Updated at 3:21pm PT with comment from Hansen

Sharing is caring — except when you’re sued for sharing trade secrets. Opera Software, a Norwegian web and mobile browser company, is suing a former employee for $3.4 million for allegedly supplying competitor Mozilla with trade secrets.

The browser company explained in a statement sent to The Next Web that a hearing will take place in “late August” and that “Opera Software ASA is of the opinion that [Trond Werner] Hansen, after he left Opera, has acted contrary to his contractual and other legal obligations toward Opera, among other things, the duty of loyalty and his contractual and statutory confidentiality obligations.”

Opera may use as evidence a Mozilla Firefox video that shows Hansen speaking alongside Alex Limi, who runs product design strategy for the company, about a new iPad browser called Junior and new features for its existing browser products. Opera reportedly believes that Hansen and Mozilla discuss products that Opera has or is working on, supposedly revealing Hansen’s guilt.

Hansen says it’s quite the opposite and that he can prove he is not at fault.

“I strongly disagree with their position and I believe I have been wrongly accused, and that I can prove my case,” said Hansen in a blog post.

Hansen worked with Opera from 1999 to 2006 and again later in 2009 as a contractor. A “goodbye” blog post submitted by Hansen to the Opera “Desktop Team” blog shows that he led work on Opera’s design and user interface development specifically for Opera on Windows and desktops.

He explained that after his first departure from Opera he started toying with the idea of a new browser called “GB.” The GB would be a “green browser,” giving the money it makes through search providers (since these companies pay browsers for being the tool people use to access search engines) to various green-conscious charities. When he returned as a contractor to Opera, he says he discussed GB with then chief executive Jon von Tetzchner. The two decided not to go forward with the browser because they could not agree on payment terms and no deal, according to Hansen, was struck.

He went on, however, to contract for Opera from 2009-2010, where he admits, “some of my design proposals will naturally be based on some of my older GB concepts, since that’s the direction I wanted to take the browser.”

The video in question shows a Mozilla employee talking about a feature that Hansen told VentureBeat was a part of GB. This is what Opera and Hansen will eventually debate in court.

Hansen told The Next Web that he will be returning to the United States in the meantime to promote his music. We have been unable to independently confirm the amount being sued for, though local newspapers report the same. We have reached out to Opera and will update the post upon hearing back.

Opera Software image via andyket/Flickr

Rob Isaac is a New Zealand-based developer, technical analyst, and consultant. After the news that Google would be creating its own, Chrome-specific version of the Webkit browser rendering engine, called Blink, Isaac created this “translation” of Google’s developer FAQ for Blink. This FAQ was originally published on his website.

1 Why is Chrome spawning a new browser engine?

The WebKit maintainers wouldn’t let us attack Apple directly, by changing WebKit in ways that would make it perform badly on OS X and iOS.

Because they share a rendering engine, developer effort to ensure Chrome compatibility currently benefits Apple platforms for free. To prevent this, we must make Chrome and WebKit behave differently.

1.1 What sorts of things should I expect from Chrome?

Nothing yet. This is a political move, not a technical one.

However, while the Chrome user interface will not change in any significant way, we will be silently overwriting all existing installations of Chrome with our new rendering engine without your knowledge or consent.

1.2 Is this new browser engine going to fragment the web platform’s compatibility more?

Yes.

We intend to distract people from this obvious problem by continually implying that our as-yet unwritten replacement is somehow much better and more sophisticated than the rendering engine that until yesterday was more than good enough to permit us to achieve total dominance of the Windows desktop browsing market in less than two years.

This strategy has worked extremely well for Netscape, Microsoft, Apple and us in previous iterations of the browser wars, and we firmly believe that everyone in this industry was born yesterday and they will not recognise this for the total bullshit it so clearly is.

1.3 Hold up, isn’t more browsers sharing WebKit better for compatibility?

Yes. See 1.

1.4 How does this affect web standards?

We have sufficient market share on the desktop that a few months from now, we will be in a position to unilaterally dictate them.

We hope to leverage this control to achieve the same dominance in mobile eventually.

1.5 Will we see a -chrome vendor prefix now?

No. See 1.4.

1.6 So we have an even more fragmented mobile WebKit story?

Yes.

We encourage you to adopt Chrome on Android for your mobile browsing needs.

1.7 What’s stopping Chrome from shipping proprietary features?

Nothing.

1.8 Is this just a ruse to land the Dart VM or Native Client?

We’ve decided to avoid discussing unpopular topics like those for the time being.

1.9 What should we expect to see from Chrome and Blink in the next 12 months? What about the long term?

We have a direct strategic interest in destroying Apple’s mobile platforms because their lack of participation in our advertising and social ecosystems does not benefit our long term goals. You should expect Chrome and Blink changes in the short term to be focused in this direction.

In the longer term, we aim to have sufficient control over the installed base of web browsers to dictate whatever conditions we consider most appropriate to our business goals at the time.

1.10 Is this going to be open source?

Not really.

While you can certainly read the source code, we’re fully aware that actually tracking and understanding a modern HTML renderer is extremely difficult. In addition, the first changes we will make are intended specifically to break compatibility with WebKit, so the only organisation with sufficient resources to track our changes will no longer be able to do so.

In practice, this allows us to call the project “open” while simultaneously ensuring Google will be the only effective contributor to the Chrome and Blink source now and in the future. We’ve had enormous success co-opting the language of open source in the past to imply our products are better, and we aim to continue with that strategy.

1.11 Opera recently announced they adopted Chromium for their browsers. What’s their plan?

Opera have such a tiny market share that they have no choice other than to follow whatever strategy Chromium adopts. In this case, it means they will adopt the Blink renderer as quickly as possible.

1.12 Why is this is good for me as a web developer?

It isn’t. Our primary goal is to use your development efforts as leverage against our competitors. See 1.9.

photo credit: nitot via photopin cc

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Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox all fell to the mercy of the hackers today. That is, in a controlled environment.

Security firms Vupen and MWR Labs were able to crack the browsers during a condoned bug-hunt today, with one company winning $100,000 for finding a huge hole.

The Pwn2Own competition is an event at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. HP’s DVLabs created the competition as part of its Zero Day Initiative: an attempt to get more people to find and report bugs as opposed to exploiting them for personal gains. This year’s Pwn2Own competition turned up a number of interesting hacks, with three major browsers all falling: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome.

