"The OS/2 community is getting close to obtaining a modern browser on their platform," writes Slashdot reader martiniturbide. In an announcement article on Monday, president of the OS/2 Voice community, Roderick Klein, revealed that a public beta of the new Chromium-based Otter Browser will arrive "in the last week of February or the first week of March." XDA Developers reports: OS/2 was the operating system developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the intended goal of replacing all DOS and Windows-based systems. However, Microsoft decided to focus on Windows after the immense popularity of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, leaving IBM to continue development on its own. IBM eventually stopped working on OS/2 in 2001, but two other companies licensed the operating system to continue where IBM left off -- first eComStation, and more recently, ArcaOS.

BitWise Works GmbH and the Dutch OS/2 Voice foundation started work on Otter Browser in 2017, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep an updated version of Firefox available on OS/2 and ArcaOS. Firefox 49 ESR from 2016 is the latest version available, because that's around the time Mozilla started rewriting significant parts of Firefox with Rust code, and there's no Rust compiler for OS/2. Since then, the main focus has been porting Qt 5.0 to OS/2, which includes the QtWebEngine (based on Chromium). This effort also has the side effect of making more cross-platform ports possible in the future.

Slashdot reader sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest actively maintained Linux distribution, released version 15.0 yesterday after a long release cycle that goes all the way back to 2016 where the last version (14.2) was released. According to the release notes, the whole spirit of this release is: "Keep it familiar, but make it modern."

Among the news, this release offers kernel 5.15.19, PAM, PipeWire and PulseAudio, Wayland and X11 graphical systems, and Rust and Python 3. As graphical environments, both Xfce 4.16 and the latest Plasma 5 (Plasma 5.23.5, Frameworks 5.90, KDE apps 21.12 running under Qt 5.15.3) are available, with Cinnamon and Mate also available from third parties. The main compilers are gcc-11.2 and llvm 13.0. The default browser is Firefox 91.5esr, with Chromium available as a third-party repository. And... no systemd at all.

Slackware can be downloaded from a variety of mirrors. BitTorrent downloads are going to be available too. I've used Slackware for 20 years and it's always impressed me with its stability and speed. I encourage everyone interested to try it. Slashdot readers arfonrg and saxa also shared the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: The next class of Chrome OS devices may be targeted at the gaming market -- more than one Chromebook is set to release with a full RGB keyboard. Similar to how Chrome OS offers support for Linux apps and Android apps, there's been a long-running effort -- codenamed Borealis -- to get Steam and various Linux-compatible PC games running in a virtual machine on your Chromebook. While there's yet to be any formal announcement of Steam games for Chromebooks, work has steadily continued since the project was first discovered.

Whether through Steam games or game streaming services, it seems Google's gaming ambitions for Chrome OS may be coming to fruition in the near future. According to changes to Chrome OS code in the last few weeks, Google has begun working to support Chromebooks with full color RGB keyboards -- you can't have a product for gamers without RGB, right? Right? -- starting with a new feature flag. From what we can find, each keyboard key can be individually customized to your liking to vary the intensity of the red, green, and blue lighting to create different colors and adjust the keyboard's overall backlight brightness. For now, this is only possible through an internal command for Chrome OS developers to use in testing. In time, one would assume there would be a tool within Chrome OS to let gamers change the colors of their keyboards.

At first glance, one could argue that this is just about supporting the many USB and Bluetooth connected keyboards you can buy with RGB lighting built in. However, with a bit more digging, we've found that rather than being a generic feature, Chrome OS's RGB support is being prepared for a select few unreleased devices. So who is going to be making the first gaming Chromebooks? For the time being, there appear to be at least three hardware codenames associated with RGB keyboards. The first two are Vell and Taniks, both of which are based on Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake laptop processors. [...] A third hardware codename attached to RGB keyboards for Chrome OS is Ripple. However, rather than being the name of a particular Chromebook, it seems that Ripple is the internal name of a detachable keyboard, like that of the Pixel Slate.

"The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly, with the company now averaging over 100 million daily search queries and growing by almost 47% in 2021..." reports BleepingComputer: In 2020, DuckDuckGo received 23.6 billion total search queries and achieved a daily average of 79 million search queries by the end of December.

In 2021, DuckDuckGo received 34.6 billion total search queries so far and currently has an average of 100 million search queries per day, showing a 46.4% growth for the year.

