browsers

While the rest of the Web-savvy world fawns over breakthroughs in real-time search and pontificates on the future of social networking, Los Alamos National Labs is looking to the past. A team there is developing a "time traveling" Web browsing technology, dubbed Memento, that will allow users to find old versions of Web pages without trolling old archives.

Google has scarcely stopped for a breather since launching its cloud-based Chrome OS as an alternative to PC and Mac operating systems. Now its Chromium group has announced an effort to replace the traditional HTTP web browser language with a new protocol that supposedly boosts Internet browsing by up to 55 percent.

A lot has changed since the 1990s when the search engine of choice was AltaVista, when Internet connections ran through a phone line, and when Netscape battled Internet Explorer for browsing supremacy. Now Google, apparently nostalgic for the days of Presidential impeachment and O.J. Simpson, has reignited the wars with the roll out of its new application, a browser named Chrome.

The big news on the browser horizon is the release of Microsofts Internet Explorer 8. Its promising new contextual serviceslike being able to Digg a page with an integrated menuand a feature called WebSlices, which lets you bookmark and track only a certain portion of a page. But Microsoft isnt the only one with updates in store. The other big browsers are rolling out changes at least as promising as IE8's.