Vupen, a security research firm based in France, cracked both Firefox and Internet Explorer. It roughly explained the attack in a tweet (warning: A lot of security vocabulary is incoming), “We’ve pwned Firefox using a use-after-free and a brand new technique to bypass ASLR/DEP on Win7 without the need of any ROP.”

The technique involves recalling memory that the browser had previously “freed,” (user-after-free), after which they were able to mess with the technology that protects a computer system from letting bad code execute.

In Internet Explorer’s case, Vupen says it found two separate “zero-days,” or previously unknown holes in a system, and used them to get inside a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet. From there, the company was able grab hold of Windows 8.

The company explained, again, in a tweet, “We’ve pwned MS Surface Pro with two IE10 zero-days to achieve a full Windows 8 compromise with sandbox bypass.”

Lastly, U.K.-based security firm MWR Labs cracked Chrome and also gained full control of the operating system, this time Windows 7. It also “demonstrated a full sandbox bypass exploit.” The company explained in a blog post that it found a zero-day in Chrome “running on a modern Windows-based laptop.” It was able to exploit the vulnerability by performing a very similar attack to what took down Facebook, Microsoft, and a number of other well-known companies: It had the laptop visit a malicious website. From there the website probed Chrome and was able to get control of the area of the browser that executes code “in the context of the sandboxed renderer process,” or the protective area that allows code to run, but restrict it from using any other part of the system but the CPU and memory.

The sandbox cannot, however, protect against any attacks against the kernel, or the root of the operating system, it exists in and that’s exactly what MWR took advantage of. It found a vulnerability in the kernel, exploited it, and gained full access to the Windows 7 system.

Shabam.

All of these browsers had been previously patched in preparation for the competition, showing just how much can be missed and how valuable these types of bug-finding events are. MWR won $100,000 as a result. Of course, both MWR and Vupen properly disclosed all the documentation of its findings to the appropriate browser security teams.

hat tip ZDNet; Chrome coffee image via yukop/Flickr

If Microsoft is looking for someone to blame for its $732 million fine from the European Union, it could start by blaming Google.

According to sources quoted by the Financial Times, it was Google (along with Opera) that tipped off the EU about the lack of browser choice in Windows, putting the whole investigation in motion.

Google’s stake in the whole thing should be pretty clear: As the creator of the Chrome browser, the search giant has a major interest in whittling away at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer empire — hence why it makes so much sense that Google would want to help kickstart a look into Microsoft’s Windows browser defaults.

Google’s move also makes sense given the increasingly bitter relationship between it and Microsoft. Between Microsoft’s bitter anti-Google attack campaign and Google’s move to nix Exchange ActiveSync support for Windows Phone owners who use Gmail, the animosity between the two companies has never been more pronounced. And it’s certain to get worse over time.

Photo: Shutterstock

About 10 years ago, Don Melton was nervous as hell. Melton, Apple’s director of Internet technologies, had been tasked with building the Safari web browser and keeping the whole project secret.

While Apple has done a fairly good job of keeping hardware product designs secret (minus that one time), a web browser is a different story. What browsers are in use around the world are easily tracked by site administrators and web monitoring services.

Melton describes the ordeal of keeping Safari a secret in a blog post published late last night. He writes:

We weren’t under physical lockdown like Jony Ive’s design group was then, or like the iPhone team would be years later. But unless you knew who to look for, you were never going to find us on campus. And if you did, it’s unlikely you could tell what we were doing unless you caught one of us actually running Safari — something we usually did with our office doors closed.

I wasn’t worried about talk either. Forstall certainly trusted me – that’s one of the many things that made him a great boss. And I trusted my team — otherwise I wouldn’t have hired them. None of us nor any of the internal beta testers at Apple were going to snitch. There were too damn few beta testers, but they were above reproach.

Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist then. Nobody at Apple was stupid enough to blog about work, so what was I worried about?

Server logs. They scared the hell out of me.

Server logs make it easy to track which browser someone is currently using, so you have to be more clever than people with access to server logs.

Melton had one other big problem. Apple’s computer network has the same number (“17″) in front of its 16,777,216 static IP addresses. Which means anytime people did testing on Safari from Apple’s campus, it would be easy to spot the connection on a server log between the IP address number and the browser info.

To make sure server logs didn’t reveal Safari to the world before Apple did, Melton wrote code to create a fake “user agent string” on Safari. Instead of Safari, it appeared to server logs that Internet Explorer for Mac was in use. Later, Safari was masked to appear as if it was a Mozilla browser.

Melton writes:

Even though we operated the project like some CIA black op — with loyalty oaths and all — we couldn’t let Safari be “Safari” when we used it on the Apple campus network. Otherwise, some Web server administrator somewhere might be scanning their log files and notice the connection between user agent string and IP address origin. Then the big surprise Steve Jobs wanted to unveil at MacWorld on January 7, 2003, would be shot. And, likely, so would I.

So we hid my cleverly designed Safari user agent string whenever we were at Apple. And I say “my” because that’s actually one of the few pieces of code in Safari and WebKit that I can 1) claim to have designed and 2) is still actually in the source. Thank God my engineering team removed or refactored all my other hacks. I hired good people.

Whenever we were off the Apple campus network, e.g. in our homes, we modified Safari to enable its real user agent string. And we had to do this for compatibility testing. That allowed me to tweak the string for maximum compatibility with the websites of that time. Which explains why the Safari user agent string has so much extra information in it, e.g. KHTML, like Gecko — the names of other browser engines.

Finally, Melton had one more challenge. He needed to make sure the legitimate “user agent string” shipped with Safari on Jan. 7, 2003. So Melton and his team coded Safari so the real user agent string would automatically be enabled after a certain date. That way, the browser would finally display its info normally to server logs when regular people used the browser.

“Just about this time 10 years ago, days before it was to debut, Safari went from hiding its light under a bushel to being proud of who it really was,” Melton wrote.

Safari image via Apple

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Today, data analytics company Chartbeat released the latest creation from its company-wide hackathons: the Percent of the Internet tool. The tool shows you how many people, according to Chartbeat’s data, are using a certain browser or computer type at that moment.

It built the page in two hours and shows how many people at a given time are using Google’s Chrome browser, FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and it also looks at whether people are using a Mac, PC, or Linux device. It is based on an application programming interface Chartbeat created by pulling all of its client data and making the client anonymous.

