Microsoft`s IE9 Browser Offers Speedy Cruising, Modern Look

 

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9, the latest version in its browser franchise, late March 14. To say that the company has a lot riding on the browser’s success is something of an understatement. Faced by hearty competition from the likes of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome, Microsoft needs IE9 to not only capture the hearts and minds of users who would otherwise choose another browser but also persuade those users of older Internet Explorers (such as the increasingly antiquated IE6) to upgrade to the newer version. In addition to increased security and support for various Web standards, Internet Explorer 9 puts the Web front-and-center with an interface designed to minimize (if not eliminate entirely) the presence of toolbars and icons. Many of IE9’s new features and tweaks come courtesy of extensive beta testing, in which some 25 million users participated, followed by a widely available Release Candidate. Microsoft also claims that IE9 provides blazing speed, something that will no doubt prove useful in conjunction with the Web’s increasingly rich content.

Aero Snap

With Aero Snap, IE9 users can pin resized windows to either the left or right of the screen, or even "tear off" Website tabs if they want to view a pair of Websites next to each other. 

 

All Stripped Down

IE9’s stripped-down user interface recalls rivals such as Google Chrome, with similar emphasis on putting a Webpage (as opposed to toolbar and icons) prominently front-and-center.

 

HTML5

IE9 includes extensive support for HTML5, and, for users with Windows 7, leverages the PC’s processing power to run high-definition videos, rich Websites and other media with greater clarity and speed.

 

Pinning

Users can click and drag a Website tab to the Windows 7 taskbar, pinning it there as an icon.

 

InPrivate Browsing

Microsoft’s InPrivate Browsing allows for Web surfing without leaving traces that can be discovered later. Microsoft built this feature in conjunction with the SmartScreen Filter, which judges potentially security-suspect Websites based on their reputation.

 

Jump Lists

Once a Website is pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar, right-clicking on its icon will open a menu for one-click access to various parts of that Website. This comes in particularly useful for sprawling Websites such as eBay and Facebook.

 

All Together Now

The combination of translucent, stripped-down user interface, jump lists and "pinned" icons all combine to integrate IE9 thoroughly into the Windows 7 or Vista interface. However, the new browser is incompatible with Windows XP and its sizable percentage of users. 

 

Options

IE9 lets users adjust features such as Privacy and Programs, giving them granular control over their Web experience.

 

Design Tweaks

With IE9, Microsoft also retained some very familiar elements. Many icons look like slightly cleaned-up versions of their predecessors, and features such as the "Favorites" bar are still very much present.

 

Market Share

Microsoft hopes that IE9 will allow it to halt or reverse its long, slow erosion in browser market share and serve as a viable competitor to the likes of Google Chrome and Firefox.

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Google, Microsoft Bing Locked in Apparent Search Engine Copycat War

 

Google Instant

Microsoft declined to confirm this for eWEEK, but Winrumors said March 6 that Microsoft is planning to integrate instant search results that render results as users type them into the next version of its Bing search engine. Such a move may be welcomed by Bing users, but it will be derided by Google, if only in private, after the company launched Google Instant last September. See Google Instant at work here. One wonders what the Bing implementation, if real, will look like.

 

Bing Copying Results

Google Fellow Amit Singhal noted that Google ran a search sting operation by manufacturing queries, only to find that Bing returned the same results to those queries later. "Put another way, some Bing results increasingly look like an incomplete, stale version of Google results—a cheap imitation," Singhal wrote. Microsoft attributed this to gathering clickstream data from the Bing toolbar. Is that copying, or simply the practice of mining the Web's collective intelligence? Decide for yourselves.

 

Google Adds Twitter—After Bing

At the Web 2.0 Summit in October 2009, Bing said it would be indexing Twitter tweets in its results. Google more or less announced the same deal after Bing. Obviously, Twitter was wheeling and dealing with Microsoft and Google for months before signing off on the deals, but it seemed a little too pat that Google would announce the same thing at the same event on the same day. It rang of "anything you can do I can do better," which is not exactly a tune you'd expect a company with 65 percent market share to sing. Of course, the implementation was different. Bing aggregates tweets on this Social Web page. Google first created a real-time search site, but now layers tweets throughout its results.

