Why?

Google says that using WebKit is slowing down innovation, because “Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects.”

The solution is Blink, Chromium’s new rendering engine. It’s a fork of WebKit that will use largely the same codebase, minus a significant amount of no-longer-needed code: 7,000 files and 4.5 million lines of code. That will make the codebase slimmer — obviously — as well as more stable, more secure, and less buggy, according to Google.

WebKit emerged from the KHTML browser when Apple took KHTML code as the basis for its Safari browser in 2001, and it currently powers the vast majority of web browser share. Forking the codebase will fracture the browser rendering space between WebKit, Gecko (which powers Firefox), Trident (Microsoft’s rendering engine), and now, of course, Blink.

That’s a concern for web developers who have to build websites that render properly in all browsers, but Google says that won’t be a problem:

“In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers,” Google engineer Adam Barth wrote.

The question, of course, is the long term.

Interestingly, Opera has very swiftly said that it would use the new Google fork of WebKit for the new Opera rendering engine.

(Oh, and if you’re wondering what the dongle joke is about, here’s the answer.)

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

But it’s also not often that someone invents an open-source game development platform that can make Minecraft-style games that will, with a little luck, soon be running on web browsers everywhere: laptops, Android phones, and iPhones.

Twenty-two days ago, Max Ogden was a bored developer whose latest startup, Gather, was not, shall we say, making a lot of hay. So he was looking for something new to occupy his time.

“I came back from Europe in the winter working on a bunch of little indoor projects — it’s been freezing here in the Bay area,” Ogden told me today. “Then I saw the Minecraft documentary right after Christmas.”

He had given the wildly popular sandbox builder to his 10- and 11-year-old nephews for Christmas, and they loved it, so he started to think about building something for it — a mod perhaps, or an extension of Minecraft. And was startled to find that Minecraft was totally closed source, with no API (though one is coming soon). Instead, he discovered that developers who want to mod Minecraft hack it, decompile the code, build their mods, and then release them … to be broken with every new version of the game.

A forest in Voxel.

So he came up with the idea of building not just Minecraft, but the toolset to build any Minecraft-like game, all inside the browser, using common old Javascript and OpenGL, an industry-standard toolkit for building interactive 2-D and 3-D applications.

“OpenGL has been around for a long time, but Chrome became the first browser just last month that lets you take over someone’s mouse pointer, which is totally needed for games,” Ogden said.

Having found his project, Ogden did nothing else for the past three weeks, staying up late, “going crazy,” and cranking out code. He found numerous little snippets of code that others had worked on that helped, speeding the process, and brought in a friend, James Halliday, to help solve some particularly tough problems.

“In about two days of working with James, it all came together,” Ogden said. “We had something that looked like a game, and we looked at each other and said: ‘Holy cow, that was quick.’”

The result that looked like a game was Voxel.js. It’s not precisely a game itself, but a game-building toolkit for modern browsers. You can try early examples of game environments built with it already, right in your (Chrome) browser, including one with a virtual drone simulator.

A Minecraft skin

“Kyle Robinson, who runs hackathons for AR quadricopter drones, built a virtual drone simulator for it,” Odgen told me, marveling. “It has a command line, you can tell it to take off, spin, and it has a little camera to ‘see’ the terrain that shows up like an iPad in the game.”

Which is all very meta: watching a landscape of a virtual world via a virtual drone that you control in a game running inside a browser on your computer. It sounds impressive, until you hear that another acquaintance of Odgen is planning to run Voxel.js on a Raspberry Pi running Firefox OS (coming soon) on a real AR quadricopter videoing the actual landscape while also running the game and viewing a virtual landscape.

Just try to wrap your head around that.

All the code is open source, and Odgen is welcoming any and all hackers to make contributions, adding modules like water, better physics, or creatures. Seven already have. All of which could soon have the game-building environment running on iPhones as well as Android smartphones. While Android should be relatively easy as soon as Google updates mobile Chrome to support OpenGL more fully, iOS is another story. It turns out that Apple supports OpenGL in mobile Safari, but for iAds only.

“So you can run WebGL on iPhone … if you make your own browser,” he said.

Fortunately, a project named Impact is working on a solution, rendering Javascript to iOS’s native Objective-C language.

All of which means that a Minecraft-like game built with Voxel.js could conceivably run in a browser on an iPhone. And on an Android smartphone. And in your web browser on your laptop. And, if you really, really, really must, on a tiny little $35 Raspberry Pi, flying high on a quadricopter above the drunken old ladies of Oakland.