“We’ve already received some awesome feedback, so we may decide to expand on it and spend more than two hours on it in the future,” said Chartbeat brand manager Lauryn Bennett in an e-mail to VentureBeat.

When you click on a the browser icon, a new page will open with the percentage of “active browser sessions” using that browser (see the image to the right). The same goes for types of computers. At the time of writing this post, over 5 million people, 22 percent of Chartbeat’s customers, are using Firefox.

Chartbeat holds week-long hack events for its employees every six weeks. It’s kind of like Google 20 percent rule, where 20 percent of the employee’s time is spent on building personal projects. During this past hack week, three of Chartbeat’s employees — Daniel McGrath, Tom Germeau, and Tadas Vilkeliskis — put together the Percent of the Internet page. They used JavaScript and HTML 5 to build it.

“There are loads of estimates on browser usage that so many companies put out there, but we know it’s constantly changing, so we wanted a real-time data point on what the breakdown is,” said Bennett. “Internally, it’s helpful for us to keep an eye on … how we build our products, and since we work with so many sites, we thought it would be a great (really just a quick, fun) real-time breakdown for the Internet at large.”

Disclosure: VentureBeat uses Chartbeat’s products.

The makers of the popular Dolphin Browser have released a new version of its Android app with an add-on called Jetpack that speeds it up to twice the speed of Chrome and ten times the speed of the stock Android browser.

Dolphin parent company MoboTap said today that its browser has reached 50 million installs, a sign it has largely succeeded in becoming the top third-party browser for mobile. In June, the company opened up APIs for its Android and iOS versions of Dolphin so third parties could create add-ons for the browser. Besides offering add-ons, Dolphin differentiates itself by offering gesture controls, voice commands, and more all in the same package.

Version 9 of Dolphin includes the following updates:

Network Diagnosis: Solve your network connection issues
Night Mode: Easily dim your screen to lower brightness level when browsing at night
Dolphin Connect: Option to sync your data when connected to WiFi
Dolphin Sonar (voice commands): Even more user friendly
Various performance improvements

And, of course, now the browser is adding speed with the Jetpack add-on. The add-on only works with Dolphin’s latest version, so you must download version 9 from Google Play before launching Jetpack.

Here’s how Dolphin 9 with Jetpack performed on various benchmark tests:

• HTML5test.com: Dolphin scores 480 vs Chrome 389 (HTML5test.com is an industry respected tool for testing a browser’s su­pport of HTML5)
• Ringmark: Dolphin is the very first and only browser to reach final ring (Facebook’s benchmark test)
• Octane: Dolphin: 1394 vs Chrome: 1333 (Chrome’s benchmark test)
• Sunspider: Dolphin took 1413.2ms vs Chrome took longer with score of 1847.9ms

Dolphin photo via Ste Elmore/Flickr

Update: Mozilla has patched Firefox 16 for a major vulnerability and has re-released the updated browser for download on its main site. Original story below.

Just a day after releasing the newest version of Firefox, version 16, Mozilla has pulled the updated browser over security concerns and advised those who already upgraded to roll back to version 15.

Mozilla noted that it is “actively working” to ship a version of 16 without the security issue and expects it be available Thursday. But “as a precaution,” Mozilla said users should consider downgrading to last version, 15.0.1. That is available for download here.

Michael Coates, Mozilla Director of Security Assurance, said in blog post that the vulnerability could “allow a malicious site to potentially determine which websites users have visited and have access to the URL or URL parameters.”

You can read the full blog post below:

Issue: Mozilla is aware of a security vulnerability in the current release version of Firefox (version 16). We are actively working on a fix and plan to ship updates tomorrow. Firefox version 15 is unaffected.

Impact: The vulnerability could allow a malicious site to potentially determine which websites users have visited and have access to the URL or URL parameters. At this time we have no indication that this vulnerability is currently being exploited in the wild.

Status: Firefox 16 has been temporarily removed from the current installer page and users will automatically be upgraded to the new version as soon as it becomes available. As a precaution, users can downgrade to version 15.0.1 by following these instructions [http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/new/]. Alternatively, users can wait until our patches are issued and automatically applied to address the vulnerability.

Red panda photo via ogwen/Flickr

As security takes the spotlight, hackers are often touted as being both smarter and faster than the average white hat. Google isn’t afraid to admit this and wants to pay up to $2 million in prizes for devastating exploits — no matter what hat you wear.

The company announced yesterday that it will award up to $2 million in prizes at the Hack in a Box conference in Kuala Lumpur to hackers who can deliver exploits and bugs associated with its Chrome Browser. The contest is called the Pwnium competition — a play on the words “pwn,” slang to take total control of something, and “Chromium,” a reference to the element Google’s Web browser is named after.

This is the second Pwnium competition Google has held. Last year, however, the company offered only $1 million in prizes.

Prizes are awarded in different levels. Those who find a “full Chrome exploit” get up to $60,000. A $50,000 prize is given to those who find a “partial exploit,” or have to use bugs in software Chrome may use but is not directly developed by the Chrome team.

A panel of judges will reward those who get part of the way but can’t make it to a full exploit. All exploits must be full documented, meaning you’ll need to record the steps you took to find the exploit. Google may also want you to demonstrate the way you found it as well.

The search giant recently changed its regular bug-reporting payment structure and is now offering $1,000 bonuses if an exploit or bug proves to be particularly valuable. That is, Google will shell out the extra cash after the fact if it turns out you poked a bigger hole than originally thought.

Forbes makes a good point in that, while Google and other companies such as social network Facebook offer cash incentives, there are much bigger entities with much deeper pockets. Governments and the police are willing to pay a lot more money for a bug that may be used to that entity’s benefit.

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Wargaming.net, the developer of strategy games like Order of War and World of Tanks, is launching a new title on a fresh platform.

World of Tanks: Generals is a browser-based, free-to-play collectible card game with real-time strategy elements. Players can reenact World War II in four nations at launch: the U.S., the U.S.S.R., France, and Germany. Gameplay involves using military units such as artillery and infantry, researching new technology, and purchasing tanks and other units for a more diverse experience.

The game features over 220 unique cards and several single-player and multiplayer modes.

