By Ryan Paul, Ars Technica

Mozilla recently combined its desktop and mobile design teams with the aim of unifying the Firefox user experience across form factors. A presentation slide deck published by Mozilla’s Madhava Enros offers some insight into the design process and shows how the effort to boost Firefox’s visual cohesion aligns with Mozilla’s Kilimanjaro initiative.

Mozilla is aiming for a “soft, friendly, and human” design that will “feel like Firefox” across all supported platforms and form factors. The challenge will be blending the browser’s distinctive visual style with the conventions of the underlying platforms. The slide presentation includes mockups that show how the new design language will translate to various environments, including Android, Metro, B2G, and the conventional desktop.

Some design elements will be shared across all of those environments. The presentation shows how the same distinctive curved shapes will be used to give Firefox uniform contours on different form factors.

A wireframe showing how Firefox's curved contour translates across form factors. Image: Mozilla

Mozilla’s Stephen Horlander created a new design called Australis that will bring an updated look and feel to Firefox on the desktop. Mockups and experimental third-party implementations of Australis have been floating around for quite some time. Australis will bring curved tabs, a simplified menu, and a number of other improvements to Firefox. Mozilla has also separately been working on a more functional start page and a cleaner interface for managing downloads.

A mockup of Firefox's Australis theme as it might look on the conventional Windows desktop. Image: Mozilla.

The mobile Firefox user interface is already in close alignment with the new style. Some updated mockups published in the slide presentation show how further refinement will increase visual consistency between the mobile user interface and the Australis design on the desktop. The mockups also show some of the specialized features that are available in the mobile version of the browser, including a built-in sharing tool and an article reading mode.

A mockup of the new Firefox tablet user interface. Image: Mozilla

Firefox Mobile's reading mode and sharing feature. Image: Mozilla

Mozilla is also working on a Metro version of the Firefox web browser for Windows 8. Development began earlier this year, but it has already seen considerable progress. The Metro design mockups included in the slide presentation show a layout that is similar to the one that Firefox users on Android tablets. Some aspects have been adjusted to make it more functionally consistent with Internet Explorer’s Metro interface, however. The tabs reel will slide down from the top instead of the side and the new tab page has Metro-like blocks.

A mockup of Firefox's Metro user interface that shows the tab reel. Image: Mozilla

The presentation associates a “Kilimanjaro” rating with the various designs to signify the extent to which they contribute to advancing Mozilla’s platform aspirations. Kilimanjaro is an umbrella project that encompasses all of the pending work that Mozilla is doing to create a user-focused product and service ecosystem that spans across the user’s devices and is built on top of the open web.

Key parts of Kilimanjaro include the organization’s identity service, application marketplace, B2G mobile platform, and its cloud synchronization service. Mozilla’s ongoing work on web standards and its effort to make the web a viable application platform also play a vital role in influencing the design process.

For more design mockups and information, you can see the slide presentation online. Enros wrote about it in a blog entry, in which he also says that a full video of the presentation will be available soon. More information about Kilimanjaro is available from the Mozilla wiki.

By Peter Bright, Ars Technica

A couple of years ago we lamented the state of Microsoft’s cloud storage services. On the one hand, there was SkyDrive, with gobs of storage. On the other hand, there was Mesh, with file synchronization and remote access. Two separate products, when really there should have been one.

And now there is. Microsoft has rolled out a set of new SkyDrive apps and new online capabilities to make SkyDrive the one-stop shop for file syncing and remote file access. On the software side, there are new clients for Windows and Mac OS X to sync files with the cloud, and updated versions of the Windows Phone and iOS clients (there’s no first-party Android app, but Microsoft recommends a couple of third-party programs).

On the cloud side, there’s are some major changes to availability. Under the old system, users had 25 GB of non-synced SkyDrive cloud storage, and 5 GB of synced Mesh storage. Now, there’s just a single 7 GB of synced storage, with paid options to buy more space, starting at $10 for 20 GB per year, up to $50 for 100 GB per year. Though this increases the amount of synced storage, it nonetheless represents a reduction in total storage availability. However, any users that signed up for SkyDrive before April 22, and who have uploaded at least one file to the service, are eligible for a free upgrade to 25 GB. Existing users with at least 4 GB uploaded will pick up the 25 GB update automatically.

