OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today introduced an SSD management application that centrally monitors and manages OCZ enterprise drives connected to network servers, storage arrays or appliances. Developed as a network-accessible management system, OCZ's new StoragePro XL 1.1 provides IT managers with a cross-platform view of their enterprise flash resources for centralized management, monitoring, maintenance and reporting.

StoragePro XL securely connects to multiple host systems across the network and allows IT managers to centrally monitor and administer their enterprise flash resources from a web-based management interface. Supporting enterprise hosts running Linux and Windows operating systems, and featuring an easy-to-use web-based centralized GUI (graphical user interface), IT managers are afforded specific drive details on performance, reliability and operation. Along with the monitoring functionality, a user configurable alerting systems is provided that enables identification of any potential system and/or storage issues in advance enabling corrective actions to be initiated at an early stage.

Club 3D presents its GeForce GT 640 graphic cards, both cards are low profile and come with a quiet single slot cooler (29 dBA*) and come with Dual-Link DVI-D, HDMI and VGA video outputs. The GeForce GT 640 cards are based on the GK107 chipset, and offer full support for PCI Express 3.0, DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL 1.2.

Aimed at the mid-entry level, the cards are a very affordable way to turn your PC into a multimedia and game computer. Like with all its Low Profile cards Club 3D offers more value with a Low Profile Kit (LP slot brackets included). The Club 3D GeForce GT 640 is the perfect solution for those that are looking for a small and affordable graphics upgrade.

It looks like Mozilla has given in to the pressure of incorporating H.264 CODEC into its Firefox web-browser, and could incorporate it in future versions of the browser. The CODEC allows online videos utilizing H.264 format to run. Mozilla has been avoiding H.264 support since it is proprietary, riddled with patents, and requires Mozilla to purchase a license for millions of Dollars from MPEG-LA.

Mozilla has been trying to push for standards alternative to H.264, such as WebM, and the VP8 format. It had originally planned its push for an H.264-free web at a time when it was a much stronger player in the web-browser market, which now sees a strong presence of Google Chrome, which already features H.264. H.264 is superior to its alternatives, in being lighter on the system's resources (hence, lighter on the battery).

Over two months after launching Firefox 10, and backing it up two two security updates (10.0.1 and 10.0.2), Mozilla is almost ready with the stable version of Firefox 11, which it is reportedly launching later today. Mozilla posted what was supposedly Firefox 11 stable on its FTP, before redacting it, citing that the build is not actually stable, and that QA was still on.

Firefox 11 will introduce several new features, including performance improvements. To begin with, Firefox 11 supports the SPDY protocol, all pages are loaded on SSL with SPDY, which is both faster and more secure. Firefox' bookmarks and preferences migration assistant will now support Google Chrome, letting users migrate from Chrome to Firefox. Firefox Sync will now also synchronize addons between sync'd PCs. Lastly, Firefox 11 is said to include more feature-rich developer tools. The Android version of Firefox 11 will ship with Adobe Flash, for Android 2.3 and earlier.

Adobe is working on a new sandboxed version of the Flash Player browser plugin for Firefox. The move will make it tougher to compromise a system's security using malicious Shockwave Flash objects. The new plugin for Firefox (and other browsers like Opera, which rely on the common Netscape Plugin Wrapper model of browser plugins), will work essentially similar to the Flash Player Google Chrome ships with, which works in a "Protected Mode". When "sandboxed" Shockwave Flash objects in webpages will work as separate processes, with much lower privileges than the actual user, the user's machine environment will be kept abstract to it. Adobe has already redesigned the browser plugin of its Reader X (PDF viewer) to work this way, and hasn't seen a significant successful exploit since November, last year.

After overtaking Mozilla Firefox in terms of web-browser market-share in December 2011, Google Chrome has its eyes trained on Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), still the most popular web-browser in use today. According to the most recent StatCounter figures, at the rate at which Google Chrome's market-share is growing, it will overtake that of MSIE in 2012. It will do that as early as in June-July. Interestingly, Google Chrome is the youngest web-browser among its competitors, launched in Q4 2008, but has surpassed the market shares of much older competitors in a matter of months. Apart from stats, Google's web-advertising prowess makes Chrome's MSIE overtake in June-July seem realistic.