“The Wargaming universe is evolving onto new platforms,” said chief executive officer Victor Kislyi. “World Of Tanks: Generals will merge the worlds of tabletop and video games, featuring solid mechanics, strategic thinking, and tactical twists in a fun, approachable way. It will feature the same great multiplayer tank warfare that Wargaming fans have come to love, just from an entirely new perspective.”

The move to browsers means World of Tanks: Generals doesn’t require game-client installation and instead supports cross-platform play across PCs, laptops, and tablets.

Although Wargaming is not revealing more details at this time, it will be showing World of Tanks: Generals at Gamescom this week. A board game version is also in the works.

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Around 28 million PCs were sent the Windows 7 update, Microsoft said. However, 90 percent of Windows users have an earlier version of the operating system, the company said. Hoping to minimize the impact of the error, Microsoft said it issued a fix of the missing browser choice screen within a day after detecting the mistake.

“While we have taken immediate steps to remedy this problem, we deeply regret that this error occurred and we apologise for it,” the company said in a statement. Despite the steps to correct the mistake, the EU has opened a new investigation into the error, saying any penalty could be “severe.”

“Needless to say, we take compliance with our decision very seriously,” the AP quotes EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia.

In 2010, Microsoft  agreed to offer a screen permitting Europeans to choose a browser other than the company’s Internet Explorer. The screen gives Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Opera as IE alternatives. The software company offered EU regulators the browser choice screen as an alternative to entirely stripping IE from Windows.

IE is not as dominant now as in years past. Earlier this year,  Google’s Chrome was ranked in first place worldwide. In Europe, IE and Chrome are fighting for second place to No. 1 Firefox, according to Statcounter. Microsoft’s browser still has plenty of friends, though. The Windows default browser is No. 1 in China, North America and Oceania.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Who needs mobile Safari? Google announced today that its popular Chrome web browser is finally headed to the iPhone and iPad.

The company made the announcement at its I/O developers conference today, amidst several Chrome-related announcements. The Chrome apps should be available in the iTunes App Store later today.

A Google representative demonstrated both the Chrome iOS apps on stage, showing how easy it is to juggle between tabs and use incognito mode for private browsing. Not surprisingly, the apps resemble their Android counterparts: the iPhone Chrome app has a similar method for managing tabs, while the iPad app sports tabs at the top of the screen (like the Nexus 7 and Chrome on desktops).

The Chrome iOS release is somewhat ironic, since Chrome is only available to the lucky few Android users running Android 4.0 or above.

When asked for comment about what’s powering the Chrome iOS apps, a Google representative offered the following statement:

Chrome for iOS provides the same fast, secure and stable web browsing experience you’ve come to enjoy when using Chrome on your desktop or Android device, while also adapting to platform specific technical specifications.  Rendering and the javascript engine are provided by iOS through UIWebView, so Chrome for iOS does not use Chrome v8 JS engine.

Apple has strict rules preventing third-party browsing engines on iOS, so the Chrome app is doing the same thing as Firefox by using Apple’s browsing engine.

Still, the Chrome iOS apps will be useful for features like private browsing and synchronization with your Google account. I’ve been a big fan of Chrome on Android, so it’s nice to have a somewhat similar experience on iOS finally.

Images via Google I/O live stream

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Watch out Google Chrome: For many Android users, Mozilla’s updated Firefox app could quickly become their favorite mobile browser.

Mozilla has been beta testing a revamped version of its Android Firefox app for over a month now, and today the company is rolling those updates into the official Firefox Android app. The app now sports a slick new interface, incredibly fast startup and browsing speeds, support for Adobe Flash, and new HTML5 features.

In short, it’ll give Google’s Chrome Android app (my favorite mobile web browser) a run for its money. Mozilla also has a big advantage: The new Firefox app works on any Android 2.2 phone or newer, while the Chrome beta app only works on Android 4.0 devices.

According to the latest Android version adoption statistics from Google, that gives the new Firefox a potential market of around 94 percent of Android devices, while Chrome only has 7 percent of the market running Android 4.0 or newer.

I’ve been testing out Mozilla’s latest Android Firefox beta for some time now on a Samsung Galaxy S III, and I’ve found it to be the best mobile browsing experience I’ve had yet. Taken together with Chrome, it’s clear that Android is now the most exacting mobile platform when it comes to web browsing innovation. (Apple’s Safari has also seen quite a few speed improvements in iOS 6, but that platform doesn’t allow for the sort of browsing engine competition we’re now seeing on Android.)

As advertised, the new Firefox app is blazing fast. It starts up almost instantaneously and pulled up mobile websites like the New York Times, CNN, and Yelp, almost as fast. It remained speedy for bandwidth-hogging websites meant for desktops, like Cracked.com, that feature large images and Flash videos. Browsing speed was about on-par with Google Chrome — it was faster in some instances, and slower in others — but I’m giving Firefox the edge since it works on so many more Android devices.

The new Android Firefox app isn’t just fast, it’s also gorgeous. When you first launch it, you’re presented with a start screen that features your most recently and frequently visited sites. There’s a new tab interface that’s a far leap beyond the previous Firefox app, and the mere act of scrolling through websites feels smoother. (Mozilla claims that it’s around twice as fast as Chrome when panning the mobile version of CNN.)

The Firefox app still sports the same tab synchronizing features of Mozilla’s other apps. The company also touts it as the first mobile browser to support Do Not Track, a feature that can prevent websites from tracking your online behavior.

Just as Firefox was the great savior from Internet Explorer for many Windows desktop users years ago, Mozilla’s new Firefox Android app could do the same for Google’s platform. The stock Android browser is slow, ugly, and featureless — which leaves the door wide open for Mozilla to provide something better. And while Google isn’t too concerned with improving the browsing experience for pre-Android 4.0 users, Mozilla has shown that even crummy Android phones can have halfway-decent browsing.

Check out just how fast the new Firefox app launches in the video below:

Photo via ogowen/Flickr

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While news of Apple’s latest Macbook Pro, iOS 6, and Siri upgrades are sure to dominate headlines, the company is also making some big changes to Safari.

One of the larger updates is Safari’s new unified universal search. Channeling Google and Chrome, Apple is combining Safari’s search and URL bars. With the new feature, browser history, bookmarks, and the web can all be searched from a single field.

Apple has also added a feature called iCloud Tabs, which, when linked with a user’s iCloud account, allows them to sync tabs across computers and devices. This is identical to a feature Google introduced to Chrome last month.