The software client incorporates most of Mesh’s features. It performs file synchronization, and it also optionally enables remote file system access, allowing even non-SkyDrive files to be accessed via the SkyDrive site. With Mesh, we were critical of the way it lacked the simplicity of Dropbox, with its prominently displayed “magic” synchronized folder. The new SkyDrive all but clones Dropbox’s way of working, with a new special “SkyDrive” folder created in your user directory, and all files placed in that folder automatically synced.

After authorizing via SMS, you can use any computer to browse the disks of any computer running the SkyDrive client app. Image: Microsoft

A handful of Mesh features haven’t made their way to the new client. Mesh offered limiting synchronization of settings such as Internet Explorer bookmarks. The new SkyDrive does not. Setting synchronization via SkyDrive will, however, be an important feature of Windows 8, so it’s likely that this feature will return in some capacity. Mesh (like Dropbox) also offered syncing over LAN when it detected that machines could share files without going over the Internet. This capability has been dropped in SkyDrive.

Mesh also offered remote desktop access similar to that found in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol. This was a great feature, as it worked even on Windows SKUs that had no native remote desktop facility. It also worked without requiring any ports to be forwarded on routers, so it had zero maintenance overhead. The removal of this feature is a pity; even Windows 8 retains Remote Desktop’s positioning as a “premium” feature, with neither the standard Windows 8 SKU nor the ARM Windows RT SKU able to serve as Remote Desktop hosts. Windows users may have to start looking elsewhere to fill this gap.

These latest changes to SkyDrive come hot on the hells of last week’s updates, in which Microsoft added URL shortening, ODF support, and 300 MB in-browser uploads to SkyDrive.

The company is aggressively positioning SkyDrive as a superior alternative to Apple’s iCloud, Dropbox, and Google’s apps storage. With the new client, SkyDrive has become a lot more useful to a lot more people, and Windows 8′s SkyDrive integration is set to take this to another level.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

By Peter Bright, Ars Technica

The browser wars are back on in earnest. For the second time in three months, Internet Explorer made large gains, picking up almost 1 point of market share. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all lost out, as Internet Explorer 9 won over new users.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Internet Explorer gained 0.99 points for a 53.88 percent market share, taking it to a six-month high. Firefox is down 0.37 points to 20.55 percent. This is the lowest share the browser has been at since October 2008. Chrome is down a third of a point to 18.57 percent, Safari is down 0.17 points to 5.07 percent, and Opera also fell, dropping 0.09 points to 1.62 percent.

This is a strong performance from Microsoft, though it may come as a surprise to many. In mid-March, Web analytics firm StatCounter announced that Chrome had overtaken Internet Explorer for the first time ever: On Sunday, Mar. 18, for one day only, Chrome was the number-one browser. This seems at odds with Internet Explorer’s growth and Chrome’s decline.

StatCounter, however, is recording something slightly different from Net Marketshare, the numbers we use for our monthly look at the browser war. StatCounter measures raw unadulterated pageviews. It doesn’t attempt to make any corrections for pre-rendering (Chrome will render pages ahead of time if it thinks that the user will look at them, boosting its number of pageviews), it doesn’t attempt to count unique visitors, and it doesn’t attempt to use geographical weighting to account for uneven visitor demographics. (Some sites are more popular in the United States than China, for example, so their browser usage will tend to be more representative of American users than Chinese ones.)

StatCounter’s numbers are still interesting as a measure of web usage, but Net Marketshare’s numbers, which do try to account for things like the geographical variation, are a better measure of browser market share — that is, the number of people using each browser.

A look at the version breakdowns for each browser reveals how Microsoft has made these gains.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Internet Explorer 9 has picked up 2.6 points of share in the last month. This is its strongest month since its release. Internet Explorer 8 fell by almost the same amount, dropping by 2.19 points. Internet Explorer 7 dropped a fraction, down 0.09 points, and Internet Explorer 6 picked up 0.66 points.

The numbers suggest that Internet Explorer 8 users are switching to Internet Explorer 9 in relatively large numbers, particularly on Windows 7: 34.5 percent of Windows 7 users are using Internet Explorer 9.

Microsoft has been vigorously promoting Internet Explorer 9, most recently with a campaign that encourages nerds to give Internet Explorer a second chance; the latest part in a broader campaign to educate users and explain to them that Internet Explorer 9 really isn’t the same as the much-hated Internet Explorer 6.

On top of that, the company is continuing to use automatic updates to move Internet Explorer 7 and 8 users onto the latest version.

