10 Web Browsers You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

Firefox. Internet Explorer. Chrome. Safari. Opera. We’ve pretty much all heard of them by now. They’ve been fighting for market share for the past few years (Internet Explorer has been fighting for it for a lot longer than that), and it’s unlikely any of them will ever come out the absolute winner. They try to be all things to all people. And that’s great.

Except…

What if you’re looking for a browser that does just the things you want to do online? What if you’re sick of all the browser-war hubub and want something that’s truly unique and different (and, maybe, works better than the mainstream options)? What then?

Well, there’s good news. There are more than a dozen excellent alternative browsers out there if you’re looking for something distinctive. Below are ten such web browsers, along with why you might want to consider using them.

The world may be cloud-crazy, but Outlook for Mac is stuck on Earth

Store your data in the cloud and have it accessible to you from any computer, anywhere. That’s the pitch we hear more and more from companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. So how is it that all of these companies allow Outlook for Mac 2011 to remain absurdly earthbound?

I’m a long-time Outlook user on Windows, now working with Outlook full-time on the Mac. Even though Gmail is my email provider (the Google Apps version of it), I find Outlook a better way to interact with Gmail than using Gmail directly through the web.

No, I’m not crazy (but if you love Gmail’s web interface, more power to you). In a future column, I’ll explain exactly why Outlook (either for Windows or Mac) is a perfect paring with Gmail, especially for its excellent offline support and the easy ability to open and manage multiple email windows.

That’s a story for another time. For now, the point is that when it comes to syncing email, Outlook loves the cloud. When it comes to syncing other data that users create and store in Outlook, the program falls short on the Mac-side. Painfully short.

Who killed YouTube on the iPhone — Apple or Google?

Apple killing YouTube on iPhone just happens to be the last straw. Went into the AT&T store today to begin switch to my Android phone.

YouTube will no longer come standard on the iPhone and iPad, and the Internet is jumping to conclusions as usual.

The next version of Apple’s mobile OS — iOS 6 — will be missing the familiar YouTube app from its home screen. Instead, users will have to download a new YouTube app from the App Store. Apple claims it’s simply because its five-year deal with Google has expired, while Google isn’t even talking about the circumstances of YouTube’s departure from Apple’s devices.

Apple and Google don’t exactly like each other, and Apple has been systematically purging Google’s influence from its flagship OS. Earlier this year, Apple announced that iOS 6 willremove Google Maps in favor of Apple Maps.

Twitter: Olympics opening ceremony saw 9.66 million mentions

Talk of the London 2012 Olympic Games was expected to take over Twitter, and its community of 140 million active users worldwide didn’t disappoint.

On Friday, Twitter saw more tweets in a single day than it saw during the whole duration of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, according to a blog post by the microblogging service.

Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered; e-mail lost

An alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail.

Facebook users say contacts’ e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent — and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.