Posted by d33j4y on Thursday, September 2, 2010 1:58 pm
'Speed matters,' says Google exec on second birthday of company's browser
Google today celebrated Chrome's second birthday by launching the sixth version of its browser for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Chrome 6, which Google released into its "stable" channel -- the upgrade mechanism for the production-quality version -- also included patches for 16 vulnerabilities and another crack at fixing a Windows kernel bug that affected the browser.
"The last couple of years we've been focused on speed," said Brian Rakowski, Chrome's director of product management. "A lot of things have changed in the last two years [in browsers], but the one thing we've learned is that speed matters. It's something Google's always believed in and it resonates with people."
One analyst isn't so sure. "Speed is absolutely imp...
Posted by d33j4y on Thursday, September 2, 2010 1:54 pm
Microsoft on Thursday started featuring a small advertisement on its Bing home page for Internet Explorer 8 in an apparent effort to encourage more people to migrate to the latest version of its browser.
With the launch of Bing, Microsoft came up with the unique concept of displaying a new photograph on the home page each day, but it also generally followed Google's precedent of an otherwise sparse page. The Bing site features the search bar and a few links along the outer edges of the page.
Now, it also features a small link in the right corner of the photo that says: "Fast. Easy. Get Internet Explorer 8." The link goes to a page that presents IE8 as optimized for Bing and MSN and lets people download the browser.
Bing users can scroll through past photographs that appeared on the home pa...
Posted by d33j4y on Thursday, September 2, 2010 1:47 pm
Chrome is back up, Firefox stays flat in August
The browser battle returned to what passes for normalcy in August as Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which had a two-month run of usage share gains, lost ground to the usual suspect: Google's Chrome.
"August was a normal month, more like before the IE gains," said Vince Vizzaccaro, vice president at Web metrics company Net Applications. "IE lost, Chrome and Safari gained, even Firefox gained a little."
IE fell by three-tenths of one percentage point to end August with a 60.4% share of the global browser pie, Net Applications' data showed. That marked a departure from IE's performance in June and July, when it posted increases of six-tenths and four-tenths of a point, respectively.
"If you look at IE in general, it does appear that it's lost t...
Posted by d33j4y on Thursday, September 2, 2010 1:33 pm
But it might take more than the recent acquisitions of McAfee and Infineon's wireless chip unit -- it might take a phone that can compete with the iPhone
Intel wants to be a force in the mobile computing world -- a fact that was made clear by the company's recently announced plans to acquire chip maker Infineon Technology's wireless division and security software provider McAfee.
But several analysts questioned whether spending billions of dollars on those two companies and others, and revving up the MeeGo mobile operating system in partnership with Nokia, can be enough to make much difference. Some say Intel has already fallen well behind the mobile curve and has a long way to go to catch up.
With the planned acquisitions of Infineon for $1.4 billion and McAfee for $7.7 billion and the 2009...
Posted by d33j4y on Monday, August 30, 2010 8:57 pm
An email sent to beta testers and posted on the Messenger Connect forums announced today that Microsoft is discontinuing the Messenger Connect strongly typed .Net Library, instead offering samples of code which work directly with Messenger Connect web services, using REST and OData. Here’s the email:
Quote:
An important note to those of you who have started exploring or are actively working with the CTP of our .NET library for Messenger Connect (Microsoft.Live.dll). Based on feedback from our early adopters, we are discontinuing the strongly typed Messenger Connect .NET library in favor of providing developers with .NET samples which work directly with our RESTful, OData-compliant web services. This .NET library (used for Windows apps, Silverlight apps, and ASP.NET apps) was released as a c...
Posted by d33j4y on Monday, August 30, 2010 8:54 pm
Scammers are trying to take advantage of the fact that many users will soon have to update their version of the TweetDeck Twitter software.
On Monday, TweetDeck warned that some Twitter messages were advising people to upload an untrustworthy executable file, called tweetdeck-08302010-update.exe.
"These tweets are from hacked accounts and this file does not come from us. Do not download it," TweetDeck said in a post on its support page.
The software is a generic Trojan horse program that is not detected by most antivirus products, said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro. This type of software is used to download a variety of different malicious programs such as password-stealing keyloggers.
Users of the older versions of TweetDeck really will have to update their software Tuesday, as...
Posted by d33j4y on Monday, August 30, 2010 8:52 pm
Intel has added speed to its low-end processors, introducing new low-end Pentium and Core i3 processors running at the fastest clock speeds the company has put on its consumer microprocessors.
The company's new dual-core Core i3-560M and Pentium E6800 processors run at clock speeds of 3.33GHz, according to an Intel processor price list issued on Sunday.
That is the same clock speed as Intel's Core i7-980X chip for enthusiast PCs, which is considered one of Intel's fastest desktop processors. However, the six-core Core i7-980X chip has more cache, cores and is made using an advanced manufacturing process.
The Core i3 and Pentium chips usually go into low-end PCs, but the faster clock speed could play a role in helping them outperform other chips belonging to the same family and generation. Th...
Posted by d33j4y on Monday, August 30, 2010 8:50 pm
Google plays catch-up with Microsoft, Mozilla on browser hardware acceleration
Google said last week that it will follow the lead of Microsoft and Mozilla by offloading some browser chores to the graphics processor to speed up Chrome.
In an announcement on Friday, Google said it has added hardware acceleration to the newest build of Chromium, the open-source project that provides the underlying technology for Chrome.
The feature is included with the latest Chromium 7.x build.
Browser hardware acceleration shifts some tasks from the PC's main processor to its graphics processor to boost performance, especially of graphics-intensive chores like rendering video or complex three-dimensional objects.
Microsoft has for months been trumpeting its use of acceleration in Internet Explorer 9, which will ...
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