In what could be a sign of improving ties between Google and Mozilla, Peter Kasting, engineer in the Google Chrome web-browser development team referred to Mozilla as a partner, and not a competitor. The statement came in context of the recently-renewed search engine deal between the two, where Google pays Mozilla for setting Google as its primary search engine, both on its browser search bar, and its Firefox start page. Kasting also went to the extant of stating that Chrome isn't necessarily a profit-seeking operation by Google.

Kasting stated: "People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It's very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done."

Google Chrome is a fast and functional web browser. Let's get that out of the way first. But one of the main reasons a largely successful corporation put resources into developing a web-browser into a market that isn't very profitable, is cost-cutting. Since it's inception, the search bar Mozilla Firefox came with, has Google as its default search provider. Every time people search using that search bar in Firefox, Mozilla Foundation makes money. It is estimated that these Google searches amount to a majority of Mozilla's revenue, as Google pays it as much as 50 million dollars an year. Google Chrome, despite its genuine merits, is a cost-cutting operation. The more people use it over Firefox, the less Google has to pay Mozilla.

Web security researchers have historically rated Google Chrome has having the worst security and privacy compared to Firefox, and Internet Explorer (read this, and here), but the most recent research by Denver-based security consultancy Accuvant claimed that Google Chrome has the best security and privacy features, while Mozilla Firefox has the worst. Want to hear the kicker? That research by Accuvant was funded by Google. Want to hear another one? A similar research firm that has historically done vendor-funded research, NSS Labs, voiced strong objections to Accuvant's research, calling it an all-out attempt to malign Mozilla Firefox.

According to the latest data sourced by StatCounter for the month of November 2011, Google Chrome has overtaken Mozilla Firefox in terms of web-browser software market-share. The GlobalStats data provides a worldwide picture, and not just specific to a region. According to the data, Chrome took 25.69% of the worldwide market (up from 4.66% in November 2009) compared to Firefox's 25.23%.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%. Google Chrome began in mid-2008 as an experimental minimalist UI web-browser based on the Chromium project, it is a multi-process tabbed web browser based on Apple Webkit and several other pieces of free, licensed, and open-source technologies. Its market share is on the rise. The stats can be accessed here.

A little over a month after releasing Firefox 6.0, and quickly following it up with two minor updates (6.0.1 and 6.0.2), Mozilla released its next "major" version, Firefox 7.0 into the release channel. It is now clear that Mozilla Firefox is playing catch-up with other popular web-browsers in some sort of a version number game. The three year old Google Chrome is already into version 14, with version 16 already in the dev channel.

While Firefox users will not be in for a different user interface (it's bad to drastically change it from time to time), Firefox 7 does seem to come with several under-the-hood changes. To begin with, the Windows version features a brand-new rendering back-end that speeds up Canvas, a tweaked Sync system that instantly syncs changes to bookmarks and saved passwords, support for text-overflow: ellipsis, compliance with the Web Timing specification, WebSocket protocol updated from version 7 to 8, and improved support for MathML. The only UI change is that the protocol of the page loaded is hidden. The full URL will be copied when you copy the address in the bar. Firefox 7 is launched for all platforms it's available in: Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 7

Mozilla is so frantically inflating Firefox version numbers, that its latest alpha (Aurora) build is already at version 7, less than a month after Firefox 5 final was released. Mozilla is playing catch-up with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer in the version number game. While informed users might find this silly, perhaps there is some data motivating Mozilla to inflate its version numbers, other than the fact that Google Chrome has already grabbed 20% of the browser market share, discretely updates itself, doesn't brag too much about version numbers; and the fact that Internet Explorer is back in the race with version 9 that greatly improved performance and features.

In any case, Firefox 7 is said to bring with it some new features, including faster startup time, better rendering performance, and more importantly, lower memory footprint. It also features better font rendering when GPU acceleration is enabled. An improved Sync manager syncs bookmarks and passwords instantly with your other devices. Firefox 7 Aurora (alpha, 7.0a2) can be downloaded in a wide range of languages, and for Windows, Mac, and Linux, from this page. Aurora builds can be unstable and buggy.