While DuckDuckGo's growth is considerable, it still only has 2.53% of the total market share, with Yahoo at 3.3%, Bing at 6.43%, and Google holding a dominant share of 87.33% of search engine traffic in the USA. However, as people continue to become frustrated with how their data is being used by tech giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, we will likely see more people switch to privacy-focused search engines.
This year DuckDuckGo also released their own email forwarding service, and announced work on the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for Desktop — which will be built from scratch and not be based on Chromium.

The Mozilla Foundation today released its financial report for 2020. As usual, this gives us a good picture of the organization's financial health from a year ago, but for the first time this year, Mozilla also provided us with more recent data. From a report: It's no secret that Mozilla recently went through a number of difficult years, with major layoffs in 2020 as it restructured its for-profit arm, Mozilla Corporation. Its flagship Firefox browser, despite a number of technical advances, is also struggling in a marketplace that is now dominated by Chromium-based browsers. Still, in 2020, Mozilla Corporation's revenue was $466 million from its search partnerships (largely driven by its search deal with Google), subscriptions and advertising revenue. That's essentially the same as in 2019, when Mozilla Corporation generated $465 million from these sources.

For 2021, the organization forecasts revenue of over $500 million. What's maybe most important, though, is that Mozilla's new products like its Mozilla VPN service, Firefox Relay Premium, Pocket and other commercial initiatives are slowly but surely starting to pay off. As Mozilla executive VP Angela Plohman and CFO Eric Muhlheim noted in today's announcement, revenue from new product offerings will grow 150% this year and account for 14% of the organization's revenue in 2021. The Mozilla VPN service saw a revenue increase of 450% from 2020 to 2021.

Google Chrome 96 was released yesterday, and users are reporting problems with Twitter, Discord, and Instagram caused by the new version. BleepingComputer reports: The issues have been reported to Google in a Chromium bug post where Google employees have started to investigate the problems. "We're continuing to see user reports about this behavior, including reports from our social team," notes Google product manager Craig Tumblison. "One user has shared that disabling the "chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialless" flag resolves the behavior. Another report shares a specific error message: "The connection was rejected at https://cards-frame.twitter.com". Test team, would you be able to try enabling that flag to see if the behavior appears?"

The 'chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialles' flag is related to a new Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy feature released with Chrome 96. Google states that you can fix these bugs in some cases by setting the "chrome://flags/#cross-origin-embedder-policy-credentialless" to disabled. If you are affected by these issues, you can copy and paste the above chrome:// address into the Google Chrome address bar and press enter. When the experimental flag appears, please set it to Disabled and relaunch the browser when prompted.

A year after releasing the first preview build of its Chromium-based Edge browser for Linux, Microsoft is announcing its general availability. From a report: The new release supports a variety of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. Microsoft announced Linux on Edge's availability milestone during the first day of its Ignite IT Pro conference. As of the release of Edge for Linux to the "stable" (mainstream user) channel, Edge is now available on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux. As it did when introducing the new Edge on macOS, Microsoft has been positioning Edge on Linux as more of an offering for IT pros and developers who want to test web sites than as a browser for "normal" users on those platforms. However, any user on any supported platform can use the new Edge.

A Microsoft software engineer working on open-source technologies recently wrote that "you can find an open-source implementation for (almost) anything.

"But the mobile landscape is a notable exception." While there are some open-source success stories, Android being a massive one, only a handful of major companies rule hardware and software innovation for the devices we carry in our pockets. Together, Apple and Samsung hold over 50 percent of the world's market share for mobile devices, a figure that underscores just how few dominant players exist in the space. Numbers like these might leave you feeling somber about the overall viability of mobile open source. But a growing demand for better security and privacy, among other factors, may be turning the tides, and a host of inspectable, open-source solutions with transparent life cycle processes are emerging as promising alternatives....

Along with the open-source messaging app Telegram, Signal has garnered attention as a more privacy-focused alternative to apps like Facebook Messenger. The browser Chromium and the mobile game 2048 are other noteworthy examples, as well as proof that although open-source apps aren't the norm, they can be widely adopted and popular. For example, over 65 percent of mobile traffic flows through Chromium-based browsers...