Which, frankly, would be awesome.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

Here’s how Man in the Browser (MitB) works:

Imagine this: You phone your bank, asking a service rep to pay a phone bill and transfer money from savings to checking. Only, instead of talking to the bank, you’re speaking to a crook who is talking to you on one phone … and your bank on the other. And when you provide him with all the authentication details your bank requires, he loots your account and transfers your funds into accounts he controls.

Substitute a browser for the phone, you’ve got a MitB attack.

You’re using your own browser, and you’re seeing what you think is your bank’s site, or your online email, or your corporate account … but actually you’re seeing only what a hacker wants you to see, while she does whatever she wants with your personal information.

And, unfortunately, most antivirus solutions can’t do a thing about it — according to NetAuthority, about 85 percent of MitB infections cannot be detected by current antivirus software.

NetAuthority thinks it has a solution, and I talked to chief executive Chris Brennan about it yesterday.

“There’s an absence of strong authentication services that are easy to deploy, Brennan says. “We realized the device itself can be the key … it  has enough unique attributes to create a key that could not be cracked.”

In other words, your computer or your smartphone are unique in terms of software, components, log entries, defects, and any of 19 different variables. If your bank’s server knows your device and authenticates it, and all communication between device and server contains an encrypted key based on those unique attributes, the server can be assured it is talking to your actual device, and your software can be certain it is talking the server.

So you know the bank rep is on the line, not a crook. And the bank knows that you are you.

How does it work?

“We have a dynamic device key that has to be on the device,” Brennan says. “The user downloads a small application when at the web page trying to authenticate.”

From a user perspective, this could be a browser plugin, or just part of a mobile app installed for online banking. From a company perspective, it’s a few lines of code that integrate the verification engine into their server-side application. Then the browser and the server can communicate securely, says NetAuthority.

“It’s impossible to put something in the middle of this and breach its security,” says Brennan.

Any attempted MitB attack, or any attempted re-routing through a proxy server, would immediately trigger an alarm. And the solution uses multi-factor authentication, meaning that a lucky guess on one or two factors cannot spoof the system.

Supported devices include just about any smartphone: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry. Any Windows, Mac, or Linux PC will work as well. Server-side, NetAuthority supports Linux, Solaris, and Windows Server.

Pricing has not yet been released.

photo credit: Darwin Bell via photo pin cc, poncнo☭penguιn via photo pin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

VEVO just provided its answer by giving 50 million music lovers in the U.S. and Canada access to the videos they love anywhere, anytime, on any device. That means iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry Playbook (!), and now…the mobile web.

Native apps are designed for a specific mobile platform, such as iOS or Android, and are distributed via app store downloads. While they can be richer, more customized experiences, mobile-friendly websites or web apps are automatically available to anyone on any device with a modern web browser…without a download.

VEVO’s new announcement means you can have this desktop experience:

On your iPad or any other mobile device with a modern browser:

…all without downloading an app.

VEVO has more than 50,000 music videos in high definition and is seeing 45 billion views a year on a global basis. The service is a sort of Pandora for music videos: Users sign up, VEVO scans both their music libraries and Facebook likes for music they love, and then VEVO creates a playlist of their favorite artists with maybe a few new recommendations thrown in.

Adding the mobile web allows VEVO to be platform-agnostic, letting its millions of users watch music videos however they want.

Another major benefit? Users who click (or tap) on Twitter or Facebook links to VEVO videos have a seamless experience, seeing the video in a browser, instead of being forced to enter (or even download) an application.

VEVO serves videos in over 200 countries via a partnership with YouTube, and over 200 million people use VEVO to watch music videos. However, it’s not clear whether this new announcement means that video will be available on vevo.com for users outside of the U.S. and Canada. VEVO has typically distributed internationally via YouTube. (VentureBeat has inquired, and we’ll update this post as we learn more.)

VEVO is a partnership between Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Abu Dhabi Media Company and has offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Image credit: Regien Paassen/ShutterStock

Chrome is one of Google’s biggest success stories. Rank it up there with search that doesn’t suck (hard to find back in the day) and AdWords (the print-your-own money machine that drives everything else Google does).

Today at Google I/O Sundar Picahi, senior VP of Chrome and apps, says that Chrome is not only the most popular browser in the world, it’s now in active use by 310 million people.

That’s double last year’s numbers and astonishing growth, pushing past Microsoft’s Internet Explorer earlier this year.

