Yahoo! came at the tech world in a blur this week, launching its new search and browsing tool Axis. Response has been lukewarm, especially since the launch didn’t go completely as planned.

I’ve been playing around with both the desktop and iOS version and I think that Yahoo! might be on to something. I took a dive into Apple’s App Store to see what users think and was surprised to see 891 reviews and a 4.5 star rating. That’s a good sign, right?

As I dug deeper I saw some slightly familiar names sharing their thoughts on Axis. Have a look:

That’s a pretty sweet review…from Yahoo’s Patent Counsel, David Ishimaru.

Here’s another:

Right on, great review…from Yahoo’s Network Operations Center Engineer, Brian Koch.

There are plenty of reviews from regular users though, but before I leave you for the day, check this one out:

Someone thinks it’s an awesome browser! Wait, that’s…Yahoo Director, Product Management, Ethan Batraski.

Keep your Kool-aid nice and chilled this Memorial Day weekend, kids!

According to LAUNCH, Yahoo! was set to release its own browser, called Axis, tonight at 9PM PT. Apparently someone jumped the gun though, because details, including its live iOS app, have been discovered.

Our own Robin Wauters stumbled onto Yahoo’s trademark application for Axis last December, wondering what it was. Its website: http://axis.yahoo.com/, has all of the details along with the download link.

From the demo, the browser looks like it takes Google’s autocomplete to a whole new level by bringing up pages on the right hand side as you search for them.

Have a look at Yahoo! Axis in action, which installs an extension for your existing browser (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, or Firefox) and sits in the bottom lefthand corner:

Once you click the search box, it expands to show you the results:

In addition to the desktop version, Yahoo! released an iPhone and iPad app (which you can download now) as well:

The iPhone version is pretty slick, as you can see below:

The iPad version clearly uses the full real estate of the larger device:

In an email sent to LAUNCH, Yahoo! outlined exactly what makes Axis different from its competitors:

Yahoo! Axis is a new browser that redefines what it means to search and browse- enabling a seamless search experience on your iPhone, iPad, and even your desktop. Here are some highlights of how Yahoo! Axis brings search to life in a whole new way:

·Smarter, Faster Search with Rich Design: Get instant answers and visual previews so you can continuously discover and explore content without interruption. Never leave the page you are on to view your search results again.

·Connected Experience: Move seamlessly across devices, picking up wherever you left off as you move across your desktop, iPhone, and iPad. Recently visited sites, searches, saved articles, and bookmarks are automatically accessible across all your devices.

·Personal Home Page: Get direct access to your favorite sites and content across all your devices with the customizable Home Page.

Here’s a walkthrough of the product from its project manager at Yahoo!:

As we reported earlier this week, Google’s Chrome jumped over Internet Explorer to take the #1 browser position. Many said that it was “too late’ for Google when it introduced Chrome, saying that Firefox was on a clear path to take on Microsoft’s giant.

While the desktop version of Axis isn’t an actual browser, the fact that there are iOS versions of it that are standalone products makes it one. The big winner in this release could be Microsoft’s Bing, which provides the search results for Axis.

This is the biggest consumer product Yahoo!, which just fired its CEO, has launched in years. Is it too late for Yahoo!, or is the company just getting started?

Tell us what you think about Yahoo! Axis in the comments.

➤ Axis for iPhone and iPad

There are quite a few options when it comes to the browser that you use to surf the Internet. You can pick from Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, Chrome, and other smaller players that I’m probably missing. Much like mobile devices, the browser has become a powerful platform for developers to build apps on top of.

Google has actually done a fantastic job of highlighting extensions built on top of the Chrome browser in its “store”. I get sent quite a few Chrome extensions these days, but it’s difficult to write an entire piece about each one.

