Barence writes "It's a year since the Windows browser ballot came into being in Europe — but has it made any difference? PC Pro has surveyed the minor browser makers — who theoretically had the most to gain from the ballot — to find out what impact it's had on their business. The answers are very mixed. One of the 12, FlashPeak SlimBrowser, claims it's resulted in fewer than 200 downloads per day. Others claim it's transformed their business. One thing is for certain: the big boys still dominate."

jbrodkin writes "What if you took the raw, pre-patched, 10-year-old versions of Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6.1 and tried to surf the modern Web? What would happen? You might think firing up IE6 or Netscape would lead to an immediate onslaught of viruses, but just for fun, I decided to spend some time using these two ancient browsers. It turns out IE6 is still capable of surfing much of the modern Internet, and can play Flash and Java content, but Netscape's troubles show it probably died a justified death."

geek4 writes "Microsoft is planning to introduce multi-tasking and full integration with Internet Explorer 9 in future updates to its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system later this year. IE9 on Windows Phone 7 will use the same core browsing engine as on PCs. Microsoft also talked about the importance of multi-tasking, and claims it can now offer fast task switching without causing serious detriment to the battery life. In particular, Microsoft said, this will improve the experience of using third party applications. In a demo, a Microsoft engineer showed how a music application called 'Slacker' could keep music playing in the background while the user moved between different applications. By holding down the 'back' button, users can also see all their recently accessed applications, allowing them to switch easily between them." Microsoft also demonstrated how they're integrating WP7 with Xbox 360 consoles, showing a video of players using their phones as an auxiliary touchscreen controller to interact with a Kinect game.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. The new RC build includes a Tracking Protection feature, which gives users the option to control what third-party site content can track them when they're online, as well as a new ActiveX filtering option, which allows users to turn on/off ActiveX plug-ins. Best of all, Microsoft has addressed what was arguably the biggest complaint with the new version: if you want your tabs on a separate line from the address box, there's now an option to turn that on from the right click menu at the top of the browser. At the same time, IE9 RC is significantly faster than the beta version. Furthermore, many site rendering issues have been fixed, although we can't say that it's working perfectly. Last but not least, the new build includes hundreds of bug fixes."

An anonymous reader writes "Google's Chrome has taken the 10% market share hurdle, according to Net Applications and is past 15%, according to StatCounter. It is interesting to see that IE is declining at an accelerating pace and IE9 Beta cannot, despite the massive marketing campaign, dent Chrome's growth, while Firefox is holding on to what it has. It almost seems as if IE9 will not be able to turn around the decline of IE."

surveyork writes with this "new chapter in the browser wars: 'Google in a defense of its decision to pull H.264 from Chrome's HTML5 revealed that it will put out WebM plugins for Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. Expecting no official support from Apple or Microsoft, Google plans to develop extensions that would load its self-owned video codec. No timetable was given.' So Google gets started with their plan for world-wide WebM domination. They'll provide WebM plugins for the browsers of the H.264-only league, so in practice, all major browsers will have WebM support — one way or the other. Machiavellian move?"

mudimba writes "Microsoft has made grand announcements about how great their implementation of the HTML5 canvas specification is. However, while I was porting a large HTML5 application to work with IE9 beta I found that there are some key features missing. Workarounds are provided where possible. (Disclaimer: I am the author of the submitted article.)"

RebootKid writes "Microsoft has released a notice about a new zero day attack against Internet Explorer. Guess it's going to be more a 'Script Kiddie Christmas,' less of a 'White Christmas.' 'Ok, fess up — who asked for an IE 0 day for Christmas? I'm guessing Santa got his lumps of coal mixed up with a bag of exploits. This exploit has been discussed over the last day or so on full disclosure and a number of other sites. Metasploit already has a module available for it (just search for CSS & IE). Microsoft has put out an advisory 2488013 regarding the issue which manifests itself when a specially crafted web page is used and could result in remote code execution on the client.'"

devbox writes "Microsoft says it will offer a privacy setting in the next version of Internet Explorer that will make it easy for users to keep their browsing habits from being tracked by advertising networks and other third-party websites. 'By designing these sorts of enhancements with privacy in mind at the design phase, we're able to deliver a functionality that provides consumers additional levels of control over what they want to engage in and how they choose to do so,' Microsoft Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen blogged. Previously, Mozilla stopped working on a similar feature for Firefox after pressure from advertisers and other OSS projects as it would hurt their revenue sources from advertisers."

Trailrunner7 writes "A new paper from researchers at Verizon Business identifies a method through which an attacker can bypass Internet Explorer Protected Mode and gain elevated privileges once he's successfully exploited a bug on the system. Protected Mode in Internet Explorer is one of a handful of key security mechanisms that Microsoft has added to Windows in the last few years. It is often described as a sandbox, in that it is designed to prevent exploitation of a vulnerability in the browser from leading to more persistent compromise of the underlying system. In their research, the Verizon Business team found a method that, when combined with an existing memory-corruption vulnerability in the browser, enables an attacker to bypass Protected Mode and elevate his privileges on the compromised machine (PDF). The technique enables the attacker to move from a relatively un-privileged level to one with higher privileges, giving him complete access to the logged-in user's account."

dkd903 writes "A Mozilla engineer has uncovered something embarrassing for Microsoft – Internet Explorer is cheating in the SunSpider Benchmark. The SunSpider, although developed by Apple, has nowadays become a very popular choice of benchmark for the JavaScript engines of browsers."

