Safari

We've all been there. During a productive morning at work, you innocently click on a YouTube link for a quick break. (After all, short breaks are good for productivity.) The next thing you know, however, you've wasted a good chunk of time, going from one related video to the next or scrolling through page after page of comments.

With the Clea.nr Videos for YouTube browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari; there's also an iOS app), you can strip out all of YouTube's distractions. You may not want this setup on your home PC, but … Read more

Zynga's Bubble Safari is a good ol' arcade-style Match-3 shooter game in a free app for Android devices. With 89 puzzles and plenty of rewards to earn, Bubble Safari takes only a few seconds to master but can keep you entertained for hours, if necessary. With an Android smartphone or tablet, you can have fun and stay sharp, simply by popping a bunch of colored balloons. Zynga's free game is compatible with Android 2.3.3 and higher; we played it on a Samsung phone running Android 4.1.1.

Bubble Safari's colorful backgrounds and buttons are … Read more

Internet Explorer 10 doubled its reach last month thanks to its recent debut for Windows 7.

In April, Microsoft's latest browser won a 6 percent share of all traffic seen by Net Applications, a healthy rise from the 2.93 percent captured in March. Of course, the bounce isn't too surprising.

Up until recently, Internet Explorer 10 existed only in Windows 8 and RT. But in late February, Microsoft released it for Windows 7 users. Among all desktop browser versions, IE 10 is now in sixth place, trailing slightly behind IE 6.

Internet Explorer 8 is the top … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in asking about the inability to format a drive due to "partition map" errors, how to determine what is using up space rapidly on the hard drive, how to restore a missing Safari program, and the options for tackling an iMac that continually shuts off in the middle of use. I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Unable to format a … Read more

Apple has released an update to Safari for OS X 10.6 users which, along with the latest Java updates, gives Snow Leopard users the ability to enable Java on a site-by-site basis.

This news is in response to the development of the Java runtime that has moved it past official support for Snow Leopard. While the latest version of Java Apple developed (Java SE 6) is supported in Snow Leopard, support for this version of OS X ended when Apple passed the baton to Oracle to maintain Java.

With Java SE 7 requiring OS X 10.7 or later, … Read more

CSS Variables, a handy technology to ease Web page programming, could be one casualty in Safari with Google moving its resources to its browser engine, Blink.

Google engineers wanted to "fork" the WebKit browser engine project that underlies both Safari and Chrome so they could accelerate the pace of Chrome development and adopt changes too extensive to fit into a single open-source project. Even though splitting Blink away from WebKit may make each browser engine more nimble, it also means it's harder to cooperate.

That's because common features must be developed and maintained by duplicate teams … Read more

The WebKit browser engine is becoming a less flexible foundation for open-source projects with the departure of Google from the project this week and Apple's consequent paring back of the project.

WebKit is a broad project that includes participation from many interested parties -- not just Apple and Google, but also BlackBerry, Samsung, Amazon, Oracle, Adobe Systems, and the programmers involved with the KDE and Gnome user interfaces for Linux. Indeed, the open-source project began as KDE's KHTML engine for the Konqueror browser before Apple got involved.

Google's Chrome team left WebKit this week, forking the open-source … 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

Today, Google launched Blink, its fork of the WebKit browser engine, and members of Google's Chrome team clearly are excited about their liberation.

With the fork, Google will concentrate its core browser development efforts on Blink, which will gradually diverge from the WebKit project on which it's based. You can read more about the context and history leading to Blink in CNET's coverage, or read the official Blink blog post and Blink FAQ for the party line.

But to get a feel for the emotion involved, check the commentary from the Chrome team members themselves. They're … Read more