Chrome made its place in the top three by pushing Safari down in the month of December, 2009 and has been gaining market share ever since it was launched.

Firefox has shown a positive growth to 24% market share except for the last 2 months where the browser has been losing market share slightly.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been losing market share at an average of 1% a month for the last six months. Keeping the current trend in view, Microsoft will no longer hold the 50%+ share in the browser market by early 2011.

The following graph shows Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome’s trend in the last six months.

The following chart shows loss/growth of each of the browser in the last 6 months

Google is consistently pushing Chrome through advertisements on the web which shows a positive effect on the browsers market share. Even otherwise quite a few people are moving from Firefox and IE to Chrome for its lightning fast performance.

Google recently enabled chrome extensions for public use, whether it affects the browsers performance or not remains to be seen.

I have been using Chrome extensions for a while now and I am yet to see any major performance issues and I hope I won’t encounter any.

Turbo Beta 1 is currently developed to work with Windows mobile only and a much compatible version for other devices is expected to be announced soon.

The ‘Turbo’ technology in the Opera Mobile browser speeds up the internet experience by allowing smoother and faster transitions due to its OpenGL ES support and the transition between the web pages and content loading is also approximately 25% quicker as bandwidth consumption is  compressed  by up to 80% to provide a fast and rich browsing experience.

Unlike the standard Opera Mobile version, the beta version of this new release will not support flash content as of now, so you will have to wait until this feature is integrated into the mobile browser by the Opera developers or compromise with Flashlite 3.x. 

There are quite a few bugs in the beta version of the browser, for instance, if you feel like downloading any content from the web through your opera browser, you can’t, at least when the Opera Turbo is enabled. Also, if you try using it on older Windows Mobile 5.0 devices, you will have problems with its display resolution while switching between portrait and landscape modes.

Some input method editors like Microsoft’s SIP and/or IME standard do not work well with Opera, thus forcing Opera to use the default input method instead.

The new Widget Manager  which is the new add on browser to the opera will work best in the Portrait mode when the Opera Turbo is disabled and only if the Opera Turbo is already installed. The Twitter widget may bestow problems on its first use, in that case just close the widget and try again.

The public release of the Beta version of Opera Mobile v9.7 Turbo can be downloaded here.

Watch a quick preview of Opera Mobile v9.7 turbo in action in the following video.

Gmail

These are few of the fundamental questions the team has kept in mind and developed this version of Gmail for mobile which works better under these circumstances. The application supports J2ME and BlackBerry phones.

I just downloaded and used the latest version and I loved it. One of the best and more visible among other features is the ability of switching between different Gmail or Google App hosted accounts. It is absolutely effortless, just set the login information of different accounts under the "Accounts" tab.

The new version goes on to add features like an option of adding an automated footer "Sent from my mobile device" to the messages sent from mobile, see total data usage (KB) per session, receive notifications for every mail received in inbox. The compose screen has a new function called "Finish Later" which will saved unfinished e-mails in your "Mobile Drafts" folder.

Now that you no longer have to see the "Sending" screen after every time you send an e-mail as it does it in the background you will also see a new lable called "Outbox" under your "Go to" options.

Other features like composing off-line, etc.. work only with selected models of Nokia, Sony and Balckberry.

The app not only comes loaded with new features but with this release it also supports 35 different languages. The language is automatically selected by the application based on the language mobile phone is set to use. This only goes to show that the Gmail team is not leaving with any excues of not using Gmail for mobile.

Visit http://m.google.com/mail to download this application from your phones.

One of the sites owned by Network18 is BookMyShow. Its and online ticket booking system which started with movie tickets only but now it offers more, it offers tickets for concerts and theatre.

The only option to book tickets so far was on the internet. Now you can download a mobile application from http://m.bookmyshow.com and book movie tickets on mobile phone. I have used this application and I found it to be really simple and easy to use. I encountered a few server errors; I think they must have been because of the slow GPRS speed.

This application is worth a try and comes really handy when you want to book tickets on the fly.

This kind of usage of mobile phone has accelerated the development in mobile technologies. Most of the businesses on the internet have mobile versions of their sites. However as smart phones get smarter, the site which runs on your PC browser can also be viewed on your phone, however to achieve the best performance customised mobile application is required.

