Latest Software News

Two weeks after the launch of Chrome, Google Inc.'s browser has stolen market share from every competitor except Apple Inc.'s Safari, an Internet measurement company said today.

At the end of its second week, Chrome accounted for 0.85% of the browsers that visited the 40,000 sites monitored by Net Applications Inc., an increase from the 0.67% the week before.

Chrome's share came at the expense of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Opera Software ASA's Opera and even AOL LLC's Netscape, all of which have watched their browser share drop in the past two weeks.

Only Safari escaped Chrome's impact; Apple's browser, in fact, has gained nearly 0.7 percentage points during the past 14 days.

Mozilla Corp. will try to squeeze more into Firefox 3.1, the company's chief engineer said today, in part as a reaction to rival browsers from Microsoft and Google.

"Looking at where we are and the competitive browser landscape, we felt we would be doing a better job if we had another four to five weeks," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's interim vice president of engineering.

Shaver wasn't sure what impact, if any, the additional work would have on Firefox 3.1's final release, which Mozilla had targeted as late in 2008 or early 2009. "It's too early to know what affect it will have," he said. "But that [late 2008, early 2009 timeframe] is still what we're looking at."

Shavlik's NetChk Protect 6.5 lets IT administrators patch offline VMware virtual machines. Though NetChk Protect 6.5 is focused only on Microsoft Windows and VMware environments, Shavlik's products offers IT administrators a way to save time and effort updating offline virtual machines.

Patch deployment to virtual and physical systems just got a lot easier with the Sept. 2 release of Shavlik NetChk Protect 6.5.

With the ability to deploy patches to offline VMware virtual machines, IT managers can now be confident that VMs that are only used occasionally will spin up with the most current patches, hot fixes and service packs.

The current sea of web browsers is awash in promises, but what makes Firefox better then Internet Explorer? And is Google’s Chrome really any faster or better at rendering web pages then Safari? Neowin.net was looking to answer this very question when it authored an excellent roundup of browser rendering engines. The report helps to break down which browsers and applications make use of each of the four most prominent technologies: Trident (Microsoft), Gecko (Mozilla), Webkit (Apple/Google), and Presto(Opera).