Together, these factors seem to be driving upgrades to the current browser version, and users are actually sticking with it rather than switching to other options.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Chrome’s update story is the same as ever. Its automatic update process is reliable, consistent, and effective, keeping the large majority of Chrome users on the latest and greatest version of the browser.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Firefox continues to have a large number of users on version 3.6 and below. The final update for 3.6, version 3.6.28, was released on Mar. 13. Unless there’s a security emergency, there will not be a 3.6.29: Support for 3.6 ends on Apr. 24. Firefox users wanting a browser with long-term support but without six-weekly major updates will have to switch to Firefox Extended Support Release 10.0.4. Everyone else should switch to the current main branch, which on Apr. 24 will be Firefox 12.

Mozilla plans to make Firefox 3.6 offer an update to version 12 once the end of its supported lifecycle has been reached. This means that Firefox 3.6 users should start to decline. However, as with the die-hard group of Firefox 3.5-and-below users that still exists, it’s unlikely that they will all opt to do so.

Automatic, silent updates are still being developed for Firefox. The latest 32-bit nightly builds (version 14) include automatic updates that do not show any UAC prompts on Windows. They’re not yet silent updates, though this too is planned. Until these things are finished, the browser will struggle to have transitions as smooth as Chrome’s.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

In mobile, iOS users continue to outnumber Android users, with the surprising implication that Android users don’t actually use the web very much on their smartphones.

Image by Ars Technica

Image by Ars Technica

At Ars, however, Chrome and Android are dominant.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

By Peter Bright, Ars Technica

Microsoft is continuing to show off new features coming in its Internet Explorer 10 web browser, with a couple of posts describing its touch-friendly Metro interface and its enhanced security.

The current trend in browser design, led by Google Chrome, is to scale back the browser’s interface so that it takes less and less of the screen, devoting more room to the web content itself. Windows 8′s Metro design similarly removes window chrome to put the focus on content.

Metro Internet Explorer 10 is the logical conclusion of this trend: Most of the time it has no visible interface at all, leaving only the webpage visible. Its app bar, displayed by swiping from the top or bottom of the screen or right clicking the mouse, contains tabs, the address bar, and so on.

The tab selector, replete with pretty thumbnails. Image from Microsoft

The Metro version of Internet Explorer feels slick and comfortable using both touch and mouse and keyboard interaction. Particular highlights are the tile-based favorites view and the tab thumbnails, both shown to good effect in Microsoft’s post.

Internet Explorer 9 introduced some particularly taskbar-oriented features: support for pinning sites to the taskbar, and the ability for those pinned sites to create custom options in the Jump list. In Windows 8, sites can be pinned to the Start screen to make them instantly accessible. Sites pinned this way can even update their tile to show status notifications — much in the way that “real” apps can do. However, the Jump lists are tucked away, only available from within Internet Explorer.

Pinned websites, with one showing off a notification. Image from Microsoft

One concern that this chromeless look raises is that of differentiation; Metro-style versions of both Chrome and Firefox are being developed, and it’s hard to see how they might look any different.

Security-wise, Internet Explorer 10 will include a new Enhanced Protected Mode. Protected Mode is the name Microsoft gives to its sandboxing technique. The current version, introduced in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, creates a separate, low-privilege process for running JavaScript and rendering HTML. This low-privilege process has no write access to most of the file system. This means that even if there is a security flaw in the browser, the attacker cannot write malware to the hard disk.

Sandbox protection of this kind isn’t perfect — there are various techniques for escaping from the sandbox and increasing privileges — but it serves as another measure attackers have to defeat if they want to exploit users.

Enhanced Protected Mode further reduces the rights that each low-privilege process has: Not only do they not have write permission to the file system, they also lose read permission. This makes the sandbox even harder to escape, but it comes at a cost: It breaks virtually all current plugins.

The Metro browser is already plugin-free, but the desktop browser is not. Enhanced Protected Mode won’t be the default on the desktop (though this will be an option) to ensure that plugins remain compatible. If Enhanced Protected Mode is enabled, then any attempt to use an incompatible plugin will result in a prompt to disable the mode for that tab, to allow the plugin to work.

This is what you'll see if you try to use Enhanced Protected Mode on a site that needs plugins. Image from Microsoft

With the systemwide anti-exploitation features that Internet Explorer 10 is also using, it’s shaping up to be the most secure Internet Explorer ever.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.