The Download Blog

The latest update to Chrome beta refocuses its attention on speed through better memory management, as well as making numerous HTML5 and offline improvements in today's release.

Google reports that Web site content loaded in Chrome 27 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux, should appear about 5 percent faster because of how the browser manages its resources. Basically, the browser's resource scheduler gives more priority to critical resources, over preloaded content.

Calendar forms should look a bit cleaner in the beta because it now uses HTML5 date and time < input > code. WebReal-Time Communication (WebRTC) also gets … Read more

Blink, Google's new fork of the WebKit browser engine, is alive.

Yesterday, Google announced the project, which splits its browser work from Apple's in the open-source WebKit project. Today, Blink is up and running.

The first updates -- including a new list of 36 Blink "owners" who have authority to approve changes -- are arriving.

"Chrome 28 will be the first blinking release," Chrome programmer Mike West said in a Hacker News comment. The current stable version of Chrome is version 26; new versions arrive about every six weeks.

"The repository seems to … Read more

Chrome on desktops has been able to sync personal data like passwords and online form fields for ages, but the features just landed in the Android version of the browser today.

Chrome 26 for Android (download) brings automatic form filling and password synchonrization to the mobile browser, as well as unnamed performance and stability fixes. The new version of the browser also repairs a problem where a blank page would be shown instead of loading the correct URL.

Some features that made it into the beta version of Chrome 26 for Android don't appear to be in today's … Read more

Along with an update to the infamous "porn mode" that turns off your browser's ability to record your browsing session, the new Firefox 20 includes usability and back-end changes.

Firefox 20 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) updates now allow you to run a private browsing session in a new window, alongside a standard Firefox browsing window. On Firefox 20 for Android (download), the browser now lets you run private mode tabs next to standard session tabs.

Private browsing on Firefox is analogous to Internet Explorer's InPrivate or Chrome's Incognito. It's a feature that turns … Read more

Chrome 27, making its way through the development pipeline, is helping to advance the fortunes of a new audio compression technology called Opus.

Opus is what's called a codec -- a technology to encode and decode streams of information, in this case audio. Technically, it's actually two codecs in one, an approach that lets it span a range of uses from Internet telephony on slow networks to streaming high-quality music on fast networks.

One of its chief virtues is low latency: there's not a long wait for audio to be encoded or decoded, something that's not … Read more

Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer might just support WebGL, a standard for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web that the company previously has attacked as a security risk.

A leaked version of the next version of Windows, code-named Blue, came with a version of IE11, and developer's scrutiny of the browser shows evidence of WebGL.

"It seems like WebGL interfaces are defined but not functional at this time," said Web developer and author Francois Remy in a blog post this week. That means that the IE11 build has some infrastructure in place to support WebGL, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If you could play high-end, 3D games in your browser at the same speed as on a console, would you? Here at the annual Game Developers Conference, the maker of Firefox revealed a plan to get you to do just that.

Mozilla's current holy grail is getting the mix of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS that powers the modern Web to run apps at speeds that rival native code, the operating system-dependent languages underpinning apps on iOS, Android, Windows 8, and other proprietary systems.

The not-so-secret weapon in Mozilla's plan is something called ASM.js, said Director of Engineering Vladimir Vukicevic. "It's a dialect of JavaScript that can optimize [code] much better. It's around two times as fast," he said.… Read more

When Chrome's engineers sat down to plan out feature updates, who would've thought that "spell-checker" would've been anywhere on that list?

Google Chrome 26 stable for Windows (download) and Linux (download) updates the browser's ability to automatically check for spelling and homonym mistakes with new dictionaries.

Chrome 26 for Mac (download) has received the other Chrome 26 updates, but the spell-checking feature will be made available later, Google said in a blog post. The company did not specify a timeline for the feature, and unfortunately, it will not correct inaccurate spelling already published elsewhere … Read more

When you have many, many friends on Facebook, it can sometimes be hard to get through your whole stream of "news." Photos are a great addition to your Timeline, simply because they can share an idea without needing a paragraph of explanation (unless it's one of those terrible "if this gets 1 million likes" chain posts). Unfortunately, when you see one that is too small to show off all the detail, you have to click to enlarge it.

Instead of clicking on each photo, you can view the enlarged version of a photo by simply … Read more