There must be some latent value in version number. Close to 3 years old, Google Chrome is already at version 14 in its developer channel. The grand old man of web-browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE), which has a much slower release cycle, is at version 9. The second oldest browser in production, Opera, is at version 11. That leaves Mozilla Firefox, which is relatively newer to the market, but crawled its way past generations by versions 1.0x or 0.5x, with 0.0.1x in near-monthly minor updates. With the browser-wars hotting up as Google Chrome maintains its breakneck development cycle and MSIE regained competitiveness with version 9, Mozilla Firefox is ceding market-share. Perhaps this is pushing Mozilla to speed up its update cycle.

In Mozilla's case, this seems more like an version number inflation, because Firefox 4 was released just this March, and has only had one minor update since (4.0.1). The group is already looking to release the next "big release", Firefox 5, on 21 June, 2011. Its file locations on Mozilla's FTP are already leaked. Unlike with older major releases where each comes with a changed user interface, layout, or at least new icons; Firefox 5 user interface is identical to that of Firefox 4. The changes here are a faster webpage rendering engine, improved HTML5 support, the ability to pin bookmarked webpages to the Windows Taskbar a-là MSIE 9, and a built-in Adobe PDF reader a-là Chrome.

DOWNLOAD: Mozilla Firefox 5 (Win32)

Acer made the PC monitor a little smarter by giving it PC functionality, without being a PC. The new DX241H "Web Surf Station" is a 24-inch full-HD monitor that has an in-built web-browser based on Google Chrome, and DLNA-based media player, that give users the ability to surf the web and access their media collection, without needing a PC. The monitor comes with a "Web Surf Station" remote that gives media controls, and a slide-out QWERTY keypad. The monitor can connect to the internet over wired Ethernet, a wireless network adapter can also be plugged in to the monitor's USB 2.0 ports. The monitor uses these USB 2.0 ports to access USB flash drives, external hard drives, and drive enclosures, or pretty much any media that uses the USB Mass Storage framework. A multi-format card reader is also included.

As a monitor, the DX241H is full-HD (1920 x 1080 pixels resolution), and uses a TN panel. It features 80,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 300 cd/m² brightness, fast 2 ms response time, and display inputs that include D-Sub and HDMI. It is available for pre-order in Europe, priced at €299.

After subjecting itself to the dark ages as Mozilla Firefox, and later Google Chrome started eating into its market-share, Microsoft's Internet Explorer team released version 9 of its [then] iconic browser, which actually kept up with current standards in terms of speed, features, and functionality. Internet Explorer 9 stable will be released to web on March 14, 2011.

MSIE 9 made its first public release in September 2010, in the form of a functional beta, and was fed by the occasional stability updates. It later assumed the form of the first Release Candidate in early February 2011, with a slightly tweaked user-interface. Once it achieves a stable build status, it will be updated regularly under Microsoft's cumulative security updates. Internet Explorer 9 is an "omnibox"-styled, tabbed, multi-process web-browser. Each tab and running ActiveX plugin runs in its own process. The browser is up to date in terms of standards including HTML5, packs a fast Javascript engine, and uses GPU hardware acceleration to draw web-page contents.

The Khronos Group released the final WebGL 1.0 specification to enable hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in HTML5 Web browsers without the need for plug-ins. WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0 to allow rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs. WebGL has the support of major silicon and browser vendors including Apple, Google, Mozilla and Opera with multiple browsers already shipping with WebGL implementations including the beta releases for Mozilla Firefox 4.0, all channels of Google Chrome 9.0, an Opera preview build, and Apple Mac OS Safari nightly builds.

WebGL leverages the pervasive availability of OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics on almost all browser-capable desktop, mobile and embedded platforms and the recent developments in Web technology including the massive increases in JavaScript performance. The ability for Web developers to directly access OpenGL-class graphics directly from JavaScript, and freely mix 3D with other HTML content, will enable a new wave of innovation in Web gaming, educational and training applications and graphically rich user interfaces to make the Web more enjoyable, productive and intuitive.

