Fennec Acid3 Results

Mozilla has been working hard on it’s mobile version of Firefox dubbed Fennec. Building on top of Firefox 3’s reduced memory footprint, Mozilla is aiming to bring the desktop browsing experience to your mobile.

With the hastened development, the latest version of Fennec scores a very impressive 88/100 in the Acid3 test on Windows Mobile. In comparison Firefox 3 only scores 71/100, while Opera 9.6 scores 85/100.

Once released, Fennec is sure to set the mobile browser market on fire, giving stiff competition to already established browsers such as Opera Mobile. It’s sure to be an interesting year ahead for the mobile browser market.

Opera has just released version 9.6 of its web browser. The new version comes about after weeks of testing, with the beta release was available almost a month ago.

Opera 9.6 includes a new feed view, speed enchancements, and Opera link technology.

A full list of changes can be found in the changelogs.

You can download Opera 9.6 from the Opera website.

With all the news that Google Chrome’s market share has droped since it’s release, I thought it was only fitting to add some more statistics to the fire.

On another technology site that I run, browser stats were as follows for the month of September:

Browser Market Share for September

Through the month of September, Chrome’s usage has dropped around 30% from its release. Usage seems to have stabalised since then.

Of interesting note, is that Google Chrome has still gained a larger market share than Opera. It should also be noted that Chrome is still only available on Windows. Perhaps it’s market share will again increase when offical Mac and Linux versions are released.

Perhaps Google Chrome hasn’t shaken up the market as much as everyone predicted. Did you try Google Chrome and are you still using it?

Opera has released a beta version of its next generation web browser. The browser includes some fancy new features, including Link It. Link It allows you to synchronise searches and typed history across multiple computers. You can read a full list of changes in their changelogs.

Included in the release is a new version of Opera Mail. You can download the new beta software from the Opera Software website. Happy testing!

With the release of Google Chrome, John Resig has performed JavaScript benchmark tests on a wide variety of browsers on both Windows Vista and XP. These browsers include:

• Chrome 0.2
• Safari 4
• Safari 3.1.2
• Opera 9.5.2
• Firefox 3.1
• Firefox 3.0.1
• IE7
• IE8 Beta 2

Testing, using three benchmarking tools; SunSpider, V8 Benchmark, and Dromaeo, has produced some interesting results. Results show that Google Chrome is ahead in all but one benchmark test – very impressive for a browser that is still in its early beta stages. It shows the performance of the new V8 JavaScript engine and the power of the WebKit rendering engine found in both Chrome and Safari.

You can read the full JavaScript Performance Rundown article to see the other (not-so)surprissing results.