"Yahoo enters browser market with Axis"

Yahoo has launched its own browser.

Yahoo has launched a web browser called Axis, in a bid to define the company and its goals.

The announcement was made in the US last night, as the web giant,which has just lost its chief executive, battles to remain relevant and keep users.

The browser, which faces stiff competition from Google’s Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, has no search result pages. Instead, most of the time, users will receive their search results as a horizontal display of web page thumbnails. Or users will receive text boxes with results in them.

The design and functionality has been well received by the technology pundits who have tried it.

Rafe Needleman, technology site Cnet’s editor-at-large, said: “Axis does nonetheless have a much better way of getting you from searching to visiting a Web page. The browser works well. This is an aggressive product for the struggling Yahoo to launch out of its search group… The Axis browser may not conquer the world, but it is a very strong mobile product with an important new design concept for search. It's also a gutsy business move from Yahoo. It's rather refreshing.

The browser is available to download across all iOS devices and as a desktop plug-in for HTML5-enabled browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari.

“Our search strategy is predicated on two core beliefs — one, that people want answers, not links and two, that consumer-facing search is ripe for innovative disruption,” said Shashi Seth, senior vice president, connections, Yahoo! Inc. “With Axis, we have re-defined and re-architected the search and browse experience from the ground up.”

The browser market is getting more competitive, as the latest figures reveal that Google Chrome has now overtaken Internet Explorer to become the most widely used web browser in the world.

Google Chrome briefly became the world's most popular web browser for one weekend in March 2012, but according to figures from Statcounter earlier this week, it has now overtaken Microsoft's Internet Explorer for the foreseeable future.

Chrome has beaten a trend that indicated it was going to surge past IE later this summer. The March figures were dismissed as inaccurate by Microsoft, but even so there is a longer-term trend of users choosing Chrome when they can decide for themselves, while business IT departments favour IE.

The Statcounter figures also suggest that Google Android's built-in browser is now the most popular programme on mobile phones.

On desktops, Chrome and IE have been on around 33 per cent each, but the last week shows Chrome taking the lead.

Speaking in March, Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter's chief executive, said "At weekends, when people are free to choose what browser to use, many of them are selecting Chrome in preference to IE."