And he shared a few fun numbers too: 60 billion words typed on Chrome every single day, and one terabyte of data download via the browser each and every day.

Just yesterday, the mobile version of Chrome came out of beta.

Google I/O, on Chrome:

And we used to make fun of Microsoft for releasing crappy early versions of software, only to get it right later on. As the Google I/O news drowns out everything else in the tech-0-sphere today, Google announced that Chrome for Android is finally out of beta.

The software has just been updated on the Google Play store, at version 18.0.1025123. No, that number is not a joke.

It already has a 4-star rating out of almost 30,000 reviews, so like most Google products that are in beta, the software was already fairly well received.

Building on the familiar Chrome experience of searching and entering URLs in the same area, the beta finalizes new features that were seen as early as February. It’s good timing too, since Firefox just released a strong contender in the browser-for-Android-devices market.

Google says the updated mobile browser has “accelerated page loading, scrolling, and zooming” and automatically syncs with your desktop Chrome browser, so all your tabs, passwords, and bookmarks are identical whether you’re in the office or on the road.

One cool feature: To swipe from one tab to another, simply “flip through tabs the way you would fan a deck of cards.” You can see the effect in the video below.

Early user reviews are good, with some of the following being posted just today in reference to the new update:

David:
Love it — so much better than old stock browser….

Luke:
Best browser – Replaced stock browser on HTC one x, which is already extremely good. Fast, responsive, and excellent use of tabs.

But some are not sold yet:

Nikolas
Decent — lack of fullscreen browsing is still a bummer. I don’t want to burn in the address bar on my Nexus screen.

Here’s your own quick look at what the latest Chrome has to offer:

Don’t use Chrome? Here’s a video of an earlier Chrome beta that will give you a sense of how it works:

VentureBeat talked with Opera’s Jan Standal, vice-president of desktop products to get the skinny on all the latest features, and, perhaps most interestingly, on how Opera is competing in an increasingly tough browser market.

First, the new features.

Opera has always competed on speedy browsing, and that’s not changing now. With addition tune-ups for speed, including experimental hardware acceleration — using your graphics process instead of just your CPU to render web pages — Opera is doing its best to ensure clients have a fast web experience. Interestingly, since version 11 Opera has offered Turbo, compression technology developed for low-bandwidth mobile browsing, to desktop clients as well.

Opera 12 brings a new theming engine to the browser, offering a truly simple method to change the look and feel of the software you spend most of your day in. Halo fans: Master Chief is only one click away.

Perhaps more interesting to geeks and engineers, the new version of Opera enables control of your computer’s hardware without a plugin. For example, video capture has long been possible via Flash, but Opera is enabling it via HTML5.

“It’s part of a bigger trend,” said Standal. “We’re helping to evolve into a bigger app ecosystem. We have already added support for geolocation; in this version we’re adding support for HTML on the camera side.”

This allows cool effects such as being able to control a video game via your head motions, take pictures in the browser, enable advanced visual controls for software, or robust biometric authentication. Of course, many will just use the new functionality to take silly pictures and share them with their hopefully long-suffering friends:

Other updates include a sandboxing feature that allows the browser to continue operating when plugins crash, new language support, and better security notification.

The biggest question for Opera usually is, how can you compete against Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, or even Apple’s Safari? The W3schools browser stats show continued decline for Opera in this calendar year. But Standal had some good answers.

“Those are not good stats — Stats Counter is better, but still not perfect. Our trend over the past year is up.”

Opera currently counts 270 million users, including 60 million desktop users, 170 million mobile users, and the balance on smart TVs and other platforms. It is seeing growth in Android and on feature phones, in Asia, Africa, and South America, where it works with local telecoms and ISPs to bundle services and build revenue.

The good news includes Russia, where Opera has 25 percent desktop browser share, and 80-90 percent mobile browser share. And the desktop browser users are still growing at 15 percent annually, Standal said.

The new browser heavyweight contender, of course, is Google’s Chrome, which by some measures is now the most popular browser on the planet. Standal had some interesting things to say about competing with Chrome.

“Chrome is a new type of competitor — we’re used to competing with browsers that ship with the operating system — we’re used to being the alternative browser. Now with Chrome you have a different distribution channel. While Firefox grows organically, spreading from user to user, Chrome grows with very aggressive marketing, big billboards.

Chrome’s growth is completely linear — you can see it every day growing a little.  The good side is, more people now know what a browser is, that there are different options … and so Chrome is increasing our potential market.”