 

Search Refinements

Cut to May 2010, when Google introduced more navigation tabs on its left-hand rail, which is something Bing made hearty use of from its inception (or evolution from Live Search, if you prefer) in June 2009.

 

Dressing Up the Home Pages

In June 2010, Google began letting users add a photo or image to the background of the Google.com homepage. Bing launched with a jazzy homepage background, which is still one of its noticeable features.

 

Bird's-Eye View Features

Google in July made its 45° aerial imagery view available in select cities in the United States and worldwide to all users of Google Maps. That is something Microsoft offered since Live Search.

 

Image Search

Google revamped its Image Search service in July last year. Like Bing, Google Image Search sports a dense, tiled layout that packs more images on the Web page and makes them easily searchable. Another feature Google has added that Bing employed a year ago is a hover pane that lets users mouse over a thumbnail image to see a larger preview of the picture.

 

Google Recipe

Google Feb. 24 launched a new search refinement called Recipe View. As one reader noted, Bing has been offering recipes since January 2010. Google has differentiated its recipe search by offering ways to slice and dice results by ingredients, cooking time and calorie count.

 

Google

Just as Bing "may" be doing instant search a la Google Instant, Google is also trying hard to boost its travel search results by acquiring ITA Software, which funnels a fire hose of flight schedules and fares from airlines. Bing Travel uses this ITA data to offer flight search results, with dynamic price predictions. If Google gets the Justice Department to sign off on ITA, you can bet it, too, will begin surfacing a lot of the same info Bing does.

 

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Before They Were Tech Stars

 

Bill Gates (Microsoft)

Age: 19
In 1975, Bill Gates famously dropped out of Harvard (where he lived down the hall from fellow sophomore, Steve Ballmer) to start a company with childhood friend Paul Allen, who had recently dropped out of Washington State University, in order to work at Honeywell in Boston. Gates had already been programming for a number of years before co-founding the company first known as Micro-Soft (a combination of "microcomputer" and "software").
He encountered his first computer at age 13, at Lakeside School in Seattle. He soon received a pass from math class, so he could work on the ASR-33 during school hours, creating his first computer program—a version of tic-tac-toe written in BASIC.

 Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Age: 19
Fellow Harvard alum turned billionaire Mark Zuckerberg also thought up the idea that earned him his fortune at the ripe old age of 19. It was Zuckerberg's father who first planted the programming bug in the middle school student, teaching him how to program in Atari BASIC.
By the time he was in high school, Zuck was taking grad courses in the subject at a local college, soon creating ZuckNet, a personal instant messaging program he used to communicate with his father. Soon after, he developed Synapse Media Player, an AI music player that we gave three out of five stars, back in 2005. It's no Facebook, but still, not too shabby for a high school kid.

 Michael Dell (Dell Computers)

Age: 19
There are those who put off the working world for as long as possible, enrolling in graduate school well into their 30s. And then there's Michael Dell, founder of his eponymous computer company, who applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight, in order to enter the business world as soon as humanly possible.
By age 15, after having disassembled his share of Radio Shack calculators, Dell got his hands on an Apple II, which he promptly took apart. At 19, while enrolled at University of Texas at Austin as a pre-med student, Dell launched PC's Limited, banking on the concept of selling computers directly to consumers. Eight years later, he was the youngest CEO to make the Fortune 500 list.

 Steve Jobs (Apple)

Age: 21
Steve Jobs got a summer job working at Hewlett-Packard while still in high school. It was there that he met future "Dancing with the Stars" participant, Steve Wozniak. In 1975, the two Steves were briefly employed by Atari—that same year, they began attending the Homebrew Computer Club, a small grew of hobbyists that would later become the epicenter of the personal computer revolution. It was in front of that group that Wozniak and Jobs first showed off the Apple I, a fully assembled circuit board hand-built by the Woz. The young company charged an ominous $666.66 for that first computer.

 Larry Page, Sergey Brin (Google)

Age: 25
Faced with anti-Semitism in the academic environment of their native Russia, the Brin family moved to the U.S. with their six-year-old son Sergey in 1979. Partially homeschooled by his father, then a math professor at the University of Maryland, Brin eventually enrolled at his father's school, where he graduated with honors.
Soon after, he began graduate work in computer science at Stanford, where he met Larry Page. After butting heads for some time, the two eventually became "intellectual soulmates," according to Brin. Together Page and Brin went on to create "BackRub," a new search engine named for its reliance of checking backlinks. Thankfully, they soon opted for the less creepy Google, named for googol, a number followed by 100 zeros.

