In a press briefing yesterday, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 11 will support SPDY, the Google-backed protocol for speeding up download speeds for web sites. Microsoft only briefly talked about this in its briefing and didn’t even mention it in its announcement, but this is actually a major step for SPDY, which is now supported in all of the mainstream browsers.
If you are a Safari user then you might be familiar with the program's Bookmarks bar, where you can save links to individual Web pages, or group them as collections in folders. You can also use it to save any other location you can link to through Safari's address bar, including files and folders on the system. To do this, simply drag a file to the address bar, and you should see a bookmark to it as you would any other file. You can also load some files such as images directly into Safari by dropping them on a Safari window, and then bookmark them as you would any Web URL.
Opera has built a new Web browser from the ground up, and it's available now on Windows and Mac. The new Opera, which the organization is calling Next, its channel for what used to be known as "beta," was built from scratch, it claims. What has resulted is a much cleaner interface and a host of features that Opera says, will make it easier for users to find contents.
Yahoo's board has approved a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging site Tumblr, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal first reported the news on Sunday via Twitter. An imminent announcement of the acquisition had been expected. AllThingsD reported Friday that Yahoo's board was meeting this weekend to finalize a deal. Rumors about the possible tie-up first surfaced on Thursday.
Yahoo is doing some spring cleaning. The company announced its plans on Friday to shut down several products, including Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts, and the Yahoo Mail and Messenger apps used on feature phones. It's all about getting rid of the old to make room for the new, according to Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's executive vice president in charge of platforms, who wrote about the changes in a blog entry.
Up until now, only Apple's Safari browser had blocked third-party cookies by default. Last week's release of Firefox 22 to its developer's channel also came with the feature, indicating that the option will soon make it to all Firefox users. Firefox 22 Aurora blocks third-party cookies by default, putting the ad industry on notice that browsers are about to start looking askance at them. While Safari has had the feature for a long time, no other major browser has supported it until now. Mozilla first announced in February that it was changing its third-party tracking cookie policy.
It’s sure been an interesting week for people who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday Frederick Lardinois got an email from Mozilla, asking if he had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written in. Turns out, Mozilla Research wasn’t just going to work on this alone, but managed to get Samsung to help out with bringing this new engine that’s optimized for multicore and heterogeneous computing architectures to Android and ARM. Given that Mozilla had remained relatively quiet about Servo until now, it was a bit of a surprise that it was now ready to put it into the spotlight.
Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium to the various Chrome release channels, so users will see the first Blink-powered version of Chrome appear on their desktops, phones and tablets in the near future.
Back in 2011, Epic ported its popular Unreal Engine 3 technology to Flash and showed how relatively high-end 3D games could run in the browser. It’s 2013 now, however, and Flash isn’t exactly a hot topic anymore. So to show off what game developers can do with a modern browser and without plugins today, Mozilla and Epic teamed up a little while ago to port Unreal Engine 3 to the web, something that was unthinkable back in 2011.
Amazon Web Services believes wholeheartedly that the cloud is the future. And not just the cloud, but the AWS public cloud. As a result, Amazon sees big opportunity for its technology in the enterprise market and has been making some aggressive moves to fluster the incumbents and stalwarts, like Microsoft. The strategy has been to continue offering more and more services, beating its opponents at scale, while operating on razor-thin margins. And so far it’s been working: As Alex said in December, through its programmable architecture, volume and tiny margins, AWS has built a “$1.5 billion business.”