According to new figures from Net Applications, both Firefox and Google Chrome continue to wrestle away market share from long time leader Internet Explorer, with Chrome seeing the strongest growth.

Chrome saw over 10 percent growth to reach 3.58 percent market share, while Firefox continued its ascent moving to 24.07 percent. Apple’s Safari still remains in third at 4.42 percent share, mainly due to increased Mac sales.

Net Applications says given Chrome’s growth and recent beta release of Chrome 4, the browser will likely surpass Safari, and the 5 percent mark, by February of next year.

Also interestingly was the numbers behind Internet Explorer, which although still the clear market leader at 64.64 percent, is a far cry from the 93 percent share it owned in 2003. Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s most recent update to the browser, had 18.1 percent share, moving it to within days of surpassing Internet Explorer 7 at 18.2. The eight-year-old and extremely inefficient Internet Explorer 6 remained the leader for the pack, at 23.2 percent.

IE6 remains the leader despite Microsoft’s plea for users to stop using the browser.

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written by NewsFeeder \\ tags: explorer, market share, Microsoft

According to AllthingsDigital, Microsoft is in early talks with MySpace in an effort to have MySpace Music tied-in with the MSN online portal.

Microsoft has its own service, MSN Music, but traffic ranks significantly lower than MySpace Music and Microsoft has been looking to kill off the service for some time.

As of April, AOL ranked on top with AOL Music at 30 million unique monthly visitors and MySpace Music fell in second at 27.4 million. MySpace’s numbers are expected to be bigger now. MSN Music was far back at 7.4 million.

Says a source close to MSN in regards to its entertainment properties: “It’s a decision to make it so MSN does less better. So there will be a focus of attention on a smaller number of categories in which we can be either #1 or #2 in, rather than #4 or #5.”

Financial details are unknown.

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written by NewsFeeder \\ tags: Microsoft, myspace

To disable accelerators in IE8 (stop the blue arrow when high lighting text) perform the following steps

1. Start Internet Explorer 8.

2. Click Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced

3. Then uncheck the box for Display Accelerator button on selection, under Browsing.

4. Click Apply and OK.

written by NewsFeeder \\ tags: IE 8, Microsoft

In a giant decision 13th August 2009, a federal district court judge has ruled against Microsoft, and told the software company it must stop selling the extremely popular Word word processing software in the United States.

The victor company, i4i, has only 30 employees but claims Microsoft violated a patent pertaining to Extensible Markup Language (XML). The judge agreed.

Microsoft has 60 days to appeal, or cease selling Word, a key component of the Office bundle. The company was also fined $290 million USD. Microsoft says Office accounts for over $3 billion USD in sales per year.

“It’s not a question of fear or pride or anything else,” added Loudon Owen, i4i chairman, via USA Today.“We’re very respectful of Microsoft, but when you’re in the right you have to persevere.”

Microsoft will obviously appeal.

“We are disappointed by the court’s ruling,” says Microsoft spokesman Kevin Kutz. “We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid.”

i4i has the patent for “customized XML,” which has been the default format for Word files since the 2007 edition. If the ruling stands, Microsoft would not be allowed to sell the 2003 or 2007 editions.

UPDATE

According to newly leaked emails, it appears that Microsoft knew about i4i‘s XML patent but decided to go ahead with Word anyways.

“We saw [i4i's products] some time ago and met its creators. Word 11 will make it obsolete,” said one email from Martin Sawicki, a member of Microsoft’s XML for Word development team. “It looks great for XP though.”

The email was written before the release of Office 2003, when Word was

written by NewsFeeder \\ tags: Microsoft, Word