The best extensions serve a single purpose and are drop-dead simple to use. Here are 9 Chrome extensions that you should download and try right now:

Save to foursquare

This simple extension can be triggered from sites like TripAdvisor and Google. All you have to do is click the foursquare button that the extension installs, and it will save it to your “to-do list” within the app. This is the perfect way to use foursquare on the desktop efficiently for browsing to serve a better purpose for mobile later.

Sure, you could stick to browsing foursquare’s website to look for new restaurants, but that’s not a reality.

➤ Save to foursquare

FVD Video Downloader

You’re in the airport and you find a really cool video that you want to watch on the plane, which unfortunately doesn’t have WiFi. How can you easily grab the video and put it on your desktop? There are numerous ways to do this, but this particular Chrome extension makes it super simple.

You can also download flash games, music MP3 format, as well as MP4 or FLV video files in just one click. This baby has kept me entertained on many a flight and train rides.

➤ FVD Video Downloader

Writer

If you’re a blogger, writer, or just a simple note-taker, you probably know that getting the thoughts from your brain to the desktop can be a rough experience. There’s so much going on in blogging editors like WordPress and Tumblr, which distracts you from saying what you want to say.

Writer is a killer extension that gets you away from all of the noise and plops you into a very simple, and feature-free, writing environment that will help you focus on the task at hand. I use this one a lot.

➤ Writer

Pandora to Spotify Playlist Converter

When it comes to listening to music, I don’t stick to just one service. For a random radio-like experience, I tend to stick with Pandora. When I hear a song that I like, I click the thumbs-up button so I can remember the song later and help the service learn about what I like.

When I’m in an on-demand kind of mood, I like to use Spotify. This extension takes all of the things that I’ve liked on Pandora and turns them into playlists on Spotify. I can’t even begin to tell you how cool this is. Go give it a shot.

➤ Pandora to Spotify Playlist Converter

G+Twitter for Google Plus

If you’re using Google+ and don’t want top hop over to Twitter to check your stream, then this extension is for you.

With this extension, you can view your Twitter stream, Tweet, Retweet, and view conversations, all from within Google+. You can also share your Google+ posts on Twitter easily, which is one of its best features.

➤ G+Twitter for Google Plus

Magic Actions for YouTube

This extension kicks your YouTube video experience into hyperdrive. With features like auto-wide, auto-HD, and volume control with your mouse wheel, watching videos becomes a full lean-back experience.

It aims to make you feel like you’re in a movie theater and it does a pretty darn good job of it. This is a must-get for YouTube fans.

➤ Magic Actions for YouTube

Screen Capture (by Google)

One of the tasks that I do the most daily is take screenshots. When I’m reviewing a site or want to grab something really funny to share with a friend, I grab a screenshot.

There are cool desktop applications like Skitch that do a great job with this, but something like this extension makes it really easy to create a PNG file from a full-screen or region of the browser.

➤ Screen Capture (by Google)

Disconnect

Companies on the Web make money from showing us advertisements and directing us to content based on our “likes”. This is done mostly by tracking all of our actions on its sites. For some of us, that’s really creepy.

This extension blocks cookie and tracking requests on sites like Yahoo! and Google, giving you a running tally of everything that it has blocked for you. Turn this on for a day and surf the Web, it might scare the bejesus out of you.

➤ Disconnect

Scroll To Top Button

One of my favorite functions on the iPhone is tapping to jump up to the top of the page. It saves me so much time, I can’t even put it into words or numbers. Why don’t browsers have buttons just for this?

There’s nothing worse than reading a long article and then having to scroll all the way back up with your mouse or trackpad. This extension fixes that and will scroll up or down, allllll the way. Yay.

➤ Scroll To Top Button

There you have it, that should keep you busy for a while. Do you have any favorite Chrome or Firefox extensions? Let us know about them in comments!

Remember that whole thing about how Google overrode Safari’s privacy settings to track your Internet browsing? Yep, that’s the one.

It seems like Google is going to get more than just a slap on the wrist from the FTC, according to Bloomberg. Its sources say that Google could face fines in the “tens of millions” for its sneaky actions.