Google's slim and swift web-browser Chrome has been ported to Linux and Mac, at last, and a public beta release has been published. The beta version continues to use the version scheme of the latest developer channel release for Windows, with version 4.0.249.30 being the latest. It supports nearly all features of the Windows version, including sandboxed multi-process rendering for multiple browser tabs, among other features. Sadly, the team isn't ready with browser plugin support, with the Linux version not being able to use the Netscape compatible browswer plugins such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Java, and others which other browsers such as Firefox and Opera are able to use. To download Google Chrome beta for Linux, visit this page. For Google Chrome beta for Mac, visit this page.

Mozilla today announced the newest stable version of Firefox, version 3.5, which has been available in various developer preview forms for months. The new version is a milestone release, unlike timely updates that Firefox receives on a near-monthly basis, and boasts of better performance. For instance, Firefox 3.5 outperforms its previous version (Firefox 3) by over 100% in the SunSpider benchmark.

Under the hood, this new version extends support for HTML5 audio and video elements, including native support for open-source formats such as Ogg Theora. It uses a faster TraceMonkey Javascript engine (which is behind the performance boost in SunSpider), It supports downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, canvas-driven text, ICC profiles, and SVG transformations. The user interface remains fairly identical to its predecessor, except for a few minor changes. The browser finally supports a private browsing feature which MSIE 8 (InPrivate) and Google Chrome (Incognito mode) have. Existing users of Firefox will be prompted to upgrade to the new browser. Others can find it here.

Less than a week after we covered Chrome reaching version 2.0 for the public, Google have already started working on version 3.0 and it has been released to developers today. For the full list of fixes and changes go here. The full version string of this release is 3.0.182.2 and can be downloaded here

Eight months after Google's own attempts at a web browser were first launched, they have now announced on the Google Chrome Blog that the latest beta which was released in March, has reached a stable stage, by which they can now release it to the general public. If you're already using Google Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon. Otherwise you can grab the latest version at google.com/chrome

There is a valid reason behind why Safari is growing in browser market-share, apart from the fact that iPhone carries it: it is arguably the fastest browser there is. The fourth beta version that surfaced earlier this week went a few notches ahead of Firefox (Minefield) 3.2a1 and Google Chrome in a review conducted by CNet, to take the top-sport for the fastest web-browser. Internet Explorer (IE) versions 7 and 8, Opera 9.6, Firefox 3, Chrome, Firefox(Minefield) 3.1 Alpha 1 and Safari 4 were put through JavaScript tests using the SunSpider suite. The PC was equipped with a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.10 GHz. Safari 4 beta gave IE 7 a sound thrashing at the test, emerging 42 times faster. The performance difference between the two were so vast that the reviewers had to prepare a seperate graph without IE 7 so there could be more resolution in the charts showing the differences between the rest of the contendors. Then again, one must take into account the fact that Chrome and Firefox (Minefield) 3.2 weren't all that behind Safari 4 beta, only a few notches. The scores are denoted by render time in terms of milliseconds. Lesser the better. The scores stand at:

• Safari 4 (Total time: 910 ms)
• Mozilla Minefield 3.2a1 (1,136 ms)
• Google Chrome (1,177 ms)
• Firefox 3 (3,250 ms)
• Opera 9.6 (4,076 ms)
• Internet Explorer 8 (5,839 ms)
• Internet Explorer 7 (39,026 ms)

Google plans to launch its very own web-browser software in competition to Microsoft Internet Explorer called Google Chrome. The new browser according to entries at the official Google blog suggest the driving force behind the browser is to provide value-added features to its users, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web. It is claimed that the browser is tailored to give the most out of common tasks on the internet as a web-browser has become a very significant component of the connected PC.

The browser designed to be streamlined and simple for you to accomplish tasks quickly and easily by offering enhanced address-bar features and other elements that are very different from those on other browsers. The product will be open-source. Says the blog post "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go."

Google released a comic book explaining its design approach towards the web-browser, it can be read here. Under the hood, Google claims the browser to have what it takes to run complex web-applications any by keeping each browser tab in its "sandbox", the probability of a web-application crash on one tab affecting other tabs is eradicated. A beta version of this browser software would be released in over 100 countries tomorrow, September the 2nd.