Despite the many open-source technologies available to help build mobile apps, there's plenty of room to grow in the user-facing space — especially as more people recognize the value of having open-source and open-governance applications that can better safeguard their personal information. That growth isn't likely to extend to the hardware space, where the cost of building open-source implementations isn't as rewarding for developers or users — though we may start to see more devices that allow people to choose individual hardware modules from a variety of providers.
The article does cite the open source mobile hardware company Purism. And there's plenty of interesting open source software for mobile app developers, including frameworks like Apache Cordova (which lets developers use CSS3, HTML5, and JavaScript) and a whole ecosystem of open source libraries. But it all does raise the question...

Why aren't there more open source solutions for mobile devices?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac, written by Filipe Esposito: Google this week announced the beta release of Chrome 94, the next update to Google's desktop web browser. In addition to general improvements, the update also adds support for the new WebGPU API, which comes to replace WebGL and can even access Apple's Metal API. As described by Google in a blog post, WebGPU is a new, more advanced graphics API for the web that is able to access GPU hardware, resulting in better performance for rendering interfaces in websites and web apps.

For those unfamiliar, Metal is an API introduced by Apple in 2014 that provides low-level access to GPU hardware for iOS, macOS, and tvOS apps. In other words, apps can access the GPU without overloading the CPU, which is one of the limitations of old APIs like OpenGL. Google says WebGPU is not expected to come enabled by default for all Chrome users until early 2022. The final release of Chrome 94 should enable WebCodecs for everyone, which is another API designed to improve the encoding and decoding of streaming videos.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from It's FOSS, written by Ankush Das: Mozilla's Firefox is the only popular alternative to Chromium-based browsers. It has been the default choice for Linux users and privacy-conscious users across every platform. However, even with all benefits as one of the best web browsers around, it is losing its grip for the past few years. I came across a Reddit thread by u/nixcraft, which highlighted more details on the decline in the userbase of Firefox since 2018. And surprisingly, the original source for this information is Firefox's Public Data Report.

As per the official stats, the reported number of active (monthly) users was about 244 million at the end of 2018. And, it seems to have declined to 198 million at the end of Q2 2021. So, that makes it a whopping ~46 million decline in the userbase. Considering 2021 is the year when privacy-focused tools saw a big boost in their userbase, Mozilla's Firefox is looking at a constant decline. Especially when Firefox manages to introduce some industry-first privacy practices. Quite the irony, eh? Just for fun, here's a timeline of our stories reporting on Firefox's download milestones from the mid-2000s:

September 19, 2004: 1 Million Firefoxes in 4 Days
December 12, 2004: Firefox Reaches 10 Million Downloads
February 17, 2005: Firefox Breaks 25 Million Downloads
April 26, 2005: Firefox nears 50 Million Downloads
July 29, 2005: Firefox Downloads Reach 75 Million
October 19, 2005: Firefox Tops 100 Million Downloads
September 11, 2007: Firefox Hits 400 Million Downloads
July 3, 2008: Firefox Breaks 8 Million, Gets Into Guinness

On Wednesday, Google announced it will soon offer an HTTPS-first option in Chrome, which will try to upgrade page loads to HTTPS. "If you flip this option on, the browser will also show a full-page warning when you try to load up a site that doesn't support HTTPS," adds The Verge. From the report: HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP (yes, the "S" stands for "secure"), and many of the websites you visit every day likely already support it. Since HTTPS encrypts your traffic, it's a helpful privacy tool for when you're using public Wi-Fi or to keep your ISP from snooping on the contents of your browsing. Google has been encouraging HTTPS adoption with moves like marking insecure sites with a "Not secure" label in the URL bar and using https:// in the address bar by default when you're typing in a URL. For now, this HTTPS-First Mode will be just an option, but the company says it will "explore" making the mode the default in the future. The HTTPS-First Mode will be available starting with Chrome 94, according to Google. Currently, that release is set for September 21st. And HTTP connections will still be supported, the company says. Google is also "re-examining" the lock icon in the URL bar. Google explains in a blog post: "As we approach an HTTPS-first future, we're also re-examining the lock icon that browsers typically show when a site loads over HTTPS. In particular, our research indicates that users often associate this icon with a site being trustworthy, when in fact it's only the connection that's secure. In a recent study, we found that only 11% of participants could correctly identify the meaning of the lock icon."

The company plans to swap the lock icon with a downward-facing arrow starting with Chrome 93. Though, the "Not Secure" label will still be shown for sites that aren't secure.