And in fact, ever since Chrome’s release, Opera has seen its downloads go up as well.

Opera was founded in 1994 and is based in Oslo, Norway. The company employs 800 people and had revenue of $47 million in the first quarter of 2012.

Facebook may be looking to buy browser maker Opera Software, according to a new report.

A source told Pocket-lint that the social network wants to expand into the browser space and is looking to acquire Opera to do so. VentureBeat cannot independently confirm Facebook’s interest in Opera, and Facebook declined to comment on this story.

Opera is a Norway-based public company traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The company reported revenue of $46.9 million in the first quarter of 2012, and has roughly 700 employees spread across eleven offices, including a satellite office in the U.S. Opera makes an extremely popular mobile browser, including Opera Mini for iPhone. Opera Mini had nearly 200 million users across Opera branded, co-branded, and operator-branded installs of the mobile browser in Q1 2012.

While details on Facebook’s Opera interest are slim, we are certain that Facebook wants a piece of the browser pie, especially on mobile. In fact, months ago we heard a whisper that the social network was actually building its own browser.

That rumor makes sense when you consider a few things. First, the company is expected to release a Facebook-branded phone this summer running some type of custom Facebook operating system, said to be a fork of the Android OS. It follows, then, that Facebook would want to control — read: profit from — how users browse and access its social network on mobile. A Facebook phone running a Google browser doesn’t sound quite right, now does it?

There’s also this key detail: Facebook’s director of product, Blake Ross, if you recall, co-founded Mozilla Firefox and helped build the Firefox browser. The browser guru came to Facebook after his startup Parakey was acquired by the then young social network back in 2007.

But back to Opera. Here’s the kicker: Opera makes money on mobile, the very place where Facebook desperately needs to monetize now that it’s a public company. The software maker said it made $3 million in first quarter revenue from its mobile consumers — up 253 percent year-over-year — and $1.8 million from mobile OEMs. The company also netted $6.9 million in Q1 2012 revenue, up 303 percent year-over-year, from mobile publishers and advertisers.

“Opera expects to monetize this user base and the billions of daily web page traffic generated by these users to a greater extent in 2012 compared to 2011 from advertising, applications and search,” the company said in its earnings report.

But the fat lady has yet to sing in this acquisition play, so stay tuned.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re running the Ice Cream Sandwich operating system, a.k.a. Android 4.0, on your smartphone or tablet, you can run along right now and download Chrome for Android.

The latest addition to the Chrome family is a mobile beta that brings a (purportedly) better and faster browsing experience to Android devices. Perhaps most exciting of all, it allows for the desktop-to-mobile syncing and sign-ins we have loved so much in competitor Firefox for Android.

“Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices,” wrote Chrome-focused Googler Sundar Pichai on the company blog.

Similarly, Firefox for Android (which started out as a mobile project codenamed Fennec) brings the famous Firefox Sync (which synchronizes tabs, settings, and personal data from Firefox on any other platform), a streamlined interface, and blazing speed.

Far be it from Google to let Mozilla have the upper hand in Android mobile browsers, though. It’ll be interesting to see how the two browsers compare — at least on Android 4.0 devices. We’ll have to wait and see whether Google ever rolls out a Chrome for Android beta for 2.X and 3.X devices.

Here’s a demo video:

Pinchai said the tabbed browsing gestures work “as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands” and that the browser includes an incognito mode.

The beta is available now on the Android Market. Go give it a shot and let us know what you think.

According to data from StatCounter, as of November, Chrome claims a 25.7 percent share of the global browser market, while Firefox has a 25.2 percent share.

Chrome has grown massively since its launch in December 2008. In its first full year as a stable, public product, Chrome earned 4.7 of the global market. At the same time (November 2009), Firefox sat at a 32.2 percent share.

Earlier this year, Google revealed Chrome’s user base sat at around 160 million users — a number that had more than doubled year over year — and continued to grow rapidly.

However, one of the bigger shifts in the so-called browser wars has been Internet Explorer’s slide from a position of unquestionable dominance to one of possible vulnerability. While IE has seen impressive improvements over the past year in particular, Microsoft’s once ubiquitous browser now grabs just 40 percent of the global market as of November 2011. Two years ago, IE claimed 56.6 percent.

Still, Internet Explorer is by far the top dog in this contest.

Chrome has been on track to supplant Firefox since at least this past September. At that time, Chrome’s global share was 23.6 percent, while Firefox accounted for 26.8 percent and Internet Explorer nabbed 41.7 percent.

