For the first time in the history of the web, Internet Explorer has lost it's crown as the most used browser in a major territory; Europe. That's right, more Europeans as of late 2010 are using a browser other than IE.

For years Internet Explorer's dominance (and at first somewhat solitary existence at the top) has been chipped away at. Firstly by Mozilla's Firefox browser which was the first real alternative to IE worth using and more recently by Google's ever growing in popularity Chrome browser.

Towards the end of 2008 IE had a share of about 51% in Europe compared to 37.5% at the end of 2010. It's clear from these figures that in Europe at least IE is taking something of a beating. According to StatCounter a popular website statistics company Firefox took 38.11% of the browser market in Europe during December 2010 making it for the first time the most used browser, although only just. However the picture isn't as clear as it may first appear to be. In the last year despite now over taking IE, Firefox has also lost a very small fraction of it's market share, down 0.5%.

Where IE has taken a real hit is in the amount of people now using Google's Chrome browser. In the last year a alone, Chrome has seen a surge in the amount of people using it, up approximately 10% to 15% overall market share. This means people have left IE for Chrome and not Firefox.

StatCounter CEO, Aodhan Cullen said "This appears to be happening because Google's Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share". The uptake in Chrome usage may be down to the EU requiring Microsoft to present to users a browser ballot screen, thus offering a choice of browser to the user to install. Quite why people are choosing Chrome over IE or Firefox isn't clear, but it can't be a coincidence that since being forced to offer this ballot screen IE has taken a hit in Europe.

Despite this bad news for IE, it is still by far the most widely used browser on a global scale. IE accounts for 45% of all browser usage on the web, compared to 31% for Firefox and 15.5% for Chrome. However on a global scale like in Europe the real winner is Chrome. It's usage globally is up approximately 10% over the last year while IE and Firefox have both experienced drops with IE dropping around 10% of it's share over the last year which is somewhat inline with the increased usage for Chrome. Over the coming year expect IE usage to fall further, despite IE9 being released and Chrome usage to storm upwards as in 2010. By the end of 2011 it could be close or in some territories be the 2nd most popular browser out there.

Interestingly this article has no mention of Opera so far. That's because Opera is still mulling around somewhere at the bottom at around 5% market share. A pit it's been in for a number of years now. Despite all the fuss and complaining Opera made about having a ballot screen, it seems to have done nothing to help them out and instead may even have helped Chrome get to where it is now. To put things into a little perspective Chrome was released almost two and a half years ago and already has 15.5% of the global browser market. Opera on the other hand has been around since the end of 1996 and can still only muster up 5% of the market.

It's fair to say that Google is on a mission, a mission of speed. For a while now Google have been announcing audacious projects which aim to speed up everyones web viewing experience. Over the last year they have announced plans to introduce 1Gbps fibre to the home and a more efficient and faster web protocol, SPDY. Speeding up the web doesn't stop there however as both these technologies focus on the transmission of data and not the actual data being transmitted. With images accounting for around 65% of the data transmitted between web page views according to Google, it makes sense to improve upon the efficency of image compression while retaining a good degree of quality.

This is probably why Google's Product Manager, Richard Rabbat has announced via the Google blog that enginners at the company have been working on a new image format called WebP (pronounced Weppy) which aims to reduce file sizes while still retaining image quality. While testing the new format, Google looked at around 1 million jpg images and convert them to the new WebP format and noted on average a 39% reduction in file size. Images converted straight to WebP can expect even lower file sizes while retaining the same degree of image quality as JPG provides for most web images.

Although the new format doesn't support an Alpha channel (transparancy), Google say that a future update to the format will provide this feature, something that JPG can't do. Currently web designers have to use PNG or GIF for transparancy. The format is also flexible enough to allow a variety of meta data to be embedded into the image, something Googles search engine will no doubt make use of.

Every one who uses the web could benifit from this new format particluarly those who use bandwidth strangled mobile networks. If Google can get the likes of Firefox and Microsoft on board there's no reason why WebP should't be a big success in the future. The mobie ISPs might also thank Google for reducing their costs since less data has to be transmitted to mobile devices. It will probbly be some years before this new format takes off but Google is already planning a patch for it's WebKit based browser Chrome that will see the browser have native support for the new format.

Link: Google WebP Gallery

In a move that many developers will raise an eyebrow at, Google have decided to omit the showing of http:// in the address bar of their latest dev build of Chrome. Although this is quite a change to make it seems that Google decided to not express much info about the change publicly as the lack of http:// in the address bar was filed as a bug by one sharp eyed user.

