However, when all variants are combined, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer currently leads the worldwide market at 45 percent, in comparison to Firefox’s 30 percent. For the USA, all Firefox variants follow Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 26 percent to 48 percent. In Europe, for example, Mozilla’s Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer since December.

Mozilla’s Firefox 4 symbolizes an important overhaul of the company, designed to keep it on balance or ahead of other browsers, such as Safari or Chrome. By default, it currently places tabs on top and even introduces other interface elements like app tabs, tab groups and even the possibility to browse and install add-ons in a more closely-integrated system. Similar to Chrome, Firefox 4 offers the ability to sync bookmarks and other settings with numerous copies of the browser.

Another important emphasis of the upgrade is performance. Rendering and start times seem to be noticeably faster than in Firefox 3.6, thanks to a new JavaScript engine, as well as to support for hardware acceleration in the form of Direct 2D and 3D in Windows and OpenGL on Macs. Mozilla claims that even if QuickTime, Flash or Silverlight crash in a tab, Firefox will carry on running.

He said that the company intended to give the power into the users’ hands as quickly as possible, and exemplified with the video tag which was ready last year in June but still has not shipped. This item will be included in the mentioned Firefox 4 update.

Google has succeeded to obtain significant market share for its Chrome in as long as a year by using a simple schedule which meant putting out a few feature additions at time intervals of only six weeks. For instance, after putting out Chrome 9 only a month ago, it is already issuing the Chrome 10 beta version. As for Mozilla, it concentrated on monolithic updates and slowly lost share as a result.

Mozilla also modified the way it treats beta builds of its browser. For example, Firefox 4 is up to twelve betas, while older versions used to have only three or maximum four larger ones. In a few weeks, the Release Candidate of Firefox 4 will probably arrive. According to Sullivan, the large numbers are not important, as less features are added per beta version, but there are more versions than before.

It is known that Firefox 4 has been delayed until 2011. Its first beta candidate has been launched last year, on the 29th of June.

Almaer said that while all parties were aligned, everything was fine, but once the company decided to change its strategy and alignment was no more possible, developers would be hurt. Almaer compared the situation with dictatorships and said that as long the dictator was aligned with general interest, things could go even better than in a democracy. But unfortunately, in 99.9 percent of the cases this does not happen. The Open Web gave Almaer and Galbraith an opportunity. Despite of having its own problems, just like in a democracy, it is preferable.

Galbraith outlined that only a pure web option could ensure that devices and their content platforms were not definitely coupled like it was the case of the mobile area, with iOS applications and webOS. It was like, for instance, if Sony’s MiniDisc was largely used but never licensed and therefore no one else could share the same technology.

Almaer also said that coming back from a big company to a small one would also represent a timely change.

The leave of Galbraith and Almaer came at the moment HP shipped webOS 2.0 through Palm’s Pre 2 but kept up an uninterrupted series of departures from Plam’s team for other companies. A vice president was lost for Nokia, while other leaders left for Google and Apple. Jon Rubinstein, former Apple vice president and CEO at Palm is one of the few executives remaining from the phone designer.

Microsoft promises a layer meant to deeply integrate the browser with Windows. Its users will have as an option tear-away tabs like those found in Firefox, Chrome or Safari and will be able to create direct OS shortcuts only by dragging tabs into the taskbar of Windows. The browser should also take advantage of Windows 7’s Aero Snap so that two pages could be displayed side-by-side to save desktop space.

There are not many details mentioned, but the Internet Explorer 9 is expected to have a faster and more accurate web engine conforming to the highest web standards and supporting HTML5 code. Rendering in HTML5 or other areas where a graphic card can unload some work will be improved by GPU acceleration.

September 15th is the date when the beta version of the Internet Explorer 9 will be available, but rumors go that Microsoft would not be able to present a final version until early January, at the CES expo.

There is an upgraded JavaScript engine for every platform, which helps processing a large amount of numeric code. This includes animation and images besides math. The beta version can now be used natively by not less than 34 languages.

Like the previous versions of Firefox 4, the beta 3 enjoys an improved web renderer with the largest jump in JavaScript. Other additions are represented by the App Tabs, improved HTML5 support and WebM video, a streamlined user interface putting tabs on top, and protection to crash against plugins such as Flash. The beta version released by Mozilla is available at the same time for Mac, Linux and Windows systems.

When coming to operating systems, Windows 7 gained a large market share, but not enough to change Microsoft’s overall usage share. Windows 7 went from 7.57 percent to 8.92 percent of the total market, but Windows as a whole has only slightly moved to 92.12 percent. Most of the gain came directly from users moving from Windows XP to Vista.

Snow Leopard upgrades were not sufficient to stop the drop in Leopard users and therefore Apple continued its soft decline to 5.02 percent. However, iPhone share has for the first time exceeded the 0.5 percent. The lack of activity shown by Linux resulted in a drop to 0.98 percent.

No explanation is offered by most of the studies for the changes in browser or operating system share, however. While Chrome was likely to be helped by a new beta version for Mac corroborated with the relative age of Mozilla Firefox, it is very clear that operating systems use in influenced by popularity as well as users’ regular habits. As resulted from these studies, Windows was more used in months with more work days, while holiday periods as well as vacation-heavy ones were clearly favouring personal Macs.

Sullivan also stated that: “As developers get more frustrated with quality assurance, the amount of handsets they have to buy, whether their security updates will get past the iPhone approval process… I think they’ll move to the web” and argued to PCPro that many stores do not bother to produce separate versions of their applications to target a smaller user base.

The mobile version of Firefox is currently under developing for every SMARTPHONE that has no application restriction like Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and the new Nokia OS, Maemo (Nokia N900). For the last mentioned the software is in beta stage and for the iPhone from Apple the software will be totally unavailable because Apple forbids 3rd-party browsers.

In the future many of the mobile applications for web will face a lot of problems because users do not always have a positive reaction. Only after a year of the release of iPhone, Apple launched its own applications store, observing that most users did not liked their initiative of promoting web application as an alternative option to 3rd-party software. After this the need of an application store became very important and many operating systems support now more and more applications.

A great part of the attacks affecting the Apple’s Safari is due to the mobile Safari browser on the iPod Touch and iPhone.

SQL injections were the most common with 25 percent, followed by cross-site scripting with 17 percent, phishing at 14 percent and rogue web servers at 12 percent.

Open-source fans always claimed that Firefox should be more secure because many application authors have real difficulties in finding and solving bugs, while others are unaware of applications. Internet Explorer received criticism in the past for Active X-like tools that were often offering websites direct access to PCs. Since then, much vulnerability was solved through the browser or through patches in Windows.

Out of the total reported vulnerabilities, 78 percent affected web technologies, such as web servers, web browsers, applications, ActiveX and plug-ins, which reflects a significant increase from the beginning of this year.

Based on the vulnerabilities Cenzic found using its ClickToSecure managed service, leaks of information, XSS, authentication/authorization and session management flaws continue to be in the top. The majority of assessments Cenzic completed highlighted the continuing exposure and risk faced by organizations.