#browsers

Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition. Without it we would be stuck with Google Chrome and its spinoffs everywhere (including Vivaldi). The only holdout would be Apple Safari, hanging in there only because it’s the enforced default on iPhones.

Kitesurf is significantly more efficient in CPU and memory consumption than Chromium for common agentic tasks like screenshots and HTML extraction. What follows is the story of how we built it. Buckle up, it’s going to get technical — but we promise to keep it interesting.

The headless browser for AI agents and web scraping

In Safari Technology Preview 247, we’re introducing the Safari MCP server — a Model Context Protocol server for web developers that makes your web development and debugging workflow faster and more powerful. We know agents are increasingly integral to the coding process and the Safari MCP server gives your agent the ability to know how your code actually renders in the browser by connecting it to a Safari browser window.

The Open Source Web Agent Evaluation Framework

Driving all platforms UI automation with vision-based model

From where I sit, what makes the Cursor case more dangerous than just a failed hack‑week project is that the hype is baked into its methodology. The "experiment" wasn't presented as what it really was: an interesting, but messy, internal learning exercise. No, it was rolled out as a milestone that conveniently confirmed the company's long‑running autonomous agent advertising. Missing from the story were basics any senior engineer would demand: passing Continuous Integration (CI), reproducible builds, and real benchmarks that show the browser doing more than limping through a hello-world page.

Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback, I’m going to call this day 0 of an experiment in shifting the funding model of journalism from adtech to agentic AI.

If only Firefox was 3% better things would be so different... or would they?

Firefox today reminds me of Firefox when I first discovered it. Mozilla has once again delivered a technically superior product while completely respecting my rights as a user. Firefox is freedom.

Firefox today reminds me of Firefox when I first discovered it. Mozilla has once again delivered a technically superior product while completely respecting my rights as a user. Firefox is freedom.

This is an extended essay on the news out of Norway yesterday. See the closing for encouragement toward Opera and its fans, whatever the open source projects they choose to join, from me on behalf of Mozilla.

This is an extended essay on the news out of Norway yesterday. See the closing for encouragement toward Opera and its fans, whatever the open source projects they choose to join, from me on behalf of Mozilla.

OK, so what’s going on? This morning a follower pointed out an article that describes how Safari iOS makes a total fucking mess of the meta viewport when the site is hosted on a .mobi domain.

Hello! I've got some good news for you: your web browser has just been upgraded to a web server. It's responding to HTTP requests on the Internet as you read this.

Hello! I've got some good news for you: your web browser has just been upgraded to a web server. It's responding to HTTP requests on the Internet as you read this.

There is a common misconception that every time a new release of Firefox comes out Mozilla claims “this is the one that fixes the memory consumption problems”. I see this misconception in action all the time.

There is a common misconception that every time a new release of Firefox comes out Mozilla claims “this is the one that fixes the memory consumption problems”. I see this misconception in action all the time.

Google Chrome for iPhone and iPad is here. But as you all know by now, it is not the complete Chrome experience on iOS. There are many compromises (platform limitations, as Google calls it) that Google had to make to bring Chrome to iOS. Let’s take a look at 7 of them.

Google Chrome for iPhone and iPad is here. But as you all know by now, it is not the complete Chrome experience on iOS. There are many compromises (platform limitations, as Google calls it) that Google had to make to bring Chrome to iOS. Let’s take a look at 7 of them.

The Internet Explorer process on W8ARM has special privileges and is the only one allowed to run a JIT compiler to speed up JavaScript. No other browser will be able to compete on performance with IE on W8ARM. That sure simplifies keeping up with the competition ... ;-)

GPG4Browsers is a prototype implementation of the OpenPGP Message Format [RFC 4880]. The implementation is currently written as Chrome Browser Extension with a Googlemail integration for encrypting, decrypting or signing emails.

A couple of interesting things happened in the world of Web browser usage during October. The more significant one is that Internet Explorer's share of global browser usage dropped below 50 percent for the first time in more than a decade. Less significant, but also notable, is that Chrome for the first time overtook Firefox here at Ars, making it the technologist's browser of choice.

"I see no reason why Chrome won't rise to above 20% in the short term. This means, of course, that the market share of Firefox and Internet Explorer will continue to drop. But as I noted some time back, this really isn't a huge problem for Firefox - although it is for Microsoft. The reason is quite simple: Firefox was never aiming at world domination, it was fighting to create an open Web where no browser held such a dominant position that it could ignore open standards and impose de facto ones instead. We pretty much have that now, with Internet Explorer increasingly standards-compliant - and proud of it, amazingly."