 William Hewlett, David Packard (Hewlett-Packard)

Age: 26 (Hewlett), 27 (Packard)
Like a number of fellow future technology giants, Hewlett-Packard was born in a Bay Area garage. The space belonged to Frederick Terman, William Hewlett and David Packard's former professor at Stanford. It was there that the duo launched the company with an investment of $538, choosing the order of their hyphenated company name with the toss of a coin.



Fusajiro Yamauchi (Nintendo)


Age: 30
In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi started a new game company specializing in Hanafuda playing cards made from mulberry tree bark. The name "Nintendo," in keeping with the theme of that early product, means "leave luck to heaven." The company specialized in cards for nearly a hundred years after.
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Why Microsoft Should Fear Google Chrome OS: 10 Reasons

Recently, Microsoft released Windows 7 Service Pack 1, an update that delivers some better stability and important fixes to the latest in the long line of operating systems from the software giant. The update will likely be one of many service packs that will be made available to Windows 7. The launch of the service pack, however, causes some to think about Microsoft’s strategy in the operating-system space. The company is still heavily invested in desktop, offline software. And by the looks of things, especially with all the talk surrounding Windows 8, that won’t change anytime soon. Meanwhile, Google is preparing for the launch of Chrome OS, its cloud-based operating system that it believes, can deliver a new (and viable) experience for consumers who are looking for a little something different than Windows. It’s easy to see Google’s point. Chrome OS looks to be a promising addition to the operating-system market. And it could very well take a bite out of Windows market share eventually. Here's why Microsoft should fear Chrome OS.

1. It’s A Good Idea
   If nothing else, Google’s Chrome OS platform is a good idea. As more and more consumers start accessing the Web for their many needs, it only makes sense than operating system would bridge the gap between their offline efforts and their Web practices. Chrome OS might not be ground-breaking, but it’s undoubtedly an evolutionary upgrade that makes quite a bit of sense over desktop alternatives.
2. Google Has Done Well Elsewhere
   Microsoft might feel that its positioning in the enterprise and consumer markets is intact and it has nothing to fear. But it doesn’t have far to look to see that Google is quite capable of taking Microsoft down. The search giant did so online and it practically dismantled Microsoft’s operation in the mobile market. What’s to stop Google from doing the same in the OS space where it has a unique product to compete with Windows?
3. Windows Isn’t Everyone’s Favorite
   Not long ago, many believed that few things—if anything—could stop the Windows juggernaut. The operating system was simply too popular in the enterprise and consumer spaces for it not to dominate. But then Windows Vista came along. And when that happened, consumers, enterprise customers, and even vendors turned their backs on Microsoft. Windows 7 has helped revive Microsoft’s business. But the memory of Vista is still fresh.
4. It’s Probably the Future
   It’s hard to say what the next 10 to 15 years in the operating-system market will look like. But it’s quite possible that the space will be dominated by cloud-based platforms. As mentioned, the Web is integral to the experience of computing today. Realizing that, it would only make sense for Web-based operating systems to gain popularity over time. And the longer it takes Microsoft to realize what Google already has, the worse it will be for the software giant.
5. It Doesn’t Have A Real Response
   Microsoft has Azure, which could be central to its future plans in the cloud, but it’s hard to point to a single solution that can compete on the same exact level as Google Chrome OS. Microsoft is still focused on the desktop market. And it doesn’t look like that will change at any point in the near future. The longer Microsoft remains obstinate in the face of Chrome OS, the worse it will be over the long haul.
6. It Doesn’t Have A Dominant Cash Lead
   Whenever Microsoft has faced serious competitors in the past, the company has used its financial muscle to beat them. But it can’t do that this time with Google. Like Microsoft, Google is sitting on a cash cow. And it has the money it needs to invest in technologies that will help Chrome OS fight it out with Windows. That’s a problem for Microsoft. And it should scare the software company.
7. Consumers Choose Google
   Microsoft isn’t the most well-liked company in the consumer space. It’s still viewed by some as a firm that caters more to enterprise customers and fails to see the changing times the way companies like Apple or Google do. Whether or not that’s the case is up for debate. But until Microsoft can prove that it can think about consumers and deliver a Web-based operating system, the harder it will be for the company to take on Google and Chrome OS.
8. The Waiting Game
   One of the biggest mistakes Microsoft has made in response to Chrome OS is to basically ignore it. The company hasn’t come out with something that it can point to and say that the specific product will take Google on. Instead, it has largely ignored the cloud-OS space. But the longer it waits to respond, the worse it will be for Microsoft. Although Chrome OS hasn’t been sold to a single customer, time is of the essence. And Microsoft can’t forget that.
9. It’s Not Mac OS X
   There’s a general feeling in Redmond, it seems, that Chrome OS will turn out like Mac OS X—a fine operating system that few people actually use. But perhaps that’s a bit short-sighted. For one, Google has the ability to target more of the mainstream than Apple. And unlike Apple, Google is obsessed with taking Microsoft down. Admittedly, it would take a long time for Google to supplant Microsoft as the leader in the OS market. But tossing Chrome OS aside as a wannabe is a big mistake on Microsoft’s part.
10. It Isn’t Linux Either
    Microsoft would do well to not believe that Chrome OS is just another Linux, as well. Unlike Linux, Chrome OS looks to have the full support of many vendors that have traditionally only worked with Microsoft and Windows. That alone makes it a threat to Microsoft. And that alone should give Microsoft enough concern to think twice about ignoring the impact Chrome OS might have on its operation.