However, other reports from rival web-stats companies, such as Net Applications, tend to show larger disparities between Chrome and Firefox and still currently show Firefox as the number two browser. Still, the important news to take away from this isn’t the specific numbers, but the trend: If Chrome maintains its breakneck pace of growth, it will surpass Firefox in users by anyone’s counting within a few months.

The more interesting question is whether Chrome will ever pass Internet Explorer itself.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobotap’s Dolphin Browser on Monday launched an app for the Apple iPad, bringing its tabbed browsing and gestures to the most popular tablet in the world.

Two weeks ago, Dolphin made its debut on the iPhone. It originally cut its teeth as an early alternative to the pre-installed browser on Google Android smartphones, and for a while it was faster and better-featured than the stock browser. While it may not be much faster now than the stock browsers on iOS and Android, the Dolphin Browser still has many great features and an innovative approach that helps it stand apart.

Like the iPhone version, the iPad app is built on top of Safari, using it to render and display content. But the Dolphin Browser adds features to the mix that mobile Safari doesn’t have, the most notable of which is tabbed browsing (see photo above). One of the most annoying things on the iPad is not having proper tabs, and this helps bring it to life.

Other cool features include custom gestures for navigation, a webzine feature that makes it easier to read content from your most visited sites, a sidebar for accessing bookmarks, a desktop mode option for switching between desktop and mobile site views, and a smart address bar that better predicts your URL.

For funding, MoboTap recently raised $10 million in a first round from Sequoia Capital with participation from Matrix Partners.

What do you think of the Dolphin Browser? Are you a fan?

Ming Chow, a lecturer at the computer science department of Tufts University, said last week in a talk at the Defcon hacker conference that the next major version of the hypertext markup language (HTML) is full of holes that could make it easy for malware authors to place rogue code into web sites and applications.

“The attack surface just got significantly larger,” Chow said in a follow-up interview. “Now with HTML5, a large population of victims can be reached very easily thanks to the complexities of the new web browser.”

That’s a problem because a number of HTML5 supporters among big tech companies want it to become the lingua franca of the web, where developers can create a single HTML5 application and have it run on web sites, mobile phones, and other devices.

HTML5 is still a work in progress, and it has major backing from Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Chow isn’t sure that the security vulnerabilities can be easily fixed. Rather, he says that developers may simply have to be aware of the problems and design around them as much as possible.

Among the features that could invite attack is the use of client-side storage in HTML5 applications. Client-side storage is a way to store data on a user’s hard drive rather than on a server. That makes the web app available offline and helps improve performance, but Chow says it is a vector for abuse. The size of the data for things like “cookies,” or sensitive data that helps identify a user, is now significantly higher. It used to be four kilobytes of data that could be stored, but now it’s more like 5 megabytes for client-side storage. And as Chow demonstrated in his talk, it is not so hard to get access to that data via a “cross-site scripting vulnerability” in the web application.

An attacker could set up a fake log-in page to a site in the client-side data storage on the user’s computer, and that fake page could be used to steal the user’s credentials. This is like an old exploit being used in a new attack environment. But it is also easier to hide evidence of the attack.

“If you don’t sanitize that data correctly, you can get at that data,” Chow said. “All that stuff you heard in the past about sanitizing data is just as important when the data is stored on the client side. These are lessons from 2004. Now we are in 2011. Everything in local storage is susceptible to being stolen. The problem has gotten that much greater. As dumb as it sounds, you’re always going to have developers who are going to store a lot of sensitive information in local storage.”

HTML5 can also tap the 2D graphics processing power of the device it is running on to accelerate the HTML5 applications. You can play videos without having to download a plug-in first. But that is also another way to introduce vulnerabilities, especially if there is a flaw in the codec — the encoder and decoder engine — for playing the video. Those codecs can be built by third parties.

“You just don’t know what is going on behind the scenes there,” Chow said. “We’re venturing into uncharted territory. That’s no man’s land.”

Still another feature is geolocation, which can tell web applications where you are for a variety of purposes. But an attacker can use the geolocation feature to determine your location without your knowledge.

HTML5 is still a work in progress and it isn’t done yet. (We’ve checked with them for a response). It is being incorporated into browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox, as well as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9. Chow said he hasn’t had a lot of feedback yet from the HTML5 working group. He isn’t optimistic because web sites are still being broken into using attacks from 2004 such as SQL injection, where the attacker fetches more data than necessary from a web database table.