At the time, Google said that it was performing this workaround on Safari browsers for those users who were signed in with their Google accounts, to make sure that they were seeing the appropriate personalized ads and had the ability to +1 things that they found interesting. Sounds like a big fat excuse to me.

Here’s how Google characterized the Safari override:

To enable these features, we created a temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google’s servers, so that we could ascertain whether Safari users were also signed into Google, and had opted for this type of personalization. But we designed this so that the information passing between the user’s Safari browser and Google’s servers was anonymous–effectively creating a barrier between their personal information and the web content they browse.

However, the Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser. We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It’s important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.

Apple wasn’t happy and moved quickly to patch its browser up. The Bloomberg report says that the FTC will file its claim, and fine, due to the fact that Google was deceitful:

The FTC is preparing to allege that Mountain View, California-based Google deceived consumers and violated terms of a consent decree signed with the commission last year when it planted so-called cookies on Safari, bypassing Apple software’s privacy settings, the person said

While “tens of millions” might be the equivalent of an accounting error for the ginormous company, it’s a warning from the FTC that it’s being watched and won’t be able to pull a fast one like this in the future.

Skyfire, the Safari alternative for web browsing on your iOS devices has added a handy new feature for those of you who share an iPad with multiple people.

The feature is called “HotSwap” and allows the setup of multiple accounts for everyone who puts their dirty mitts on your beloved iPad.

The app has been downloaded 13 million times since it launched in December 2010 and was recently named the App Store’s “#1 paid iPad Utility of 2011″.

The new feature allows multiple users to keep their bookmarks, history, open tabs, social networking and email logins intact without having to log out each and every time.

Skyfire’s CEO Jeffrey Glueck had this to say about the new feature and Skyfire’s future:

Our goal at Skyfire has always been to create great user experiences via mobile cloud solutions, both through our consumer browsing apps, or through our carrier-grade data optimization offerings. HotSwap continues this tradition. From the office to the coffee table, tablets have quickly evolved into a shared family device. With HotSwap, up to four users can create customized profiles to access their favorite content with ease. The family iPad just got personal again.

Apple’s Safari doesn’t currently have functionality to support multiple users, like it does for its desktop OS. With HotSwap, Skyfire carves out more of a niche for itself in its plan on becoming a go-to alternative for the default mobile browser on iOS.

Skyfire got attention immediately for its ability to convert flash video nearly on the fly and serve it up in an iOS-friendly player, which the company says brings up to four times the number of videos to iDevices.

➤ Skyfire for iPad

The latest version of the Firefox browser hit the web this week and it’s quite an impressive update. The theme for version 11 of Firefox was “lighter and faster”, continuing a march forward on something that the team calls “Project Snappy”.

In a post from Mozilla today, the company discussed its success in 2011 and what 2012 holds for one of the world’s top browsers. Mozilla has been in a back and forth fight for the #2 browser spot with Chrome over the past six months, as Chrome passed Firefox for the first time last December.

What’s it going to take for Firefox to keep going strong? Mozilla seems to think that branding could have something to do with it, perhaps degrading the focus on version numbers for consumers:

Version numbers will play a lesser and lesser role for users, but they will still matter to web developers, IT administrators and similar. The reason for having major version number bumps (e.g. version 6 to 7, 7 to 8, etc) is that new versions have had cases of non-backward compatible APIs, and the version number have been there to signal that it is not a minor release or maintenance update.

From a branding perspective, it will likely more go into being just Firefox, and that versioning will be more transparent.

This is of course a page out of Chrome’s book, where Google’s strength in marketing shines through once again. The heavy focus on using “Chrome” and not a specific version of Chrome has definitely helped it grab consumer attention. There is nothing worse than hearing people refer to Internet Explorer’s version number during an “out loud” conversation. Even when you shrink the name to “IE”, it still sounds lame.