In case you are developing a wap (Wireless Application Protocol) site following is the list of sites and softwares which will help you test your application on the computer instead of a mobile phone. These softwares act as mobile platform which helps you see the mobile version right away.

1. Emulator | dotMobi (mtld.mobi/emulator.php) (Free Web based emulator)
• MTLD is the official registrar of .mobi sites and it also offers the emulator.
2. WapTiger (http://www.waptiger.com/waptiger/) (Free Web based emulator)
3. M3Gate 0.6 (http://www.m3gate.com/m3gate/download/m3stp06.exe) (Free Software)
4. AU-System Demo WAP Browser for Palm OS 1.61 (http://www.wapguide.com/wapguide/browser.html) (Free Software)
5. Deck-it WAP Browser (http://www.pyweb.com/deck-it) (Free Software)
6. Yospace SmartPhone Emulator Developer Edition (http://www.yospace.com/cgi-bin/login.pl) (Shareware)

These softwares can be categorised under follwoing categories: Wap Browsers, Wap Emulators, Mobile Browser, Windows Mobile Emulator, Wap Simulator. Do leave comments if your favourite mobile emulator is missing from the list

FireFox is faster than almost all the browsers available out there but there is always room for improvement. Follow the steps below to improve the browsing speed in firefox

1. Open FireFox
2. In address bar type "about:config" and hit enter key
3. In "Filter" type in "Network.http.pipelining"
4. In the list you should see "network.http.pipelining" and "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests"
5. Double click on "network.http.pipelining" and make sure the "Value" is changed from "False" to "True"
6. Double click on "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" and in the pop-up box change the number from "4" to "10"

Restart your FireFox

EnJoY! Faster Browsing…..

Nokia’s 770 Internet Tablet is priced at 359$ and comes with a 64MB memory card and needless to say it is Wi-Fi enabled.

I am wondering why Nokia would do something like this. At a time when every single phone company on the face of this earth (including Apple) is trying to merge Calls, Music, Internet, GPS and all sorts of crazy things and come up with a phone, Nokia comes up with Internet Tablet.

I couldn’t think of any reason why I should add this piece of technology to my list of gadgets, can you?

This can be real handy when you make edits and want to see the changes instantly.

Click here to try to see what you site look like on a mobile phone.

Mobile Monday is a group which discusses mobile technology and trends in mobile industry in our country and across the world. I joined the discussion out of curiosity to know if my mobile technology knowledge is at par with mobile techies from various other companies.

The discussion started humbly and was lead by Mr.Govindraj, he is working as a Product Manager for Mobile Value-added services at ImIMobile, He used an interesting term to define the gathering, and he called it "Unconference". Lot of us discussed the meaning of Unconference during and after the discussion as it was a new term (for me at least).

Here is how Wikipedia defines the word "Unconference" – "An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants", Click here to read more on this term.

We discussed a lot of things right from the existing mobile technologies in India to what we can expect to see in near future. There wasn’t any formal presentation around the topics I just mention but I am certainly hoping to see on in coming discussions.

I am undeniably impressed and even more interested in forthcoming discussions hosted by Mobile Monday Hyderabad.

I sincerely invite and request my readers based in Hyderabad to join this group and share your views and ideas about mobile technologies.

Click here to subscribe to the Mobile Monday Hyderabad mailing list.

This is how it works.. The moment you realize that your phone is stolen, call the support center to activate the pre-installed software by Remote XT. Once this software is activated it triggers a loud and disturbing noise which can only be turned off by pulling the phone battery out, but the moment battery is put back in it starts the loud noise again. Remote XT also offers to delete all the data on the stolen mobile phone on owner’s request, this data can be restored on the new mobile easily.

Remote XT offers lot of other services such as Automatic Daily Data Backup, Contact, Calendar, Lock, Secure restore, Antivirus and a lot more at a very reasonable price. Remote XT is the only service provider which offers its services across networks. Click here to see more services provided by Remote XT

This is certainly not the first attempt at making stolen mobile phones useless but I assure you its not the last one. The stolen mobile market is worth £390 million a year which I am sure will come up with an antidote to face a threat to the stolen mobile market. Lets wait and watch!

For more information on this topic click here