue allows poorly formed XML to crash the browser tab. “A malicious XML payload may be able to trigger a use-after-free condition. Other tabs are unaffected.”
The final bug could allow “sites whose certificates are signed using MD2 or MD4 hashing algorithms … to spoof an invalid site as a valid HTTPS site.”
Thankfully, none of these risks were rated as critical thanks to Google Chrome’s sandbox environment. The update will be pushed out to all current Chrome users.
Google Chrome 4.0.202.2 is now completely 64 bit compatible, and no longer uses any 32 bit libraries and is available for Linux.
“The v8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I’ve had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks” said Google Chrome Software Engineer Dean McNamee.
The new builds can be downloaded from here, with build instructions also being available for Linux users.
A Windows and Mac version are set to follow.
Google is planning on adding cloud-based bookmark and password sync using ‘push’ technology for its Chrome browser.
Users will need a Google Account (such as Gmail), which will be used to store bookmarks and passwords. This will allow browsers to have their preferences available on any computer when they enter their details in any Chrome browser around the world.
“A bunch of us have been working on a feature to sync user data in Chromium with a Google account. The great news is that we’ll be starting to work directly in the Chromium project this week.” explained Chrome developer Tim Steele.
“We have built a library that implements the client side of our sync protocol, as well as the Google server-side infrastructure to serve Google Chrome users and synchronise data to their Google Account.”
“Rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates, when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync.”
No details on when we will see this in Chrome have been announced.
Web browser market share results for July 2009 have been released thanks to Market Share by Net Applications, and for another month Microsoft Internet Explorer is down again.
Internet Explorer dropped almost half a percent to 67.68%, while Firefox was up 0.04% to 22.47%.
Other winners for the month were were Safari up from 3.79% to 4.07%, and Google Chrome up from 2.40% to 2.59%.
Opera had another bad month falling from 2.03% to 1.97%.
Interesting results for Firefox, with the release of 3.5 seems to have failed at attracting any more market share. Full results for June and July 2009 are available online.
Themes are even closer for browser Google Chrome, with recent developer builds including theme support already.
TechCrunch has been able to confirm that themes will be available in an online gallery from Google themselves.
While some early themes have been around for a while, latest builds allow users to push themes out to the browser, with an easy option to revert to previous themes if the user desires.
No word on when this feature will make it into the public releases, but expect things to start speeding up.
Thanks to a new algorithm, Google is able to push out Chrome updates in one tenth of the size they used to.
This means that Chrome updates can be pushed out to more simultaneously, protecting users against threats faster than before.
An example has been given on the recent update from 190.1->190.4 on the development channel.
More details on the new Courgette algorithm can be found on the Chromium Blog.
Google has pushed out Chrome 2.0.172.37 to users of the browser, patching two security holes.
The security holes would allow an attacker to run arbitrary code in the Google Chrome sandbox and even with the privileges of the logged on user.
Other changes include:
The update will be pushed out automatically to Chrome users.
Nightly Mac builds of WebKit, the basis of which Safari and Google Chrome are built on, now include 3D CSS transforms.
3D CSS transforms allow web developers to manipulate objects in the third dimension with simple CSS rules. Current CSS3 standards do not include these 3D transforms, but Apple has submitted 3D CSS transforms to the W3C for consideration as an official CSS standard.
The 3D transforms are already available in iPhone OS 2.0 and up.
Users or developers wanting to check out this new feature can download the latest nightly build from WebKit. The following 3D transform demos are available: