Ever since we did a browser comparison test last year there have been a lot of emails and comments asking if we were going to update the article to reflect new releases. I thought about adding in the new browsers as they came out, but decided against it for one reason or another. Instead I thought it would be better to just do a fresh article, and include even more stats than last time.

The last time we did a report on the operating system and browser stats was back in January 2009. In January Chrome was starting to take off as it passed 1% market share, and both Windows and Internet Explorer suffered some big blows as their competition scooped up some of their precious users.

Today Apple kind of took everyone by surprise when they released a big milestone for the Safari browser. The new Safari 4 Beta from Apple borrows some ideas from their competition, and they spiced it up a bit with some fancy graphics. This is most notably seen in the "Top Sites" screen as seen in the image above.

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.

Mac only Making one browser look like another has been a trend for ages. More often than not users like the functionality of a browser, but don't exactly like how it looks on the particular operating system.

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.

Now that the month of June has wrapped up we can see what browsers and operating systems have emerged as victorious. In both segments Microsoft is still dominating the market according to Net Applications, but there are some competitors that continue to crawl up behind them. In fact both Windows and Internet Explorer dropped in market share for June 2008.

Free digital issues of several popular magazines are available via www.zinio.com/iphone for free to iPhone users and those using Safari who change the user agent in their browser to "Mobile Safari 1.1.3-iPhone." It's also available to Firefox users who change their user agent accordingly. They're not no-name brands of magazines either.

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

Mac only Yahoo has made an acquisition today that will probably catch some Mac users off guard. They bought the rights to a Safari add-on called Inquisitor, which is pictured to the right.