Along with consumer and branding focus, which is the first time I’ve personally heard Mozilla speak on the subject, the company wants to make the update process easier for consumers as well. That’s a plus, since I’ve found that every time I upgrade to a new version of Firefox at least a quarter of my installed add-ons end up not working.

In yet another consumer-focused move, Mozilla shares that within the next few versions of Firefox, updates will become “silent”, meaning that they’ll run in the background. No longer will you bit hit with a request to download a version now or later:

To cater to update fatigue, updates will now be downloaded and installed silently in the background. It means that startup and shutdown of the web browser won’t be affected by installation routines. Additionally, the What’s New page displayed after an update can now be displayed depending if there is important information needed to be displayed to the end user. Silent updates are currently planned to land in Firefox 13.

Additionally, Firefox plans on upgrading the experience for its Web Apps, including seamless integration with the Mozilla Marketplace. Needless to say that Firefox has a full plate of work ahead of them for this year.

Since the team spent 2011 working on speed and usability it’s nice to see that the company is focused on making Firefox more consumer-friendly. With the latest version of Internet Explorer getting decent reviews it’s going to take something extremely special for Firefox to keep up. That something special might just be a better relationship with consumers, and it just might work.

As you’re moving about the Internet you’ve surely bookmarked some things now and then. The concept of bookmarking has turned into a booming business for sites like Pinterest and Delicious, but those sites focus on the social nature of link-saving and sharing.

For your own personal needs you’re probably using whatever tools that your browser of choice provides for bookmarking. Google’s Chrome browser, for example, allows you to easily set up folders to place your bookmarks in and lets you search through the titles to find that gem you didn’t have time to read last week.

But what if you’ve forgotten the title of the site you’ve bookmarked and didn’t meticulously place it in a folder to help you find it later? That’s a problem that I’ve had many times and I’m sure you’ve faced the same thing.

A site called Stashmarks allows you to seamlessly upload your Chrome bookmarks and then indexes them in an effort to make them completely searchable.

What was that story called again?

With Stashmarks, you won’t have to remember the title of the story,. All you have to do is try to remember at least one word that was mentioned in the link. The service indexes all of your Chrome bookmarks as you add them in real-time, allowing you to search through the entire text of the link later.

After you’ve uploaded your bookmarks, the service takes a few minutes to index the pages as Google’s own search engine would do on the Internet. While the service doesn’t provide the article for offline viewing, it will let you find what it was you bookmarked and couldn’t find and then let you click over to it:

In addition to letting you view and search through these bookmarks from any machine you’re on no matter where you are, Stashmarks also uses the folders that you’ve used for the bookmarks to sort them by tag. The site’s design is extremely simple yet extremely fast and pleasant to use.

If you’ve spent a lot of time bookmarking important links from the web, storing them on a third-party service isn’t a bad idea at all, especially when it takes the extra step to index them for you for easy searching later. If you’re not sold on the concept of social bookmarking and still like keeping links to yourself, you’ll really dig Stashmarks. The company behind it promises a Firefox version in the future, but for now it’s Chrome only.

➤ Stashmarks for Chrome

Google’s Chrome browser is becoming more secure as we speak, thanks to a program we talked about last week. The Chromium Security Rewards Program is sponsoring an event at the CanSecWest security conference right now, and the highest monetary reward has already been given.

Here’s what the Chrome releases team had to say about it today:

The Chrome Stable channel has been updated to 17.0.963.78 on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame. This release fixes issues with Flash games and videos, along with the security fix listed below.

Security fixes and rewards:

Congratulations again to community member Sergey Glaznov for the first submission to Pwnium!

[Ch-ch-ch-ch-ching!!! $60,000] [117226] [117230] Critical CVE-2011-3046: UXSS and bad history navigation. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.

While it may take a while for these security updates to get integrated into a future release of the browser, if you’re a fan of installing iterative versions of Chrome, you can get all of the details on the changelog here.