Apple has also updated Safari with a new scrolling architecture, which the company says make scrolling “smooth and lighting fast.”

Rounding out the new developments are native Twitter and Facebook integration, which will make sharing links significantly easier. Stay tuned for more on Apple’s intense cozying-up to Facebook; we’ve got details coming live from WWDC all morning.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile Safari, the browser found on Apple’s iOS devices, is quickly emerging as a major player in the new browser wars. Now as Internet Explorer’s market share is falling, mobile Safari is snapping up Internet Explorer users alongside Google’s Chrome browser, according to the latest data from ecommerce technology company Monetate.

Based on data from the more than 100 websites using Monetate’s platform, the company found that mobile Safari market share jumped to 11.12 percent in the January-March 2012 quarter, up from 5.84 percent a year ago. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer’s share fell from 53.45 percent last year to 42.35 percent.

Safari’s growth was slightly faster than Google Chrome, which grew from 8.08 percent last year to 14.42 percent this quarter. Given the continued success of the iPhone and iPad, I suppose it’s not too surprising that a mobile browser is now shaping up to be a browser war contender.

The news is particularly interesting since recent data from NetMarketShare showed Internet Explorer was finally regaining market share.

As always, we should take this data with a grain of salt based on Monetate’s sampling, but it’s still interesting to see. Check out the full infographic below (click to enlarge), which also lists browser market share data from StatCounter.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 web browser will include a default “Do Not Track” feature that allows users to stop advertisers from tracking and collecting their personal data while surfing the net, the company announced late yesterday.

Apparently, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz wasn’t exaggerating when he said that the DNT feature would be adopted by a significant number of companies online before the end of the year. The DNT feature built into web browsers allows websites to give their visitors the option of having their personal information tracked and collected for ad targeting and marketing purposes. Twitter is one of the first major websites to support the new feature, with Microsoft saying it’ll make its own sites compatible with DNT soon.

Internet Explorer (all versions), which accounts for more than 18 percent of global browser usage, is the second web browser to adopt the DNT feature. Mozilla’s Firefox has been testing the DNT feature since last year, but users must turn it on through the browser’s preference options. IE10, by contrast, will have the feature turned on by default, as demonstrated in the Windows 8 Release Preview that rolled out yesterday.

“We’ve made today’s decision because we believe in putting people first,” wrote Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch. “We believe that consumers should have more control over how information about their online behavior is tracked, shared, and used.”

Reading between the lines a bit, it’s easy to see that this move will clearly win over some of Microsoft’s customers. And even if its advertising revenue suffers in the long run, Microsoft isn’t a company that’s entirely reliant on its ad business. One of Microsoft’s major competitors, Google, can’t say the same.

However, at least one group is really not happy about Microsoft’s decision. While Lynch noted that Microsoft still sees value in targeted advertising, as well as its importance in the industry to make money for publishers and bring new products to market, having the DNT feature turned on by default in IE10 didn’t sit well with major ad industry group the Digital Advertising Alliance.

In an agreement with the White House back in February (PDF), the DAA agreed to the terms of the FTC’s initial “Do Not Track” guidelines so long as the feature wasn’t made as a default option. DAA General Council Stu Ingis told the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft’s decision “raises a lot of concern,” and that his group supports “consumer choice, not a choice made by one browser or technology vendor.”

Photo via karamish/Shutterstock

Google Chrome isn’t just for über-geeks anymore. Google’s minimalist web browser is now the most popular web browser in the world, according to the latest figures from StatCounter.

For the week of May 14th to May 20th, Chrome edged out Internet Explorer — which has been losing market share precipitously — for the first time ever. StatCounter’s data shows that Mozilla Firefox has been slowly dipping in popularity, and that Chrome surpassed it in market share in early November last year (though Firefox usage shot up a bit in recent weeks).

The news isn’t too surprising, since Google has done a remarkable job of quickly improving Chrome and adding features that easily tie into your Google account. Last week, the company added a useful tab synchronization feature to the latest version of Chrome, which likely helped drive new downloads.

Looking at the browser market by region, it’s clear that South America gave Chrome a big push in worldwide numbers. Chrome’s popularity skyrocketed in South America over the last year, almost doubling to 52 percent. It’s unclear what exactly is driving Chrome’s numbers in the region, though I assume the popularity of Google’s Orkut social network in Brazil has something to do with it.

In North America, Internet Explorer is still slightly more popular than Chrome, though Microsoft’s browser has been steadily dropping in popularity over the last year. That generally seems to be the story of most regions — even though Internet Explorer 9 was a surprisingly intriguing release, it wasn’t enough to fight against the rising tide of Chrome hype.

Via The Verge; Photo via Van_PC/Flickr

Google has released its latest version of its Chrome browser, version 18, which features better hardware-accelerated graphics and nine security fixes.

Chrome became the number two browser by worldwide market share this past December, surpassing Firefox but still behind Internet Explorer. Each release adds new features and ways to improve security, in hopes of retaining and attracting users. On the security front, Google offered up to $1 million to hackers who would publicly find security cracks in the Chrome browser, with the goal of implementing changes to fix the flaws.

Those welcome security fixes are implemented in this release, including ways to address one low-severity, five medium-severity, and three high-severity issues. Specifics about the vulnerabilities will be withheld from the public until the majority of Chrome users have updated their browsers. The release also includes the new Adobe Flash Player 11.2.

Futhermore, Chrome 18 adds better graphical capabilities to the browser, and which will even make graphics better on older PCs. Specifically, this updates includes hardware-accelerated rendering for HTML5 Canvas for both Windows and Mac computers. The releases also adds TransGaming’s SwiftShader engine, which makes it possible to render 3D web graphics based on the WebGL standard, even on older machines.

“Today’s web brings beautiful, rich experiences right into your browser,” Googler Vangelis Kokkevis wrote on a company blog. “With Chrome’s most recent Stable channel release, we’ve sped up graphics and drawing performance for users on capable hardware, and enabled fancier 3D content for other users on older computers.”

Google Chrome Japan ad: Junya Ogura/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is hard at work on a Metro-style version of its Chrome browser for Windows 8, a sign that the company is taking Microsoft’s new touch-friendly OS seriously.

