Last year, we worked with Mozilla to add Bing as a search option that ships with Firefox. Since that time, you have told us to make it even easier to use Bing in Firefox.

So today we’re teaming with Mozilla to release Firefox with Bing, a version of the popular Web browser that includes default search settings for Bing. Now Firefox users who are Bing enthusiasts can use Firefox with Bing to use the Web the way they want without having to take extra steps to navigate or customize their settings to Bing.

Firefox with Bing offers the latest version of Firefox with Bing set as your home page and the default setting in the search box and AwesomeBar (where you can also type in queries as well as Web addresses). If you already have the latest version of Firefox, then you just need to download the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on to set the same preferences.

You can download Firefox with Bing here starting today. We are excited to make it even easier for members of the Mozilla Firefox community to use Bing.

Please let us know what you think.

- Tor Steiner, Bing

 

Google‘s 3 year-old Chrome browser just hit the 200 million user mark, CEO Larry Page announced Thursday.

The fast-growing browser had about 160 million users in May, up from 120 million in December 2010, according to eWeek, which correctly predicted Chrome would hit 200 million users in October.

Chrome’s growth had been noted elsewhere. The browser has about 15% market share and in some markets, like the UK, it has surpassed Firefox’s share to become the second most popular browser after IE. Among Mashable readers, meanwhile, Chrome is the most popular.

The huge installed base for Chrome is good news for Google, which just started rolling out its first Chromebooks in June.

More About: chrome, Firefox, Google

Google Chrome is well on its way to surpassing Mozilla Firefox’s No. 2 market share position and should overtake the fox no later than December, according to Irish analytics company StatCounter.

We reported at the beginning of August that Chrome had overtaken Firefox in the UK, but now that trend appears to be intensifying on a worldwide scale. Chrome has gained an incredible eight percentage points in worldwide market share since January, which is a 50 percent increase in total share growth, and it is expected to keep growing at a quick pace.

The data from StatCounter, as first noted by Computerworld, says both Microsoft’s No. 1 Internet Explorer and Firefox have been losing market share since January, with most of those lost customers being picked up by Google.

As of Wednesday, Chrome’s global share for September was 23.6% with Firefox at 26.8% and Internet Explorer at 41.7%. For Chrome to surpass Firefox by the end of the year, StatCounter makes the assumption that Chrome’s rapid growth will continue at the same pace. At the end of the year, Chrome should have approximately 26.6% share and Firefox should have 25.3%.

A rival report by U.S. web metrics company Net Applications shows a much wider current gap between Chrome and Firefox. In August, Net Apps said Chrome had 15.5% of market share and Firefox had 22.6%. But if Chrome keeps up its growth pace, Net Applications’ data points to Chrome surpassing Firefox by the middle of 2012, which would still be an impressive feat.

What’s your favorite web browser?

Filed under: VentureBeat

Mozilla’s rapid release schedule for Firefox continues with the arrival of Firefox 7 for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Firefox 7 comes less than six weeks after the release of Firefox 6. Mozilla moved to a more rapid release cycle with a more streamlined, frequent and incremental upgrade cycle a la Google’s Chrome browser, after Firefox 4 launched back in March.

As a result, most of the changes have taken place under the hood. Mozilla boasts that Firefox 7 uses less memory and performs faster.

Firefox 7 also improved its support for cutting-edge web technologies, including hardware-accelerated Canvas for HTML5 animations. That means that web apps and browser-based games should get better performance.

Memory Improvements: Your Mileage May Vary

The Firefox 7 team says that the latest version of the browser uses less memory, a reduction of anywhere between 20% and 50%. In a blog post at Mozilla Hacks, Firefox developer Nicholas Nethercote details the memory improvements. He says the benefits will be most noticeable for users that:

Keep Firefox open for a long time
Have many tabs open at once
Use Firefox for Windows
View pages with lots of text
Use Firefox while also using other memory-intensive programs

In our tests, using a mid-2010 MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM running OS X Lion, we were unable to ascertain just how much better Firefox 7 used memory as compared to Firefox 6. However, we did pit it against the most stable release of Google Chrome.

I opened up the same browser pages in Firefox 7 and in Chrome. They included Mashable, Variety.com, Google+, Facebook, Mashable‘s backend website and Hulu.com. On Hulu, I played a video in high definition.

To take Flash out of the equation, I then removed the Hulu tab from both browsers. These are the results.

As you can see, the main Firefox app uses the same amount of memory in both tests. The “plugin-container” process is actually what Firefox uses to sandbox some plugins, like Flash, so that even if that process crashes, the rest of the app stays in place.

Mozilla’s tests indicate that peak memory usage for Firefox 7 is lower than its predecessors and that sustained usage is more consistent. We haven’t had enough time to test whether memory usage continues to increase the more time a tab or window is left open, but we’ll assume this is true.

For Mac users, Firefox 7 is still no match for Google Chrome, at least when it comes to memory usage. To be fair, Apple’s own browser, Safari, has memory performance issues with OS X Lion, and Firefox 7 could perform better in Mac OS X 10.6 or earlier. Firefox has historically had better Windows performance, especially when it comes to memory usage, and we expect those are the users that will really see the benefits.

Is the Rapid Update Cycle Working?

I’m conflicted about Mozilla’s rapid-release approach to Firefox. As nice as it is not to have to go months or years between major updates — especially when it comes to support for newer HTML5 and JavaScript technologies — I have to wonder if this process isn’t too rapid.

Because Firefox has historically been such a version-number driven product, users are conditioned to expect major feature improvements every time a release is introduced. On the flip-side, Google doesn’t make a big deal about the version numbers of its Chrome browser. Users just know it as Chrome.

Part of the reason that a rapid update cycle works for Google Chrome is that the updates take place completely in the background. Because of how Chrome plugins are designed, most will continue to work with new versions. Firefox has a much larger and more complex add-on environment and as a result, there will always be add-ons that are incompatible with the latest release.

While I firmly believe that the move to more rapid, consistent improvements is good for the browser ecosystem as a whole, I’m not convinced that the Firefox team has figured out the best way to alert users about updates or that that the messaging behind how these updates work is on target.

What do you think of Firefox 7? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Browsers, chrome, Firefox, firefox 7, web browsers

The After the Deadline Firefox add-on brings smart, contextual spelling and grammar checking to the browser. Once installed, click on the check icon displayed on text areas of web forms to check your grammar and spelling. Click again to finish proofreading.

Go to History tab, hit show in sidebar, highlight website then edit delete.

Firefox is not social networking ready but can be easily converted into a social networking hub by using extensions and add-ons. Flock-ofy FireFox

You can cram many of Firefox's best features into the proprietary beast that is Internet Explorer.

Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? Our Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.

The kind of person that puts the effort into getting into and completing college is also the kind of person who succeeds at other things. Firefox is similar.

Great resource listing by Mashable

PDFCreator