As we noted last week, Google is building a great relationship with developers by having programs like this, and also keeps nasty hacks out of the public eye. Developers must submit their security exploit directly to Google without sharing it with anyone else first. If they publicized the exploit, they wouldn’t be able to claim a prize. That’s super smart on Google’s part.

Google plans on giving up to $1M in total rewards during the event, in increments of $60k, $40k, and $20k, depending on the level of the hack. Apparently Glazunov’s was a big one, netting the Russian student a top prize in the category of “Full Chrome exploit”.

According to the number puzzle website Calcudoku, Chrome users appear to have the highest level of numerical intelligence when it comes to solving the puzzles on its site.

The company recently published a study based on 2010 and 2011 usage data and parsed it by the browser of choice by its players.

I’ll be completely honest, when I went to the Calcudoku site, I had no idea how to even get started with number puzzles, which makes me feel like an absolute moron someone who isn’t so hot with numbers:

According to the data it analyzed, people who use Google’s Chrome browser were the quickest problem solvers of its puzzles compared to those who use Internet Explorer or Firefox:

Firefox users came in second place with Internet Explorer in third. There wasn’t enough Safari data to drop them into the mix. Not only were Internet Explorers the slowest number puzzle solvers, they were also more likely to give up on the problems than Chrome or Firefox users.

Here’s Calcudoku’s summary on the data it looked at:

These differences were found to be statistically significant (p = 5%). Based on the fact that Chrome users solve Calcudoku number puzzles the fastest, and that IE users give up on solving them the most, it appears that Chrome users have the highest numerical intelligence, followed by Firefox users, then by Internet Explorer users. Note that it does not follow that using Chrome makes you smarter, for example (“correlation does not imply causation”). Also, we can only speculate about the causes of the differences: perhaps Chrome is the browser of choice for more technically inclined people, who tend to have better number skills. And maybe because IE is the default browser for Windows, people who do not choose a different browser possibly are less technically skilled.

While this is a very small segment of users, we’re not implying that Chrome users are the most brilliant people on the planet. In fact, we’ve been hoaxed on something like this before in the past. However, Google’s CEO Larry Page was pretty excited about the results:

All of this probably just means that Google Chrome users are number nerds. Or that everyone who uses Calcudoku’s site works at Google.

Making sure that you have the most secure browser on the web means that you need a whole lot of people doing continual security audits and QA. While Google surely has this experience and capability in-house, the company like to challenge outsiders to find holes in its Chrome browser, and give money away to those who do.

For a little over two years, the Chrome team has had a “Chromium Security Rewards Program” that offers pretty sizable monetary rewards to developers who find security holes and bugs within its browser and increases the reward for those who successfully create a fix for the issue they find.

At the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver from March 7th-9th, Google will be sponsoring a challenge to exploit Chrome with a total of $1M being given away in the following categories:

$60,000 – “Full Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using only bugs in Chrome itself.

$40,000 – “Partial Chrome exploit”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence using at least one bug in Chrome itself, plus other bugs. For example, a WebKit bug combined with a Windows sandbox bug.

$20,000 – “Consolation reward, Flash / Windows / other”: Chrome / Win7 local OS user account persistence that does not use bugs in Chrome. For example, bugs in one or more of Flash, Windows or a driver. These exploits are not specific to Chrome and will be a threat to users of any web browser. Although not specifically Chrome’s issue, we’ve decided to offer consolation prizes because these findings still help us toward our mission of making the entire web safer.

By holding this type of challenge, Google gets to build a much better relationship with hackers and developers and keep the exploits away from those with nefarious intentions. The company is also giving away a Chromebook to all of the winners, a great way to get these security experts relying on Google’s technology platform even more.

To be able to win the prizes, participants must submit their exploits directly to Google and not anywhere else first, such as publishing them on a blog or sharing them in the press.