One developer replied to the bug report stating that the apparent bug is in fact a feature of the browser. Naturally this invoked a lengthy discussion regarding the removal of http:// the workhorse protocol of the web that has been around since year dot.  Naturally many developers and comments made  aren't in favour of the omittance and I can understand why.

Many fear that omitting http:// will break a lot of applications when people try to copy and paste a URL, or when some web apps try to autoparse a URL. Some need http:// in the URL to do whatever it is they're trying to do. However Google say that this should not be the case, as http:// is added to the clipboard when the URL is copied. This is not a perfect solution though, as some systems may not fully support using the clipboard in this manner. It remains to be seen how effective this solution will be if Goolge decide to keep it. It will be interesting to see if this feature will be seen in Googles Web centric OS, Chrome OS when it is released later this year. Other protocols such as ftp:// and https:// seem unaffected and remain viewable in the address bar.

My view on this is that Google should revert back to showing http:// as not including it will cause people to be come lazy when typing URLs, not to mention that fact that it breaks years of standardisation that we have all become used to as users, never mind it being technically correct to add http:// to a web url. Some  applications as stated previously require http:// and having a system where people don't have to type it will induce a situation where usability is affected.

Source: OSNews.com

Google Street View was launched in the UK last March with many of the UK's most prominent Cities having Street View mapping. According to CNET the initial roll out covered about 28,000 miles of British roads.

Since then I had always wondered when my local area would show up on the service. However I didn't have to wait long, as late  last year (maybe the Autumn I can't quite remember), I spotted a Street View car making it's way down my street. Ever since that day, I have been waiting and expecting Google to update their Street View maps to include my area.

Well today, that has happened, and its happened in a lot of other places to. According to CNET, Google have added almost 219,000 extra added value miles to their UK Street View service. A number which covers about 96 percent of the country. There's not much else to say about the roll out other than to say, go check out your area because it's more than likely on there now.

In other somewhat related news, Google have also added more than 12,000 miles of trail data to their maps service in the US. The new feature that allows you to plan and customise your cycle routes as per your requirements. Whether it's the daily commute to work, or a leisurely freeride through your favourite woodland trail. Amongst other things you can tell the route planer to make use of bike lanes for safe commuting, calculate routes that avoid hills and calculate routes that are safe for bikes to travel on. These are routes that avoid car swamped roads, which are always dangerous for cyclists. Just go to http://maps.google.com/biking to plan your routes.

Sources: Cnet.co.uk and the Official Google Blog

In an email I received today (and no doubt countless others have to) Google has stated that it will be dropping support for Microsoft's archaic Internet Explorer 6 browser. Google say that to continue improving the user experience of it's applications and services they will have to ditch support for older browsers such as IE6, Firefox 2.x, Chrome 3.x and Safari 2.x. Google are aiming to improve the performance of JavaScript within  their applications and provide wider support and implementation of HTML5 within their applications. Wave for example makes extensive use of HTML5 elements.

Initially Google will begin by phasing out support for these browsers in their Docs suite and Sites editor on March 1st 2010. Followed by Gmail and Google Calender later in the year.

So that the changes don't come as a surprise to anyone Google will later this week start to issue on screen messages to those users still using older browsers when accessing Google Docs and Calender.  The message will be to basically ditch your old browser for a newer one.

With a company such as Google behind a push to finally and with out any sorrow, say good by to IE6 forever it could well encourage many other organisations to ditch the browser to. IE6 is still quite popular amongst businesses and places of education as many of their internal systems rely on IE6 in order to function. However it's shoddy support for web standards and myriads of security holes has down the years caused IE6 to become the thorn in the side many of web developers and security firms alike.

Having previously announced that Firefox 3.6 was in Beta, Mozilla have finally finished Firefox 3.6 and released it for Windows, Mac and Linux. Having already download it I can say that is feels somewhat more responsive and snappier than 3.5 felt. 

Having seen how fast Chrome can process JavaScript, Mozilla have been hard at work trying to catch up to the level of JavaScript performance that Chrome has. There is still some way to go yet but as you can see from the graph FF 3.6 is roughly 20 percent faster than 3.5 when tested in SunSpider. However Chrome is still 50 percent faster than 3.6 at running JavaScript so it remains king of the hill for now. IE 8 is nowhere as usual and we'll just have to wait until version 9 comes out to see what Microsoft can do here, they have a lot of work to do as you can see. They're not even close with IE 8.

