OStatic

Is innovation in browsers where it should be? We've reported before on how most of the innovation is going on in open source browsers, as Microsoft's Internet Explorer continues to lose market share. This week, at two separate conferences, officials from Google and Mozilla have weighed in on how browsers need to improve. Notably, they primarily agree, and their focus doesn't seem matched by Microsoft with Internet Explorer.

According to Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, several sources say that the Mozilla-based social browser, Flock, will soon shed its Mozilla code base and start using Google's Chrome framework for future releases.

Flock's CEO, Shawn Hardin, responded to Arrington's post, saying that the browser's upcoming 2.1 release is being developed, and will be released with, its traditional Mozilla underpinnings. Hardin does not explicitly say that Flock will move to Chrome, only that the browser space has been heating up rapidly in the last few months, and that the Flock development team will continue to make architectural decisions that balance what's best for our users and what's best for Flock as a business.

Wow, the competition among open source browsers is getting so heated that you have to stay on top of the day-to-day goings on with the pre-release versions. We've written before about Google Chrome winning speed tests, and I keep hearing people cite it as the fastest browser. Meanwhile, CNet has been posting speed results showing very strong performance from the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (it is indeed snappy).? Now, there are some new performance results out that show the nightly builds of Webkit--the open source rendering engine within Safari and Chrome--posting the fastest speeds of all.

How many web browsers do you run? If you're like me, you regularly use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Each of those browsers, of course, has its own underlying rendering engine: Gecko (in Firefox), Trident (in Internet Explorer), and Webkit (in Chrome and Safari). Today, a Japanese startup called Lunascape has released an alpha version of its Lunascape browser, downloadable here, that allows you to switch between all three of these prominent rendering engines. The company says that the Japanese version of Lunascape has been downloaded 10 million times and touts it as the fastest browser available. Is it?