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Microsoft Tablets Could Borrow Best Parts from Windows Phone 7

 

Lighter UI

Microsoft seems determined to cling to Windows for its tablets currently on the market. However, the OS comes across as ungainly versus Android and iOS. In its place, Microsoft could consider a touch-optimized, "lighter" user interface more in line with what you find on a smartphone.

Low Cost

The Motorola Xoom and the higher-end Apple iPads represent the top of the tablet market’s price range, at around $800. Most other competitors fall somewhere between $550 and $700. If Microsoft and its tablet partners really want to make an impact, they’ll aim for the lower side of the price spectrum

Hardware

At the moment, tablets are transitioning to dual-core processors to power apps, games and Web cruising. By the time Microsoft begins its big tablet push, the hardware baseline for tablets will doubtlessly have risen into more powerful ranges. Microsoft’s tablet strategy needs to set tough standards for what’s acceptable in terms of screen resolution, processors and other areas.

USB and Peripherals

There exists a tricky line between providing a slimmed-down tablet (truly a "post-PC" device, in Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ words) and something with enough features to cover a wide variety of possible functions. To that end, Microsoft and its partners could err on the side of installing a number of hardware features, such as multiple USBs, on the tablet form factor—something that at least some power users might appreciate.

Regulation

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft demonstrated that it was willing to impose a strict set of requirements on its manufacturing partners in order to prevent fragmentation and make software updates (somewhat) easier to manage. It could well do the same with tablets.

Other Assets

As with Windows Phone 7, Microsoft could (and maybe should) focus on a tablet experience that bakes other company properties into the tablet UI, including Xbox, Office and SharePoint.

Battery Life

If the current spate of tablets proves anything, it’s that any new competitor on the market needs to place battery life at an absolute premium.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Windows Phone 7 demonstrated how aggressively courting the developer community to develop apps, months before a platform’s release, can translate into small but steady dividends. While WP7 doesn’t boast an app library the size of Google’s or Apple’s, it has so far managed to avoid the fate of Palm and RIM in that category. With any tablet, Microsoft will need to ensure it has an app developer plan in place.

Xbox Integration

Microsoft’s secret weapon with tablets could be integration with Xbox Live. Easily the company’s most successful consumer franchise, Xbox could give a Microsoft tablet a built-in gamer audience.

Stylus

Fujitsu’s Q550 tablet already boasts the ability to write with a stylus, in addition to touch input. A deeply ingrained ability to treat a tablet’s surface like paper could go far in expanding its user base to writers, artists and designers.

Security

Security features such as an embedded security chip and encrypted SSD could make a Windows tablet that much more appealing to enterprise users.

Carriers

While it’s too soon to tell whether it will ultimately succeed over others in the tablet market, Samsung’s early experience launching the Galaxy Tab on multiple carriers drew a lot of buzz. A similar blanket strategy could also serve Microsoft well, ensuring its tablets get high visibility.

{Source: eWeek}