The Windows 8 OS, which will be released later this year, lets companies develop apps for its touch-based Metro interface, as well as for a traditional desktop environment. Google’s move follows Mozilla’s decision to produce a new version of Firefox for Windows 8 in mid-February. Mozilla said at the time that building a Metro-style browser requires a different type of coding than the normal desktop app, so it needs time to develop it.

The revelation that Google is working on Windows 8 version of its browser comes from Mashable. A Google representative explained the decision to the outlet: “Our goal is to be able to offer our users a speedy, simple, secure Chrome experience across all platforms, which includes both the desktop and Metro versions of Windows 8. To that end we’re in the process of building a Metro version of Chrome along with improving desktop Chrome in Windows 8 such as adding enhanced touch support.”

Chrome and Firefox will compete with Microsoft’s pre-installed Internet Explorer 10 for Metro. Apple and Opera — which also make rival web browsers — have thus far not announced creating Metro-enabled browsers for Windows 8.

Google Chrome Japan ad: Junya Ogura/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual MobileSummit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of themobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Despite search titan Google asking hackers to publicly break its Chrome browser for past four years, it wasn’t until yesterday that it finally happened — with the company dishing out thousands of dollars to a hacker who cracked Chrome at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

During Google’s own Pwnium competition, Russian university student Sergey Glazunov won $60,000 for hacking a PC running Chrome. Glazunov discovered a new exploit that only affects Chrome and went around its “sandbox” restriction that is supposed to prevent hackers from accessing an entire computer system, according to ZDNet.

In a separate CanSecWest event called Pwn2Own, hosted by HP, researchers from the security firm VUPEN found a flaw in Chrome in the first five minutes of the competition, according to Pwn2Own’s Twitter account.

Google said it would offer up to $1 million in prizes for Chrome exploits found during its own Pwnium competition, but Glazunov appears to be the biggest winner so far.

Google’s purpose for hosting these hacking competitions is to help the company find out the biggest flaws in its Chrome, patch those flaws, and ultimately make the browser safer. All exploits found during the public competition have to be verified by Google and will no doubt be patched with the latest update for Chrome.

Are you a Chrome user? Have you ever had your credit card or personal data stolen while using it?

Money on keyboard photo: Ruslan Semichev/Shutterstock

“To get you where you want to go even faster, Chrome will now start loading some web pages in the background, even before you’ve finished typing the URL in the omnibox,” Google software engineer Dominic Hamon wrote in a blog post on the release. “If the URL auto-completes to a site you’re very likely to visit, Chrome will begin to prerender the page.”

The speedy new feature reminds us a lot of Google Instant, a lightning-fast 2010 search enhancement that returns results as you type.

The new Beta release has also been infused with security features to better protect users as they download files from the web. The browser can now scan the executable files you download — .exe and .msi files only to start — to determine whether they are malicious in nature, and provide with you warnings to keep you informed.

The update demonstrates Google’s ongoing commitment to speed and security. Once the new features make their way over to the stable version of Chrome (a Google rep said a date hasn’t been set yet), they’ll certainly help make the company’s increasingly popular browser further stand out from the likes of Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Image courtesy of thesussman/Flickr

“IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away,” wrote Roger Capriotti, Director of Internet Explorer Marketing, in a company blog post. “Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6.”

Last March, Microsoft launched the IE6 Countdown website to track the slow and painful death of the outdated browser. Microsoft even partnered with many tech companies and websites like Kayak, Meebo and CNET to advertise a banner to IE6 users encouraging them to upgrade. The most stubborn country to update is China with 25.5 percent of that country’s share allocated for IE6, according to IE6 Countdown. Other update offenders include South Korea, which has 7.2% IE6 share, and Japan at 5.9% IE6 share.

Facebook, one of the most trafficked sites in the world, has even gone a step further to help get the world’s browsers upgraded. Last week, it was reported that Facebook’s new Timeline feature would not function for Internet Explorer 7 users, forcing them to update to IE8 or IE9.

Of course, in the complete scope of things, Microsoft might not want to drink too much of that champagne because Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers are munching away at Internet Explorer’s market share. A December report by StatCounter said Chrome has 25.7 percent share of the global browser market while Firefox has a 25.2 percent share. While Internet Explorer is still the big dog, it’s losing ground fast to its peers.

More than 400 such posts, which contain the phrase “This post is sponsored by Google,” were first uncovered by SEO Book’s Aaron Wall, which led Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan to do even more digging.

Why the hubbub? Google expressly forbids the use of paid links to influence search rankings, and last year it penalized companies like JC Penney and Overstock for using such links. If a sponsored post does link back to an advertiser’s site, it must use the “nofollow” tag so that it doesn’t influence search rankings.

The company notably also penalized itself, including Google Japan and Google-owned Beatthatquote, last year for breaking its own rule, Sullivan points out.

That means, in the worst case, the company may have to ban the Chrome download page from its search engine. That certainly won’t help Chrome when it comes to taking on Internet Explorer and Firefox, especially among general users. The company has also been promoting Chrome heavily in more legitimate ways via online and TV ads — efforts that may be wasted if Chrome disappears from Google search.

Google hasn’t yet officially commented on the matter, ostensibly because most employees had yesterday off. But the company is definitely aware of the issue, as Chrome vice president Linus Upson commented last night on Sullivan’s Google+ thread, “News to me. Looking in to it.”

That Google hasn’t immediately denounced the news means that the company may indeed be involved with these posts, albeit unwillingly. It’s possible that a lone wolf within the company, desperate to increase Chrome’s profile on the web, began this sponsored post campaign to shine additional light on the fast growing browser.

The campaign appears to have been run by Unruly Media, a third-party firm, Sullivan points out. What’s worse for Google is that much of the paid posts seem to be of extremely low quality, something the recent Panda update for Google Search was meant to minimize.

Unruly CEO Scott Button responded to the controversy by saying it’s not actually violating Google’s rules, reports All Things D:

Andrew’s absolutely right — we don’t ask bloggers to link to the advertiser’s site. It’s just not part of our business model. We help advertisers distribute video content and that’s what we get paid for. All links from the video player itself are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings. Even though we don’t ask bloggers to link, we do advise them to use nofollow if they do link to the advertiser’s site. This is really important and they should do it to protect themselves as much as the advertiser.

