A couple of months after the browser ballot has been included in installs of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 has already resulted in Microsoft’s IE browser losing even more market share to its rivals, according to web stats firm StatCounter.

In France, IE usage has dropped by 2.5 percent, Italy by 1.3 percent, and the UK by 1 percent. Browser developers Opera and Mozilla have reported strong growth within Europe, with Opera claiming that downloads have tripled since the ballot was introduced, and a Mozilla spokesperson claiming, "We have seen significant growth in the number of new Firefox users as a result of the Ballot Choice screen”. As the ballot is rolled out across the rest of Europe, Mozilla expects further gains to be made.

The ballot isn't universally popular. Although 12 browsers are offered, only the top five are immediately accessible. The remaining seven are only visible after scrolling horizontally. As the seven minority browsers expected, their presence in the ballot has done little to boost their market share. A spokesman for the Flock browser said, "To date, new downloads of Flock originating from the browser choice screen have only contributed marginally to growth in overall downloads. This is also the case for the other browsers not on the main screen."

The remaining browsers have petitioned the EU to get the ballot changed. For its part, Microsoft still maintains that the browser ballot is compliant with the EU's demands. With some 200 million European users due to be shown the choice screen, and the benefits of being included becoming increasingly clear, time is clearly of the essence for the seven smaller browsers.  What is also clear though is that Microsoft IE is certainly not the defacto browser of choice anymore and testing on multiple browser’s and version is certainly going to get more complex as users get more options.

There are 12 browsers on offer:

• Avant
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Flock
• Green Browser
• Internet Explorer
• K-meleon
• Maxthon
• Opera
• Safari
• Sleipnir
• Slim

The latest monthly browser usage stats indicates an even sharper drop in marketshare for Microsoft's Internet Explorer since the browser ballot was launched in the European Union on 1 March 2010. Although Internet Explorer's marketshare still dominates, it is certainly under growing threat, especially from the likes of Google's Chrome browser, who's marketshare has essentially exploded since it was launch not even 2 years ago.

 As you can see on the chart below, Google Chrome accounts for almost 7% of the browser market share and is climbing steadily. Internet Explorer has dropped below 60% marketshare. It is interesting to note how many users are still using IE6. According to hitslink, approximately 18% of worldwide users still use IE6. This figure obviously include large coorporations that have not gone through the upgrade path yet, as well as users who are unable to upgrade due to bandwidth restrictions or Microsoft copyright infringements(illegal copies of their Windows OS etc).

There are many different browser usage statistics sources available on the web. I used http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ .

The most comprehensive cross browser testing software application just got better!

Version 2.0.4 brings with it the following new features:

• CDN integration: All sandboxed browsers and application updates are now delivered via a new world class CDN. This should provide much faster download speeds, and generally improved performance.
• Code optimization: The UI and basic scripting code have undergone some optimization, so the application should behave better.
• Minor bug fixes: thanks for reporting any bugs to us, a number of minor bugs have been fixed.
• Less Restrictive Evaluation version: More screenshot browsers are now available for testing, including IE6.

These new features build on Multi-Browser Viewer's existing main features like:

• 16 Virtualized Sandboxed browsers – test using real sandboxed browsers locally on your own PC, no VNC or remote desktop connections needed.
• 48 Screenshot testing browsers – high quality, full page screenshots of any URL, using our wide, always updated, selection of browsers on Linux, Mac or Windows.
• Built-in HTML validation and auto-correction to help you identify possible HTML problem areas.
• All files saved locally for future reference, including the HTML source code, web archive file and all screenshots images.
• Multi-Browser Viewer is updated continuously to ensure you always have access to the latest web browsers.

Why don't you give Multi-Browser Viewer a try today and tell us what you think. You can download a full trial here.

Multi-Browser Viewer 2 has just been released! After months of hard work and having listened to your feedback we have finally launched the next major version of Multi-Browser Viewer.

We still have to update some of the documentation, and other sections of the site, which still only covers the basic parts of v2 at present.

The coolest feature of v2 is the standalone browsers. Utilizing virtualization technology, we are now able to run all the major versions of web browsers alongside each other on one machine, with extra installs needed. All browsers run as a single executable that run instantly, each in its own sandbox — no DLLs, data files, installations, or runtime dependencies. The virtual browsers allows the application environment, including file system and registry subsystems, to be isolated from your computer, preventing the virtual browsers from interfering with your computer. This enables a user to test secure sites, Intranets etc. It also enable a user to test functionality like Flash, Javascript and Ajax. things that simply aren't possible using screenshots and is simply to slow via a VNC connection.

We are very proud of Multi-Browser Viewer as a product and feel that it now has all the functionality required to be one of the best, if not the best cross browser compatibility testing tool available today.

Some of the other updates include an improved installer, a snappier, more responsive interface and more Apple Mac browsers for screenshot testing.

We'd love to hear your initial feedback, let us know what you think. 

After over a year of hard work, the Camino Project announced the release of Camino 2.0, a major new update to the Camino web browser.

Camino 2.0 includes a number of new features and enhancements, including rearranging tabs by drag-and-drop, a new Tab Overview feature, phishing and malware protection, full content zoom, Growl notifications for downloads, improved support for Full Keyboard Access in the browser window, and displays web content using Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9 rendering engine. For a list of features in Camino, visit our features page. Also, see the release notes for more detailed information about changes in Camino 2.0.

Multi-Browser Viewer has 3 versions of the Camino available for you to test your web site against, versions 1.5, 1.68 and 2.0

As you might have heard, Google released Google Chrome Browser yesterday.

Multi-Browser Viewer have been supporting Chrome 3 througout the stable Beta releases and is in the process of updating our network to support the final version. In fact you can also test the latest Beta version of Chrome on the Linux Ubuntu Opearting System using Multi-Browser Viewer.

Some of the main features accoring to Google:

• Much Faster Javascript performance
• Themes Support
• New Tab Page
• An much improved Omnibox

For full details check out the official Google Chrome Blog