"It's a hefty wave to catch, but our browser has already been Atlas for five years - the IGB is perched atop a custom-written HTML parsing and rendering system. While a noble technical endeavor, this leaves to us the tasks of upgrading and extending the IGB to match the ever-shifting currents of the HTML standard. Hardly the best way for us to serve you, the player! But, like Atlas, we now have two Pillars upon which to rest these burdens. The first, and undoubtedly greatest, is the Heraclidean support provided by Awesomium and its Prince of Code. This library harnesses the raw strength of the Chromium browser toolkit - the muscles, knit from Webkit, that writhe cobra-like beneath the skin of Google's Chrome - and hand-delivers rendered HTML pages to us as nice 3D surfaces, which we can then readily display in our own Trinity engine."

"The biggest problem with CSS sprites is memory usage. Unless the sprite image is carefully constructed, you end up with incredible amounts of wasted space. My favourite example is from WHIT TV's web site, where this image is used as a sprite. Note that this is a 1299x15,000 PNG. It compresses quite well — the actual download size is around 26K — but browsers don't render compressed image data. When this image is downloaded and decompressed, it will use almost 75MB in memory (1299 * 15000 * 4)."

"For a long while now (even before Google Chrome was announced), Mozilla has been examining ways to make Firefox better by splitting the work of displaying web pages up among multiple processes."

"The fun comes when I kill -9 this gecko-iframe, the “tab” containing mozilla.com. To the non-geeky, invoking kill -9 on a program causes it to crash IMMEDIATELY. This simulates what would happen if, say, you tried to run a buggy plugin and it got itself into trouble. Notice that only the “content” disappears when the page crashes; the user interface itself keeps running as if nothing happened. This is a big step forward! If I were to kill -9 the current version of Firefox, everything would die, user interface and tabs."

"The new version of the increasingly popular browser carries a clearinghouse of features, some 5,000 in all according to Mozilla. Headlining for the raft of changes includes: HTML5 streaming video, IP geolocation for location-sensitive websites (think restaurant searches), a knockoff of IE8’s InPrivate browsing mode and a dupe of Chrome’s webpages-as-apps feature."

"Although Stainless started out as a technology demo to showcase our own multi-processing architecture in response to Google Chrome, we've been inspired by our growing fanbase to forge ahead and craft Stainless into a full-fledged browser. In fact, Stainless now has features you won't find in Chrome or in any other browser."

"Valve today released an update to Steam that includes the final version of the in-game web browser from December's beta patch. "

"Microsoft is trying to put together a patch, but in the meantime computer users have been advised to update their security settings or switch to unaffected browsers such as Firefox or Opera. ... The flaw in IE allows criminals to gain control of computers that have visited a website infected with malicious code designed to exploit it. While restricting web surfing to trusted sites should reduce the risk of infection, the malicious code can be injected into any website. Users do not have to click or download anything to become infected, merely visiting an infected website is sufficient."

"In IE, the redefinition of really() is interpreted and used even though it is inside a block of code that is not executed. Wonder of wonders..."

Yikes. This is really making me hope that Android or Palm linux phones grow up fast. "It seems that the engineers at Opera developed a version of Opera Mini that would run on the iPhone (and the iPod touch), but this browser will never see light of day because Apple rejected it from the App Store."

"you know how more and more sites out there are adopting a m.* mobile version, tailored for smaller screens? Why don't the video sites out there start adopting tv.* versions of their interfaces, tailored to people using the site from their couch?"

"Chrome is the end of the browser and the beginning of the Cloud Client. These are quite different things. A Cloud Client is a flexible and configurable Interface in which an application can run. Whether the rest of the application is local or lives in the cloud is an option - and switchable. The user may not even know nor care. It doesn’t sound much like a browser does it?"

"Our new project attempts to alleviate all of these problems by allowing end-users to apply textual commands, or verbs, to whatever they’re looking at."

"After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th."

"After I discovered Fluid's ability to change browser agents, however, I realized that it has quite a bit of potential to create SSBs for mobile web apps that are a bit more friendly to desktop real estate."

"Today I’m pleased to announce a beta release of an enhanced version of our Firefox Add-on for del.icio.us that now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility."

"While working on optimizing page load times for a high-profile AJAX application, I had a chance to investigate how much I could reduce latency due to external objects."

"Apple's role within the New Browser Alliance and emphasized Apples WebCore, which will of course extend to cell phones and other mobile devices from Nokia in 2006, for starters."

Tab Exposé looks hot, though I still like OmniWeb's tab drawer

"Plans are underway to provide greasemonkey with its own persistence mechanism. Once that happens, the sky's the limit." Huh, it's too bad OmniWeb doesn't have greasemonkey.

"I'd like to suggest something much more radical [to Microsoft's IE team]: Switch to Mozilla"