Button admitted that one post didn’t properly use the nofollow tag in a link, but that was eventually fixed. Of course, he didn’t comment on the fact that many of the posts appear to be poorly written junk.

Update: In a statement to the Verge, a Google representative lays the blame on Unruly Media: “Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products.”

There’s no word yet on whether the Google Chrome site will be penalized.

We reported at the beginning of August that Chrome had overtaken Firefox in the UK, but now that trend appears to be intensifying on a worldwide scale. Chrome has gained an incredible eight percentage points in worldwide market share since January, which is a 50 percent increase in total share growth, and it is expected to keep growing at a quick pace.

The data from StatCounter, as first noted by Computerworld, says both Microsoft’s No. 1 Internet Explorer and Firefox have been losing market share since January, with most of those lost customers being picked up by Google.

As of Wednesday, Chrome’s global share for September was 23.6% with Firefox at 26.8% and Internet Explorer at 41.7%. For Chrome to surpass Firefox by the end of the year, StatCounter makes the assumption that Chrome’s rapid growth will continue at the same pace. At the end of the year, Chrome should have approximately 26.6% share and Firefox should have 25.3%.

A rival report by U.S. web metrics company Net Applications shows a much wider current gap between Chrome and Firefox. In August, Net Apps said Chrome had 15.5% of market share and Firefox had 22.6%. But if Chrome keeps up its growth pace, Net Applications’ data points to Chrome surpassing Firefox by the middle of 2012, which would still be an impressive feat.

What’s your favorite web browser?

Last month, Chrome overtook Mozilla Firefox by a hair with 22.1 percent of the U.K. market, according to the web metrics firm Statcounter. Firefox has 22.0 percent of the market. Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser with 45 percent. Apple’s Safari is number four, with a 9 percent share, according to the Statcounter study.

Chrome launched in the U.K three years ago and has gained share despite Internet Explorer’s advantage of coming pre-installed on almost all computers sold in Britain. Users are finding Chrome on their own or through Google’s advertising initiatives, including Chrome TV commercials. Chrome is the first Google product to be advertised on British TV.

Lars Bak, the Google engineer responsible for Chrome, says it’s Chrome’s speed that is attracting users. ”Speed is a fundamental part of it,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. “It’s also about the minimal design and the way it handles security. If you as a user try [to load] a webpage and it feels snappy, it’s really hard to go back. It has shown that people spend more time interacting with the web.”

Bak works from a farmhouse in the Danish countryside, two hours from Copenhagen. That rural location hasn’t affected Bak’s mentality. His interview with The Guardian reveals Bak is obsessed with speed. ”You should never be happy with [existing] speed,” he said to The Guardian. “Of course it gets harder to make substantial gains, but it’s all healthy competition.”

In June Statcounter revealed that Chrome was the third most popular browser worldwide, with a 20.7 percent market share up from 2.8 percent in June 2009. Firefox and Internet Explorer have fallen steadily in rank during that time period. Internet Explorer dropped from 59 percent to 44 percent, and Firefox dropped from 30 percent to 28 percent.

In June, Google released Chromebook laptops from Amazon and Best Buy. The netbooks are manufactured by Samsung and Acer. Google is testing U.S. consumers with the release to see if they are interested in a new kind of operating system that is focused on web applications.

Internet Explorer has been losing market share for years, first to Mozilla’s Firefox and now to both Firefox and Google’s Chrome. With the release of Internet Explorer 9, it appeared Microsoft recognized this problem by adding new features and pushing better performance to keep users from leaving. With Internet Explorer 10, Microsoft probably hopes to keep users from leaving and to win some back as well.

The second preview of IE10, which comes 11 weeks after the first preview was launched, has lots of new features and background elements that enhance performance. It specifically includes “support for major platform features like HTML5 Parser, HTML5 Sandbox, Web Workers, HTML5 Forms, Media Query Listeners and more,” according to Microsoft’s release notes.

Arguably the biggest enhancement is support for the Web Worker API, which lets developers take advantage of things like multi-core processors when they work with JavaScript. Basically, when a website is rendering images or something complex, IE10 will take advantage of hardware to make the site load more smoothly or even run scripts that are more complicated than ever before.

IE10′s second preview also outpaces the first preview’s HTML5 performance on www.html5test.com. The second preview scored a 231 while the first preview had a 125. Both of those scores, however, are easily beaten by Firefox 5′s 296 and Chrome 12′s 327. At the very least, IE10 is a step in the right direction.

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next with this browser. While I prefer Chrome 12 and Firefox 5 any day to Internet Explorer 9, I love the idea of using hardware acceleration to boost what you can get out of the web. The best part of the browser wars is that even if some company clearly loses, the resulting technology improvements from the fierce competition end up helping all of us.

Now that Mozilla has put itself on a rapid release development cycle, similar to what Google does with Chrome, old numbered versions of the product will no longer get security updates. Users that don’t update will likely be exposed to vulnerabilities as they are discovered.

A mozilla.dev.planning mailing list indicates that Mozilla views Firefox as “end of life” for security patches. The last update to Firefox 4 was 4.0.1 on April 28, which fixed eight vulnerabilities.

Chrome has solved the problem of lagging security updates by having the browser automatically update, which means users almost always run the latest and most secure version. Unfortunately, Mozilla does not have automatic updating in place. Instead, a pop-up window shows up on screen to let the user know about the latest major update.

I’ve used both Firefox and Chrome extensively, and I much prefer the Chrome approach. When you see a pop-up telling you to upgrade, you’ll likely only upgrade if you’re not busy doing something else. Automatically upgrading to the latest version forces the user to be safe rather than letting him or her sit there as a hacker takes advantage of a security hole in an old version of the browser.

The only reason users may choose not to update to the new version is to keep their add-ons working if the latest version does not support them. But those users need to ask themselves if a certain add-on or two not working in a new version is worth added security risks.

If you’re a Firefox user and haven’t updated to 5, I’d recommend doing so immediately. If you’re using Chrome, well, let it ride.

Co-founders Eric Vishria and Tim Howes told me that they consulted with Facebook team members while working on their latest release. And while RockMelt already included a number of Facebook-related features, like the ability to chat with Facebook friends directly in the browser, the founders said the social networking company is now allowing them to integrate much more closely — thanks to Facebook’s cooperation, Vishria said this version includes a number of features “that we couldn’t accomplish in the past.”

