Facebook Finds its Place in the Location-Sharing Landscape

The biggest social network on the web — that’s Facebook, by the way — is getting ready to unveil a location sharing service of its own, according to a report Tuesday. Citing unnamed sources, The New York Times’ Bits blog says there will be two components, “a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users [...]

Google Gets a New Geocoder

Google has announced a new geocoding web service app authors can use to better plot locations on a map. The new Google Geocoding Web Service includes some enhanced capabilities that not only make it possible for app developers to provide more accurate and granular locations in their apps, but it also lets them increase the performance [...]

Amazon Is Building a Better Browser for Kindle

Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards, and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities. But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website. A job posting [...]

Meet the Winners of Webmonkey’s Google I/O Giveaway

We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today. A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got [...]

Browse the Web as it Looked in 1993

Github user Alan Dipert has posted the source code for NCSA Mosaic 2.7 on the code-hosting website. You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting [...]

Welcome to the All New Webmonkey

As you may have noticed, we’ve given Webmonkey an entirely new coat of paint. The visual design has been refreshed — something we’ve been doing every couple of years since we launched in 1996 — and we honestly think the site has never looked better. It took a lot of hard work by everyone on the [...]

Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9

With the latest releases of Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox continuing to push the boundaries of the web, the once-dominant Internet Explorer is looking less and less relevant every day. But we should expect Microsoft to go on the offensive at its upcoming MIX 2010 developer conference in Las Vegas, where, it has been speculated, the [...]

Google Chrome Beta Adds Privacy and Content Controls

The latest beta release of Google Chrome adds a slew of much needed privacy and content controls — as well as automatic page translation — to Google’s fast, but slightly feature-deficient browser. The new features — which put Chrome on par with other browsers when it comes to privacy controls — are so far only available [...]

Firefox Borrows a Bit of Safari’s Magic to Speed Up JavaScript

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser was one of the first to optimize for today’s JavaScript-heavy web pages. Mozilla’s new Tracemonkey JavaScript engine — released with Firefox 3.5 — put the browser at the top of most page rendering speed tests. But lately, Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari and the coming Opera 10.5 have been beating Firefox at [...]

New Opera 10.5 Delivers Speed, Windows 7 Tricks

Opera software has released Opera 10.5 for Windows, boasting that it’s “the fastest browser on Earth.” We took the beta version for a test drive last month and found that it is indeed snappy, besting Safari 4, Firefox 3.6 and even Google’s speedy Chrome browser in our informal testing. Now that the final release is [...]