Other notable improvements and enhancements in 3.6 over 3.5 include:

• Persona's - These allow you to change the style or look of the browser with a single click.
• Out of date plugin alerts - When an installed plugin is outdated Firefox will alert you to that fact and direct you to somewhere where you can get an update
• Improved CSS, DOM and HTML support - Developers can now make use of color gradients, background sizing and pointer events. Also support for the Drop and File APIs have been added which should provide a more engaging experience for web users.
• Improved page load times - Developers can tell scripts to load asynchronously
• Full screen Native Video support - HTML 5 embedded video can now be played full screen.
• Screen orientation support - Firefox can now determine the orientation of your screen and adjust it's self accordingly

Developers can check out the nitty gritty details of what's new and approved over at the Mozilla Developer Center. If you're just a bog standard Firefox though, you can go straight to the Firefox 3.6 download page and get it right now.

PS - The rumours of Firefox 3.7 being shelved and Mozilla going straight to version 4 are said to be "greatly exaggerated" according to Mike Beltzner, Firefox's director.

Microsoft co-founder and richest man in the world Bill Gates has increased his cool rating today by signing up to Twitter. His first Tweet, sent last night was ""Hello World." Hard at work on my foundation letter - publishing on 1/25". No doubt the 'Hello World' was a nod to the programming community as it's become tradition for beginner programmers to be taught how to print those words to the screen when they learn a new language, and Twitter by and large has it's own language to learn if it's to be used effectively. The 'foundation' he refers to is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which is the worlds largest openly operated private foundation with a focus on increasing healthcare and education for those who live in poverty.

The news of Gates' signing up to Twitter has reverberated around the net and has earned him more than 200,000 followers already. He can be followed at twitter.com/billgates or @billgates if you're on Twitter already. 

Earlier in the day if you had gone to Twitter you would have been greeted with its over capacity whale, leading some to speculate that the news of Gates signing up to the service and the subsequent interest in his Twitter page caused the service to crash.

This has not be confirmed, but it's also worth noting that Twitter is also being used to keep people up to date with everything that's happening in Haiti after last weeks earthquake. So that combined with the spike in activity after Gates signing up may have tipped Twitter over the edge for a time today.

Microsoft has revealed for the first time its pricing for the up and coming Office 2010 for both the retail and Product Key editions. Microsoft in a press release has expressed how proud it is with Office 2010 after a successful beta release. Interest in the beta edition of Office 2010 has exceeded that of Office 2007 when it was released as a beta according to Microsoft. As such Office 2010 has been downloaded more than 2 million times in the seven weeks since Microsoft made it available for download.

However what most of us are really interested in are the prices when it comes to launch day and Microsoft has finally divulged said information, at least for the US market.

Office 2010 will be available in four versions:

As you can see the downloadable Product Key editions offer healthy savings over their boxed counterparts but at the cost of only being able to install them on one computer compared to the two systems that most of the boxed editions can be installed on to. Also note that Office Professional Academic includes the same packages as Office Professional but at a significantly reduced price.

Like the download versions, the boxed version of the Home and Student suite can only be installed on one machine regardless of whether or not you go for the download option. However it will be available as a Family Pack which will grant you the right to install it on up to three machines, it will undoubtedly cost you more for the Family Pack edition however.

No pricing information for the upgrade products have been released as of yet, in the meantime if you have not yet tried Office 2010 you can download Office 2010 Profession beta and give it a spin.

Some might argue that Google's products' haven't always had a great visual appeal to them, unlike that of Apple's and these days even Microsoft's. In a lot of cases those people would be right. Traditionally Google has been more about functionality and less about attractive design and providing copious amounts of eye candy. However this trend is about to change as Google are working on a radically redesigned homepage and search results pages. When I say radical, I mean radical for Google.

Back in the summer Google made their homepage search bar longer and the text bigger, big deal everyone thought. This week though details of an overhauled Google homepage and search results page have surfaced, with Google testing out the new design on random searchers. For the rest of us we will have to wait until next year before they roll the new look out, or do we?

Cnet via Softpedia has posted information, detailing how you can access the new look without having to wait until it's officially rolled out. By following the instructions below you should be able to do it yourself:

• Go to Google.com - this hack doesn't appear to work for Google country specific sites such as google.co.uk. If your having trouble getting to Google.com from outside the US there should be a link underneath the 'Google Search' and 'I'm feeling lucky' buttons to take you to Google.com.
• If you're signed into your Google account, then sign out.
• In your browser's address bar delete any text that exists (it will probably be http://www.google.com) and paste the following code in bold into the bar and press return (there is no space after the TM= bit):
• javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=
  1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com");
• If nothing happens, refresh the page. If after refreshing you get redirected back to your country specific Google homepage then click the 'Go to Google.com' link again like you might have done above.
• You should now be looking at the the plush new look that Google are going for. Although it's still simplistic I think it looks fantastic.
• If you need to log back into your account then go ahead, the updated look should stay after you have logged in.

