Dooble – Secure and Open Source Web Browser

Dooble is a secure and Open Source web browser that claims to provide solid performance, stability, and cross-platform functionality.

Its most important goals are to safeguard the privacy of its users with a group of integrated privacy features of the browser: search engine, secure messenger, and e-mail client.

The installer also provides a means of installing the Dooble browser component. The website states the rendering engine is fast compared to Firefox‘ one which is slow and Opera’s which has middle rendering speed.

Dooble is available for popular operating systems Windows, OS X and GNU/Linux.

Visit the dooble website for more information on this new safe browser.

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Personas – Customize your Firefox

If the standard look and feel of your Firefox browser is too boring for you maybe you want to try the new Personas for Firefox. Personas is a free add-on just released from the Mozilla labs. It is a Mozilla Labs experiment. Just surf to getPersonas.com, download the free add-on, restart your browser and choose from a selection of totally different looking skins.

After the restart you’ll find a small fox icon in the lower left corner of your browser. Klick on it to open a menu from which you can choose skins by popularity, age, category and from the ones you recently tested. You can also easily go back to the standard look and feel which you are used to.

Personas are lightweight, easy-to-install and easy-to-change “skins” for your Firefox web browser.

Among the most popular skins are a California sunset, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, Hanami, Fireflies, Minefields and the Firefox Robot of the upcoming Firefox 3.5 which I chose. You can preview a new skin just by rolling over the menu entry. The skin changes almost instantly without selection, restarting or any other hassle. Great way to do themeing!

Prototype implementation of Gazelle Web Browser

Researchers Helen J. Wang, Chris Grier, Alexander Moshchuk, Samuel T. King, Piali Choudhury and Herman Venter of Microsoft Research published a paper on The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser.

They see a need for a new kind of web browsers as the way people use the web and web browsers has changed over the past years.

Web browsers originated as applications that people used to view static web sites sequentially. As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals.

Their solution is a web browser with its own kernel for a mini operating system named Gazelle.

… we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection. We elaborate on these issues and provide comprehensive solutions.

Gazelle might not only what we might see as Internet Explorer 9 some time in the future but Gazelle might be a solution for existing browsers.

Our prototype implementation and evaluation experience indicates that it is realistic to turn an existing browser into a multi-principal OS that yields significantly stronger security and robustness with acceptable performance and backward compatibility.

You find a link to the research paper (PDF) at the bottom of the blog post The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser.

Opera 10 alpha Screenshots

Check out some of Opera 10 new / revised features: auto update feature, HTML mail, spellcheck on the screenshots. Click on a screenshot for a larger version.

How-To: Buttons in Opera for common search queries

If you are an Opera user you might be interested in How to convert the search field into a button in the Opera Search panel?.

You find a detailled answer to this question in the Opera Watch Blog.

Yahoo! will deliver Opera Mini

Opera Software and Yahoo!® announced a partnership to bring the Opera Mini mobile Web browser and the full Internet to more mobile phone users around the world. Yahoo! will begin distributing Opera Mini via Yahoo! Mobile and also as a standalone download from Yahoo!’s mobile Web sites in the near future. The Opera Mini client will be available free of charge.

As the most popular mobile browser on the planet, Opera Mini will also be available to users of Yahoo! Mobile. Yahoo! Mobile with Opera Mini is easily accessible to end-users, operators and manufacturers and provides a cost-effective means of getting the Internet on your phone. Together, Yahoo! and Opera will bring the full Web experience to your phone, similar to how you know it from your desktop computer.

CEO Jon von Tetzchner of Opera Software is quoted in the press release Yahoo! Mobile to take flight with Opera Mini mobile Web browser.