There has been more talk about web browsers in the last few weeks than any time I can remember in the past. Google Chrome came out of the Beta phase, Opera unveiled the first Alpha release of version 10, Internet Explorer 8 is suspected to have a 3rd Beta coming in the next month, and Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was just unveiled.

The last time that we received any physical type of viral marketing materials from Microsoft was back in early 2007 when Microsoft sent bloggers and other members of the media a little box. Some of you may remember this. The box was a puzzle in itself to get open, but once we got it open, we found a slim 256mb USB drive that had a video and a cipher key.

When Mozilla launched Firefox 3 there were some people who weren't fond of the changes they made to the address bar. With it they decided to intermingle results from the user's history, bookmarks, and typed addresses to provide a long list of sites they might be trying to find.

Microsoft will be addressing a lot of privacy issues in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, which will be released to the public soon.

Web browsers are probably among the most updated applications because of how important they are in our daily lives, and also because of how vulnerable they can make us to outside attacks. For example, Firefox 2 has had about 15 different versions since its release in October 2006, and all but three addressed security issues.

Browser vulnerabilities are nothing new, and they are constantly popping up no matter what software you're using. Today, however, there's an especially eerie one that Ghacks found which currently affects almost all versions of Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8. It's capable of recording all of your keystrokes even after you've left the site that you were visiting.

Windows only Have you ever wanted to have more control over how your browser used it's bandwidth? Some routers will let you do this for Quality of Service (QoS) reasons, but it's also possible to achieve the same results using some free software.

We're almost halfway through the year, and it looks as though Internet Explorer is once again continuing its steady decline in usage.

Windows XP/Vista only As a web designer one of the things that is difficult to do is test a site in multiple versions of Internet Explorer, especially if you're running Vista which doesn't really include an option to run prior versions of IE.

Keyboard shortcuts step aside! Mouse gestures have been around for quite some time, and are often used as a way to quickly issue commands. One of the places that these are used the most is in the web browser, and that's because a lot of repetitive actions are performed there. Just think about how many times each day you click the back or refresh buttons.

Last week we took a look at where the various browsers stood up against each other in terms of market share. I was shocked (to say the least) when Internet Explorer triumphantly came out on top with a 1.22% market share increase. That really hit hard for Firefox who's market share was sent spiraling down to 16.96%, which was nearly a percent lower than the previous month.

And so April 2008 has come to an end, which means it's time to take a look at how the browsers stack up against each other once again. Who's rising, who's falling, and who can't catch a break? I think some of the stats might surprise you!

One of the most popular extensions for Firefox is Greasemonkey simply because it gives developers and users a chance to customize their browsing experience with very little work. The extension has been downloaded over 165,000 times which is pretty incredible, and new scripts that power the extension are always being created.

If you're using Firefox there is a very good chance that you've heard of the IE Tab extension. For many of us it helped ease the burden of switching to Firefox as the primary browser back when developers didn't see Firefox as a viable alternative. That is not nearly as big of a problem as it once was.

So you're browsing the web and come across an image that you want to save to your computer. There are various ways that you can go about doing this. For example, in Opera you can hold down the Control key and click on the image. You'll then be prompted with the Save-As dialog just as you would have if you right-clicked on the image to save it.

We've been asked for quite awhile to provide a performance comparison of the different mainstream browsers out there, and so today we are going to show you the stats from several different areas that users generally find to be the most important. Things like memory usage, page load time, and JavaScript performance will all be covered below.

We realized that we've never really done an article diving deep into the history of browser stats even though we have shown you screenshots of browsers from long ago. Thanks to Net Applications we have about a year and a half worth of data to look at, and it is interesting to see the rise and fall of the different browsers.

I've never been a big fan of the search box located in almost all of the browsers these days, and I'm not quite sure why.

It didn't take long for two different developers to start replicating some of the best new features in Internet Explorer 8: WebSlices and Activities. Come on, you knew extension developers would jump on the chance to give users very few reasons to switch to Internet Explorer.

We've been receiving quite a few requests from our readers wanting to know what we think about Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, and whether it is worth the upgrade. I downloaded and installed it shortly after it was released yesterday, and the total installation time on my Vista machine took around 4 or 5 minutes. There were absolutely no problems upgrading to IE 8 from IE 7.