Today’s changes fall into three main categories. First, there’s an improved interface for Facebook Chat, allowing people to bring up a full list of their Facebook friends and stick it on either side of the browser. Second, you can now manage your Facebook friend requests and respond to Facebook messages directly from RockMelt without visiting the Facebook site itself — Vishria and Howes said this has been one of the most-requested features from RockMelt fans.

I was most impressed with the third set of changes, which create a more seamless experience when you visit the Facebook website while using RockMelt. Since there are already boxes for friend requests, messages, and notifications in RockMelt, those elements disappear from Facebook. And when you start a chat with someone on Facebook.com, it will immediately open as a RockMelt chat window.

According to Vishria, there are more features coming — although he declined to get specific, because he said, “Honestly,” I’m not sure yet.”

RockMelt has raised $10 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft wasn’t at all shy today about proclaiming the awesomeness of Internet Explorer 9 for Windows Phone 7, which will be part of a major fall update for the mobile platform.

Director of the Windows Phone program, Joe Belfiore, the closest thing the platform has to a public champion, showed off just how fast IE9 is compared to the iPhone 4’s browser and Android’s browser on the Nexus S. Not surprisingly, IE9 bested its competition (see video below) — mostly due to its support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration.

Even though IE9 was benchmarked on one of Microsoft’s own browser tests, the win is still a swift kick in the pants to Apple and Google, because it shows that Microsoft has finally surpassed them in one aspect of mobile innovation.

Belfiore says that IE9 on Windows Phone 7 runs the same powerful new engine found in the desktop version of the browser, which I found to be fast in my testing, though not as fast as desktop versions of Firefox or Chrome. IE9’s browsing engine has more of a chance to shine on mobile devices since both Apple and Google have been slow to implement extensive HTML5 support and hardware acceleration on their mobile browsers.

As you can see in the video below, Internet Explorer 9 ran Microsoft’s HTML5 benchmark at around 20 frames per second, while the Android phone chugged along at 11 FPS, and the iPhone didn’t even finish the bench in time, with 2FPS performance (even with a head start). Again, the test was definitely cherry-picked by Microsoft to show off its Windows Phone 7 improvements, but it’s still a clear sign that Apple and Google will have to step up their mobile browser game.

Via Winrumors

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. We’ve pretty much finalized the invite list, but have a few spots left. Request an invitation.

That’s the experience Virtual World Computing promises with it’s new Cocoon browser plug-in.

The Cocoon plug-in works with Firefox and other browsers to effectively unplug your computer from the internet and route you instead through Cocoon’s servers. Those servers filter out the bad stuff and let you surf the web through Cocoon’s own connections as fast as possible.

“We let you have more control, like setting up an electric fence around your house,” said Jeff Bermant (pictured right), chief executive and founder of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Virtual World Computing.

The benefit of going through Cocoon’s connection is that web sites can’t spy on you. They see only Cocoon, not your computer, as if you were using an “in-private browsing” feature. Normally, browsing the web privately would mean your machine would browse the web as if it were stripped of tracking software known as “cookies.” If you take out your cookies, you are in for a rude surprise when you visit a site such as Amazon.com, which won’t recognize who you are and won’t let you log in without those cookies.

But Cocoon has a clever scheme for letting you get around that. When you log into Cocoon’s SE Linux-based secure servers, everything you do is encrypted. Your browsing history, personal information, and passwords used on web sites are all protected. When you visit Amazon, no data is revealed about your computer, your internet connection, your service provider or your location. But you can still sign in via a kind of proxy.

Rather than using a traditional third-party site to mask your movements, such as a proxy server or Tor identity-masking network, Cocoon tweaks your browser. Cocoon then creates “mail slots” for you, concocting a random and disposable email address for every site that you want to log into on a regular basis. Cocoon will automatically fill out a form when you sign up, substituting a Cocoon-generated email address for your actual email address. You don’t have to remember the Cocoon email at all. When the web site wants to verify your email, it will send an email to the Cocoon email address. You can go into your mail slots, click on the name of the web site, and find the verification email there. You can then open it and click on the verification link from the web site. After you do that, the web site will confirm your account as a real one and let you proceed to browse or buy things. Cocoon can store cookies related to that site, but you don’t have to do so on your own machine.

One protection is clear. If hackers break into a company and steal your email address, as happened with the cyber attack against email marketing company Epsilon, the hackers won’t get your real email address. They will only be able to steal the Cocoon address. Your privacy is protected. Your Cocoon email address can’t be used to send email to anyone; that blocks spammers from signing up for Cocoon accounts.

Another benefit is that you can log into Cocoon from anywhere and then log into a web site. Normally, you would have to log in and prove to that web site that you are who you say you are. But Cocoon handles that for you so you can quickly get on with what you want to do. You can even log into Cocoon and see all 30 web sites you had open the last time you logged off.

Bermant founded the company in 2008 with chief technology officer Brian Fox. Bermant had a bad experience where a virus took over his server and spammed his friends with 30,000 messages a day.

“I felt there has to be a better way to browse,” Bermant said. “I didn’t like being followed around, with cookies landing on my computer without my knowledge.”

The solution was to recreate the browser so that you don’t touch the internet directly, tapping instead the benefits of virtualized and cloud computing. And you can do what you normally do. If you want to download a game, you can still do so. But soon Cocoon will scan that download for you first to check to see if any viruses are in it. You can visit a Flash web site and enjoy the rich animation without worrying that it is going to deliver a virus. And you can browse the web without worrying that a site like Facebook, or perhaps a government spying agency, is tracking your every move.

Cocoon can also be set up with master accounts and sub-accounts so that children can safely cruise the web. You can lock down the sub-accounts so they can only visit safe sites, and you can track every site the kids visit using Cocoon’s own tracking ability. You can also block the user’s ability to fire up another browser. And for yourself, you can turn off Cocoon’s ability to track your history. In that case, your internet service provider also won’t know your web-browsing history.

You can sign up for Cocoon and get a 30-day free trial and then pay $6.95 a month for it after that. There are rivals out there, but Cocoon has gone a long way to making this friendly to consumers who don’t want a lot of hassle just to browse the web privately and safely. You can, for instance, hide Cocoon from your browser window and also turn it off with a single button click.

The company already has more than 4,000 active users and is self-funded. Its advisors include Marvin Minsky, the artificial intelligence expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.