This interface responsiveness report is good news for developers using IE11, but most people will notice changes under the hood: WebGL and SPDY support, for better graphics and faster page-loading, respectively.

If Internet Explorer 10 impressed you, you're going to love what we now expect from IE11 at Microsoft's Build conference on Wednesday.

Information leaked by a Microsoft Developer Network subscriber appears to confirm long-rumored details on what's going to be included in Internet Explorer 11.

The next major version of the browser, expected to arrive with Windows 8.1 later this year, will include support for many under-the-hood features that Firefox and Chrome already offer, and some that they don't.

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Today's stable release of Mozilla Firefox 22 (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android) includes a variety of back-end technical updates and relatively minor tweaks (to be honest, the word-wrapping of plain-text files is the most relevant to me).

The most notable news is Firefox's new default support for WebRTC (the RTC stands for real-time communication), a set of API components that allows developers to create browser-to-browser applications without plug-ins. WebRTC was developed by Google for Chrome and open-sourced back in 2011, so Google Chrome (Windows, Mac, Android) of course supports it as well.

In real terms, WebRTC enables features such as videochat, VoIP calling, and peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, all within ... [Read more]

The Chrome OS photo app imports photos, backs them up to Google Drive cloud storage service, picks what it judges to be the best ones, organizes them accordingly, and presents them for sharing on Google+.

Google has released its promised photos app for Chromebooks, software that imports photos from an SD card, backs them up to the cloud, and spotlights the ones it judges to be the best.

The software, a Chrome extension, is available only for the Chromebook Pixel at present, but Google is "working to bring the app to other Chromebooks as well," said AJ Asver in a Google+ post Tuesday.

Sundar Pichai, head of Chrome, Google Apps, and now Android, gushed about the app in a February interview during the debut of the Chromebook Pixel, Google's high-end, $1,300 laptop. Here's how he described the software at the time:

You plug in an SD card or connect the camera. It opens your photos in in full resolution and starts backing them up against your 1 terabyte Google Drive quota. There's nothing to mess with. We immediately choose, de-dupe [get rid of duplicates], and take out the blurry pictures. If there are six pic... [Read more]

A couple of months ago we reviewed the beta version of the surprisingly convenient online password manager from PasswordBox.com. On Tuesday, Dan Robichaud, CEO of PasswordBox, has just announced the official release of PasswordBox and introduced some new features as well as the mobile app releases for iOS and Android.

PasswordBox lets you perform one-click log-in to all of your favorite sites from previously stored accounts. Just download the client, which is available as an add-on/extension for IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Create a PasswordBox.com account and Master Password and you're ready to go. You can either manually input your log-in information or just surf the Web normally and the add-on will automatically save your account info. From your frequently visited sites for the next time you need to log in. Featuring military-grade AES 256-bit encryption, everything is kept on the client side to protect you from snoopers listening in. This can free up your mind from having to remember the huge accumulation of passwords and account names that normally build up online.

WebRTC logo

Following the recent introduction of full Web Real-Time Communications to Chrome, Tuesday's update to Firefox makes it the second browser to support the plugin-free protocol.

The debut of WebRTC, as the protocol is known, in Firefox 22 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) is no small potatoes. "Plugins are the single largest source of security and stability issues that we see," said Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's vice-president of engineering for Firefox.

WebRTC is planned for Firefox for Android (download), which also updated Tuesday, but it has yet to be added to the mobile browser.

On the surface, WebRTC sounds a lot like Skype. It lets you conduct voice and video calling one browser to another via its PeerConnection component, but it also lets you transfer data directly between two browsers thanks to a component called DataChannels. These were both added in Tuesday's new version of Firefox stable.

"How is it different from Skype misses the point of it," said Nightingale, who nearly bo... [Read more]

With all of the recent talk about PRISM, the NSA, and Big Bro Obama following you around the Internet and reading all of your precious e-mails containing links to those "all-critical" YouTube videos your dad keeps send... [Read more]

Stephen Konig, a Google product manager, discusses the WebP image format at Google I/O 2013.

One of the knocks against WebP, an image format Google and some allies hope will speed up graphics on the Web, is that the world's premier image-editing software can't read or write WebP files.

Adobe Systems isn't interested in supporting the format within Photoshop, at least not yet. But now there are two active open-source projects under way to build Photoshop plug-ins that handle the format.

The first WebP plug-in, by Toby Thain of Telegraphics, has been around since 2010 and has been updated with new features this month: ICC color profile support and lossless compression support.

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The Windows Server 2012 R2 preview shows off new features slated for Windows 8.1.

Windows 8.1 will try to make your life a bit easier by letting you shut down or restart your PC from the Start screen.

The preview edition of Windows 8.1 isn't due out until Wednesday. But the Windows Server 2012 R2 preview is available now for download. Since both versions share many features in common, the server-based preview provides a good glimpse at what's ahead for PC and tablet users.

Windows 8.1 users will be able to trigger a shut down or reboot much more quickly than in Windows 8. On the PC's Start screen, simply right-click on the new Start button to display the familiar pop-up menu. You'll now find a shut down command at the bottom of the menu, which lets you turn off or restart your device.

Windows 8 offers a few different ways to shut down or restart, none of them ideal, so this new option is clearly Microsoft's attempt to make the feature more accessible.

Users will spot a few other changes in the Windows 8.1 Start screen.

The tile for "Computer" has been renamed "This PC." An arrow at the bottom of the Start screen takes you directly to the Apps screen. You can select multiple tiles and then run a single command on all of them in one shot. And some tiles gi... [Read more]