"New data from Statcounter shows that Edge has now overtaken established rival Firefox in the rankings," reports TechRadar: In recent months, the pair have been neck-and-neck, but Microsoft's browser has now put daylight between itself and Firefox. Figures for June suggest Microsoft Edge now holds 3.4% of the browser market, while Firefox has slipped to 3.29%, continuing a downward trajectory that has seen the browser either lose or maintain market share in ten of the last twelve months.

The change pushes Edge into third position in the browser rankings, behind only Chrome (65.27%) and Safari (18.34%). Launched in January 2020, the new Chromium-based Edge got off to a slow start, but began to gather momentum as the year progressed. Since last summer, the browser's market share has more than tripled.

The increase in adoption can be attributed in part to renewed marketing efforts, but also to improvements that brought the experience in line with other modern web browsers.
That may be true, but the article also acknowledges that it was just last month that Microsoft began rolling out Edge to all Windows PCs (via Windows 10 updates), "expanding the install base by millions almost overnight.

"Now, Microsoft is doing everything in its power to encourage users to abandon Internet Explorer in favor of Edge, such as removing support for Microsoft 365 web apps and automatically launching certain web pages in the new browser."

An anonymous reader shares a post: Google Chrome for Android has a feature that gives Google Search an unfair advantage over its competition. Sure, it's the default search engine and that's a huge hurdle to overcome for any competitor. However, Chrome also reserves a performance-boosting feature for Google Search exclusively. I recently poked around in the Chromium project source code; the open-source foundation for Google's Chrome web browser. The Chromium project is co-developed by Google, and other corporate and individual contributors. The project is managed and controlled by Google, however. I was looking for something else when I stumbled upon a feature called PreconnectToSearch. When enabled, the feature preemptively opens and maintains a connection to the default search engine.

The preconnection feature resolves the domain name, and negotiates and sets up a secure connection to the server. All these things take time and they must happen before the search engine can receive the users' search queries. Preempting these steps can save a dozen seconds on a slow network connection or half a second on a fast connection. This optimization can yield a nice performance boost for Google's customers. Assuming the connection only requires a trivial amount of processing power and network bandwidth, of course. Setting up the connection early can be wasteful or slow down the loading of other pages if the user isn't going to search the web. There's just one small catch: Chromium checks the default search engine setting, and only enables the feature when it's set to Google Search. This preferential treatment means no other search engine can compete with Google Search on the time it takes to load search results. Every competitor must wait until the user has started to type a search query before Chrome will establish a connection.

In a blog post this morning, Google announced plans to increase its update cadence for Chromebooks. Like Chrome, its operating system will now also follow a four-week Stable channel before moving to the next major milestone release. Android Police reports: Google will deliver fresh features more rapidly to Chromebooks starting with Chrome OS 96 -- all while keeping it stable, secure, and speedy. To adapt to the rigorous update release schedule, Google will skip Chrome OS 95, which will help it bridge the gap between M94 and Chrome's new four-week rollout strategy. Enterprise and education folks can opt enroll in an Extended Stable option for Chromebooks, which will update every 6 months. In light of the new rollout strategy, Google updated its documentation and pushed an update to its release calendar. The company will share plans about the choices Chrome OS administrators will have for milestone updates "in the coming months."

Google has shipped a new JavaScript compiler for its V8 JavaScript engine in Chrome called Sparkplug that promises a much faster web experience -- and it does it by 'cheating', according to the engineers on the project. From a report: Sparkplug is part of Chrome 91, which Google released on Tuesday with security updates but also some key changes under the hood that improve its powerful JavaScript engine, V8. Microsoft relies on V8 these days too after ditching its Chakra JavaScript engine from legacy Edge and moving to Chromium for the new Edge browser and switching to V8. Google says Chrome 91 has 23% faster performance thanks to Sparkplug's integration into V8's JavaScript pipeline.

"Chromium-based web browser Opera is all set to fully integrate with blockchain domain name provider Unstoppable Domains," reports TechRadar, "in a bid to provide millions of its users with decentralized web access." Opera users will now be able to access decentralized websites hosted via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) using Unstoppable Domains' popular .crypto NFT addresses from the Opera browser. This will include platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, Mac or Linux. Right now, Opera has over 320 million monthly active users across its offerings, following the addition of a crypto wallet to its browsers in 2019.

Unstoppable Domains was launched in 2018 and provides domain names to users with no renewal fees. Users of Unstoppable Domains are granted full ownership and control when they claim a domain because it is minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Domain names such as .crypto replace complex wallet addresses for payments across over 40 cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges in addition to accessing the decentralized web through Opera.

