Internet, Safari | featured news

Google Inc will pay $22.5 million to settle charges it bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple Inc's Safari browser, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.

According to one analyst, Apple made $1 billion from Google last year to make it the default search engine in Safari.

Discovery comes just days after Web giant was found to be sidestepping the user privacy preferences in Apple's Safari. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Security.

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

The March launches of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) and Firefox 4 failed to stop Microsoft's and Mozilla's decline in browser share, new Web usage data shows.

Microsoft has launched the finished version of its Internet Explorer 9 web browser amid tough competition from rivals. The company said IE9's graphics handling, security and privacy features put it on an even footing with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and others. The release comes as Microsoft's browser market share is being whittled down by a growing roster of rivals.

Pwn2Own, the annual three-day browser hackathon, has already claimed its first two victims: IE8 on Windows 7 64-bit, and Safari 5 on Mac OS X.

Apple released a new version of Safari on both Mac OS X and Windows, suggesting it has the "performance edge." Our testing doesn't quite agree with that conclusion.

Just last week, Google finally released official betas for its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux.

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times.