Chow isn’t alone in raising security issues. A recent report by the European Union’s cyber security agency, ENISA, said the security threats number around 50 and they aren’t that small. One way to mitigate is to use SSL, or secure socket layer,

“HTML5 is not going to go away anytime soon,” Chow said. “Starting over with it is not a reasonable thing to do. The writers of the specification can do one thing. But the developers themselves need to keep an eye on security. Whenever there is a new language, there isn’t a lot of attention on security. It’s so scattered now. We haven’t trained web developers well enough. Adding this stack of HTML5 is only going to make it worse. We have to get security into the mindset of developers.”

He added, “Security seems like a complete afterthought in putting together the HTML5 specification. A lot of stuff to defend yourself — this is not new.”

The idea is to let you save content from your browser and access it later via a desktop or other device, like an iPhone or tablet. Founder Nathan Weiner notes that he was constantly struggling to move articles and movies from work to home. He found himself emailing this content and having tons of open browser tabs.

Currently, the tool is available on a variety of browsers, including Internet Explorer and Safari, as well as mobile operating systems like Blackberry, Android and Apple’s iOS. More than 3.5 million users have downloaded the app, and Weiner says it’s adding 10,000 downloads a day.

Read It Later isn’t the only one helping web surfers save their content. Instapaper offers a similar tool allowing you to save web pages to access later via a desktop or mobile device, though it doesn’t appear to have an Android app at this time.

The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2007, secured the funding from Foundation Capital, Baseline Ventures, Founder Collective, Google Ventures, and a number of other investors not named. As part of the funding, Weiner has also added 4 more employees, though specific jobs were not mentioned.

Both Instant Pages, which preloads your most likely search result, and print preview are important additions to Chrome, which is arguably the most innovative browser on the market. As a still young browser, Chrome’s market share worldwide has had remarkable growth. As of May, Chrome has an estimated 12.5 percent of the market.

Instant Pages marks the first time Google has implemented a feature to improve search. The company only offers the function in its own Chrome browser, but the code for Instant Pages is open-source, so other browsers could implement the feature if they want.

The print preview feature for Chrome is long-awaited and has comparably been offered in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer since 2000. Print preview was first requested by a user in Sept. 2008 on Google’s Chromium wiki and Google finally delivered it today.

I updated Chrome to the 13 beta to give it a spin. So far Instant Pages has not worked, but it’s possible the feature isn’t live just yet. Print preview, on the other hand, works like a joy and will help me figure out if certain pages are worth printing.

A recent blog post by Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, offers up the first real glimpse at what the open source browser maker intends to accomplish with Firefox 4. And not too surprisingly, it looks like Mozilla is racing to catch up with young browser upstart Google Chrome. Firefox currently holds about 30 percent of worldwide browser market share, with about 365 million users, according to Mozilla.

Beltzner lists the main goals Mozilla wants to accomplish with Firefox 4: It wants to make the browser fast (Chrome’s biggest advantage), powerful (by supporting new web standards like HTML 5), and empowering (by putting users in full control over their browser and web experience). He offered up more details via a set of slides (see below), but was adamant that the plans are still early and may change before Firefox 4′s release.

The new browser’s user interface takes a few cues from Chrome — tabs are now above the location bar, for one — but it still looks overall like a Firefox browser.

Mozilla’s last major browser release was Firefox 3.6 at the end of January. It made the browser slightly faster and more stable, but it still couldn’t hold a candle to Chrome’s benefits: Incredibly fast web browsing, and the ability to run tabs and plugins in separate system processes. The latter feature allows Chrome to keep functioning even after flaky plugins like Adobe Flash crash, or if a user accesses a troublesome web page on one tab.

Mozilla initially planned to offer plugins in separate processes with Firefox 3.7, but Beltzner notes in his slides that the company has relabeled that update to Firefox 3.6.4. The latest version of Firefox currently available to users is 3.6.3. Full support for separate processes in Firefox tabs probably won’t appear until Firefox 4 hits.

The browser maker plans to release the first Firefox 4 beta version sometime in June or July (around the Mozilla 2010 Summit). If all goes according to schedule, Mozilla will offer a Release Candidate in October (basically a more stable test version), and will ship the final version of Firefox 4 in November. Mozilla made a big event of the Firefox 3 launch, and it ended up surpassing its goal of 5 million downloads. We can expect even more festivities for Firefox 4.