Maciej Kocemba, Product Director at Opera said that the company believes in giving all people the ability to access the full web, regardless of the technology behind it.
The Opera product director was further quoted by Business Insider: "We have always supported web innovation, and the decentralized web or Web3 is the natural next wave. Making Unstoppable Domains accessible in the Opera browsers means our users can try blockchain technologies for themselves. Registering your .crypto domain, which is forever yours, is a great first step into Web3," the company's product director Maciej Kocemba said.

Opera is quickly becoming a leader in pushing for the adoption of Web 3.0, also often described as the decentralized web.

New submitter oblom writes about Mighty, a new approach to web browsing: In short, server-side web navigation, with client-side rendering. Per Y Combinator founder Paul Graham: "Usually when people talk about grand things like changing "the future of computing," they're full of it. But not this time. Suhail [founder of Mighty] has been working on this for 2 years. There's a good chance it's the new default infrastructure. Suhail writes in a blog post: After 2 years of hard work, we've created something that's indistinguishable from a Google Chrome that runs at 4K, 60 frames a second, takes no more than 500 MB of RAM, and often less than 30% CPU with 50+ tabs open. This is the first step in making a new kind of computer. [...] When you switch to Mighty, it will feel like you went out and bought a new computer with a much faster processor and much more memory. But you don't have [to] buy a new computer. All you have to do is download a desktop app.

To make Mighty work, we had to solve a lot of complex engineering problems, including designing a custom server to keep costs low, building a custom low-latency networking protocol, forking Chromium to integrate directly with various low-level render/encoder pipelines, and making the software interoperate with a long list of macOS features. We are working hard at ramping up server capacity across the world as we roll it out to users. You might be thinking: "Yeah but what about the lag?" Lag would have been a real problem 5 years ago, but new advances since then have allowed us to eliminate nearly all of it: 5 Ghz WiFi bands, H.265 hardware-accelerated low-latency encoders, widespread 100 Mbps Internet, and cheaper, more powerful GPUs. We also designed a new low-latency network protocol, and we locate servers as close to users geographically as possible. As a result, a user with 100 Mbps internet will rarely notice lag while using Mighty. Watch this demo video and see for yourself.

Google is all alone with its proposed advertising technology -- FLoC-- to replace third-party cookies. Every major browser that uses the open source Chromium project has declined to use it, and it's unclear what that will mean for the future of advertising on the web. Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, and Brave have said they are not implementing Google's FLoC into their browsers.

An Indian security researcher has published today proof-of-concept exploit code for a recently discovered vulnerability impacting Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Brave. From a report: The researcher, Rajvardhan Agarwal, told The Record today that the exploit code is for a Chromium bug that was used during the Pwn2Own hacking contest that took place last week. During the contest, security researchers Bruno Keith (@bkth_) & Niklas Baumstark (@_niklasb) of Dataflow Security used a vulnerability to run malicious code inside Chrome and Edge, for which they received $100,000. Per contest rules, details about this bug were handed over to the Chrome security team so the bug could be patched as soon as possible. While details about the exact nature of the bug were never publicly disclosed, Agarwal told The Record he spotted the patches for this bug by looking at the source code commits to the V8 JavaScript engine, a component of the Chromium open-source browser project, which allowed him to recreate the Pwn2Own exploit, which he uploaded earlier today on GitHub, and shared on Twitter. However, while Chromium developers have patched the V8 bug last week, the patch has not yet been integrated into official releases of downstream Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and others, which are still vulnerable to attacks.

Google, Microsoft and the broader web community are working together to make it easier for developers to build websites that work seamlessly across browsers. From a report: They've teamed up for a cross-browser effort called #Compat2021, which aims to eliminate the top five browser compatibility pain points on the web for developers. The group identified the issues they decided to focus on based on usage data, number of bugs reports, survey feedback and test results. One of the most problematic issue that they want to address is with CSS Flexbox, since images as flex items are often stretched incorrectly and differently between browsers. They also want to improve CSS Grid so that it can be used to create animated grid layouts on Chromium and WebKit -- at the moment, the ability is only supported in Gecko. The group wants to work on sticky positioning so that any content that's stickied looks consistent across browsers, as well. Similarly, they want to make sure web elements maintain a consistent width-to-height ratio and that animations and 3D effects look the same whatever browser a user is on.