Mozilla made live the Firefox 42 update on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The new features added to the browser include enhanced tracking protection in Private Mode - which now blocks ads (with tracking capability), analytics trackers, and social share buttons, tab audio indicators, and background link opening on Android.

Opera was the very first browser to offer the concept of compression-proxy for faster web-browsing on Desktop and Mobiles, Google has also started offering data-compression proxy on Google Chrome for Mobile phones and is also available to Desktop Chrome users via an official and unofficial browser extension.

Taking the technology further Opera Max is now a dedicated app for Android platform allowing data-management and data-savings features which now even supports shrinking of videos and photos on almost any app on mobile data, as well as Wi-Fi.

Microsoft has released a new video demonstrating highlights of the latest Windows 10 build, the new release also debuts first public appearance of Microsoft Edge the default web-browser replacing "Internet Explorer" across all Windows 10 versions (mobile and desktop). Do watch the videos shared below.

Google Chrome web-browser on mobile-platforms features the option to reduce bandwidth costs and enable faster web-browsing utilizing the "Google Data Compression Proxy". The same had been made available to Google Chrome Desktop users via an unofficial Data Compression Proxy extension as shared earlier, now the feature is officially made available by Google as new Data Saver web-browser extension.

Once Data Saver extension is activated on Google Chrome, the web-browser will use Google servers to compress pages you visit before downloading them. Taking user's privacy into consideration, the service will bypass the compression proxy for SSL and incognito web-pages.

As expected Mozilla has now unveiled the Developer Edition of 64-bit Firefox for Windows (v 38). The 64-bit build allows users to get a more richer, desktop-quality app experience in the web-browser, the 64bit version of the browser allows running of larger applications, better performance, and increased security vs it's 32bit sibling.

Microsoft has announced the Internet Explorer killer, company's Windows 10 will ship with a brand new browser, codenamed “Project Spartan.” Designed for Windows 10, Spartan is a single browser developed for the entire Windows 10 device family - from keyboard and mouse on the Windows 10 desktop to touch, gestures, voice, controllers and sensors on other devices. The new web-browser from Microsoft is designed to offer a more interoperable, reliable, and discoverable experience with advanced features including the ability to annotate on web pages, a distraction-free reading experience, and integration of Cortana for finding and doing things online faster.

Powered by a new rendering engine, Spartan is designed for the modern web with greater emphasis on performance, security and support for modern web-technologies across Windows 10 devices. The new rendering engine will be the default engine for Windows 10, Spartan will also allow loading of IE11 engine for legacy enterprise web sites and applications using older technologies designed only for Internet Explorer, such as custom ActiveX controls and Browser Helper Objects.

As blogged earlier after Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, our beloved Firefox web-browser is also coming with multi-process support. To make things even sweeter Mozilla has also announced an official 64bit version of the web-browser for Windows OS, although this was unofficially available as Waterfox.

Raspberry Pi team has been working with Collabora to offer a better web-browsing experience on the mini-computer, their efforts have now getting results in form of Epiphany (aka GNOME Web). The up-to-date, HTML5-capable web browser for the Pi aims to support a reasonably good multi-tab web-surfing experience with ARMv6-optimized 2d rendering and accelerated image and HTML5 video decoding. The new web-browser for Raspberry Pi is offers better interactivity during page loading and faster scrolling.

While I personally liked the minimalistic approach of the new Fireox 29 interface (named Australis) some might not, for the haters we have the new free addon "Classic Theme Restorer" which will give you the look and feel of the "good old days". The free Firefox addon restores squared tabs, appbutton/appmenu (known from Firefox for Windows), bookmarks menu button, bookmarks sidebar button, history sidebar button and other buttons from Firefox 4-28 (non-Australis) on Firefox 29+ (Austalis UI - Windows, MacOSX, Linux), all buttons remain fully optional. Some of them have to be moved to toolbars manually using browsers 'customize' area.

Similar to Opera Turbo technology, Google Chrome features an "data compression proxy" for Android and Apple iOS mobile-devices which when enabled opens a connection between the user phone and optimization servers running in Google's datacenters relaying all non-encrypted HTTP requests over this connection. The SSL secured proxy connection performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with gzip compression for all resources, DNS lookups from proxy and images converted to WebP with resulting sizes upto 80% smaller provides huge bandwidth savings and resulting in faster web-browsing experience.

This feature is not available for Google Chrome Desktop users, however a free Chrome extension now allows users to get the same savings on their desktop computers. The extension sends all HTTP (but not HTTPS) traffic through Chrome Data Compression Proxy server, which utilizes SPDY protocol to speed up web browsing. Users can check bandwidth savings by visiting chrome://net-internals/#bandwidth and can disable compression-proxy by clicking the green bolt icon from the toolbar.