CWmike writes "Roger Thompson, chief research officer of AVG Technologies, said Sunday that an exploit for the newest IE flaw had been added to the Eleonore crimeware attack kit. 'This raises the stakes considerably, as it means that anyone can buy the kit for a few hundred bucks, and they have a working zero-day,' Thompson said on his company's blog. Microsoft has promised to patch the vulnerability, but last week said the threat didn't warrant an 'out-of-band' update. Microsoft will deliver three security updates Nov. 9, but won't fix the IE bug then."

GIL_Dude writes "The W3C posted results for their latest HTML5 compatibility tests and have found that, so far, IE 9 has the best overall results. 'The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes," "audio," "video," "canvas," "getElementsByClassName," "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5." The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API, local storage, or other aspects of the spec. Not do they cover CSS or other standards that have nothing to do with HTML5 but are somehow lumped under HTML5 by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The October market share numbers are in and Net Applications' numbers show a surprising drop in IE8 market share — the first time since the browser was introduced. Strangely, IE9 has not gained much and IE7 as well as IE6 are losing as well. The only two browsers gaining are Chrome and Safari — and both browsers have hit new record market shares. The frenzy around IE8 may have subsided already, and Microsoft is under tremendous pressure to roll out IE9 soon. StatCounter's numbers indicate that Firefox is close to surpassing IE in Europe."

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla said that it will not be releasing Firefox 4 RC, or the final version, before early 2011. Apparently, the bugfixes in the current beta take up much more time than anticipated. Mozilla is working on the feature freeze release Beta 7, which has 14 bugs left. The beta 7 is about six weeks behind schedule and will be released 'when it is ready,' according to Mozilla. It seems as if the original schedule, which estimated that Firefox 4 RC would be released in the second half of October was a bit too optimistic. Microsoft, by the way, released a new IE9 platform preview (PP6) at PDC 20910 today."

Taxman415a noted a CNN story on the dying Microsoft brand where they talk about "The less than stellar performance of, and problems in, nearly every consumer division. It cites StatCounter's data showing IE's market share falling below 50%, and is even smart enough to note that's just one statistic with various problems, though the trend is clear. It also seems that MS doesn't want to compete with Android, so it plans to charge royalty fees to handset makers to discourage them from using it in their products. The conclusion is that MS will just be a commercial, not consumer company."

alphadogg writes "Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has dominated the Web browser market since blowing by Netscape in the late 1990s, last month fell below the 50% market share level for the first time in years. IE's share of the worldwide market fell to 49.87% in September, down from 51.3% in August and 58.4% a year ago. It is followed by Firefox, which increased its share slightly from 30.09% to 31.5% and Google Chrome, which grabbed 11.54% share, more than triple its September 2009 share, according to market watcher StatCounter."

cgriffin21 writes "Microsoft expected Internet Explorer 9 to be popular, but after more than two million people downloaded the IE9 beta in the first two days after its release, the software giant is having a hard time choosing which eye-popping statistics to cite. Microsoft says its "Beauty of the Web" site, which illustrates the aesthetic advantages of IE9's support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration, has had more the 9 million visits and 26 million page views since the IE9 beta launch on Sept. 15. Microsoft's developer-oriented IE Test Drive Site has had 4 million page views during the same period."

An anonymous reader writes "Most browser benchmarks are isolated, artificial tests that can be gamed by browser vendors optimizing those specific cases. With only those benchmarks to go on, the folks at LucidChart were skeptical that the IE9 beta would actually outperform other modern browsers in real-world applications. To separate hype from reality, they built their first browser benchmarking tool, based in LucidChart itself. This benchmark is to SunSpider what a Left4Dead 2 benchmark is to 3Dmark Vantage. Product specs don't matter, only real-world performance on a real-world application. The results were surprising. IE9 held its own pretty well (with a few caveats), and the latest Firefox 4 beta came in dead last."

CWmike writes "Those who have written off IE as being slow and old-looking are in for a surprise. The just-released Internet Explorer 9 beta is dramatically faster than its predecessor, sports an elegant, stripped-down interface and adds some useful new features, writes Preston Gralla. Even more surprising than the stripped-down interface is IE9 beta's speed. Internet Explorer has long been the slowest browser by a wide margin. IE9 has turned that around in dramatic fashion, using hardware acceleration and a new JavaScript engine it calls Chakra, which compiles scripts in the background and uses multiple processor cores. In this beta, my tests show it overtaking Firefox for speed, and putting up a respectable showing against Safari, Opera and Chrome. It's even integrated into Windows 7. One big problem: It will not work on Windows XP. So, forget the performance and security boost, many enterprises and netbook users."