Things you will undoubtedly notice:

Homepage - The Google logo loses it's drop shadow, and looks flatter and possibly a bit chunkier. The search bar and buttons are now blue with your search terms and suggestions in bold text. The suggestion search box that drops down as you type your search will also display the traditional Google search buttons as per the homepage.

Search Results Page - Down the left you will see a permanent sidebar. On the current page this only pops up when you click the 'Show options' link. The new sidebar allows you to filter your results to specific topics and areas such as news, images, videos, blogs, books, maps, shopping and forums. A lot of these filters already exist of course, but now that they look more visually appealing, I might actually start to use them as previously they didn't grab my attention very much. Not least because they were invisible until I clicked the 'Show options' link.

Clicking a main filter category will bring up other filters which are unique to the main filter. So clicking the video filter will bring up filters which allow you to narrow the results by duration or quality.

All in all I like the updated Google image, it looks quite youthful, vibrant and to be honest it kind of all reminds me of Lego now. I can't explain my rational for thinking that. 

Source: Cnet via Softpedia and thanks to Adam for alerting me to this hack.

Microsoft with their Bing search engine will be teaming up with the "computational knowledge engine", Wolfram Alpha. The partnership will see Wolfram Alpha bolstering Bing's search results based on nutrition, health and mathematics. This partnership comes after Wolfram released an API (Application Programming Interface) in October that allows outside parties to use it's services.

Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British born physicist Stephen Wolfram and aims to provide answers to direct questions, rather than displaying a list of returned links based on your keyword searches as is the case with search engines such as Bing and Google. 

As such the Wolfram team are calling their service a "Computational Knowledge Engine" rather than a search engine. You can use Wolfram Alpha to answer direct questions such as "amount of water on earth", or "Google page hits" and it will return pretty much exactly what you want. The data Wolfram Alpha, retrieves from it's databases is vetted by Wolfram Research Staff to ensure that the system can display the searched for term to the user. 

Traditional search tools would provide you with links that it feels best matches your search terms, but won't necessarily mean you find what your looking for. With Wolfram Alpha ticking over behind the scenes at Bing, it could provide the search engine with a powerful ally.

The Wolfram team are proud to have Bing on board and stated in their blog post that the "partnership with Bing would allow Microsoft to access "tens of thousands of algorithms and trillions of pieces of data" to incorporate into its results."

Microsoft meanwhile believes that the service (initially only available in the US) would give about 90 million Americans access to dietary information each year and would provide, "a nutrition facts label at the bottom of the results page that summarises all information on that food item in a very familiar and friendly format."

Google has announced that is up-and-coming browser, Chrome has reached a milestone for it's next release. Google Chrome 4, now in beta features a couple enhancements. Those who switch between multiple computers whether home-to-work or home-to-mobile or vice versa can now manage their bookmarks much easer with the implementation of bookmark syncing.

If you have bookmarks on your home computer that you use on your work computer for example, then keeping things up to date between both sets of bookmarks can become tedious. Thankfully Google has seen this problem and now offers users the ability to sync their bookmarks between different computers. So if you create a bookmark on your home computer it will auto-magically appear on your works bookmarks - cleaver stuff.

As ever Google have taken the opportunity in the Chrome 4 Beta to increase the browsers performance. In their Blog post for the release Google said, "We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests, and by 400% since our first stable release".

If you're interested in trying the new Beta you can download it from the Google Chrome Beta Download page

Mozilla have made Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 available for download and it  brings with it a number of new features not seen in Firefox before. The new beta runs on the Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering engine, and includes various improvements for web and add-on developers alike. Mozilla also point out that they have improved the start up time for Firefox. This should come as a welcomed announcement as many have started to moan about how long Firefox takes to load up these days.

Other new features and improvements include:

• The ability to change the browser's appearance through the use of Personas
• Support for the WOFF Font format
• Improved JavaScript and browser performance
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 elements
• An updated plugins system that will alert users about out of date plugins
• And finally the ability to display native video full screen with poster frames. Native video was introduced in Firefox 3.5 and allows developers to make use of HTML5's and tags to embed related content directly into the web page without having to worry about flash.

Mozilla point out that most Add-ons have not yet been updated to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta and so it is only recommend that web developers or testers download the new version.

If you are interested in downloading the new Beta it can be found via the Official Firefox Blog.