Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

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Microsoft has shown its commitment to improving the browsing experience, increasing the use of standards, and its commitment to maintaining its leadership in the cloud-space.

Just 4 weeks after releasing IE9, Microsoft has announced the first platform preview of  Internet Explorer 10 today at its MIX 11 Web developer event, going on all week.  Platform previews illustrate technologies that Microsoft  considers viable.  Platform previews for IE 10 will appear every 12 weeks, allowing for continuous developer  feedback, according to Microsoft’s announcement.

The current platform preview contains a demo of  CSS 3 gradient backgrounds, achieved using the HTML 5 spec, and another demo shows CSS3′s multiple columns handling.  Varying-length paragraphs of text  from a Twitter feed are flowed into multiple columns.  Microsoft also continues  to hammer home its point that the browser, operating system, and graphics acceleration hardware all contribute to the user experience by presenting the new IE 10 platform preview in a fish-bowl demo, showing how Google’s Chrome browser is unable to match the animation and rendering speeds of the IE 10 platform preview.

Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s corporate VP for  Internet Explorer discusses these points and more on stage during the MIX keynote address, and in Microsoft’s IE blog.

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Microsoft has revealed a new feature that will ship with Internet Explorer 9 to help users avoid the online tracking that is now widespread on the Web and is used to power behavioral advertising. The new Tracking Protection Lists will tell the browser which third-party content to permit and which to prohibit.


Tracking Protection Lists will be an opt-in feature, and Microsoft says that it will not provide any lists itself. Instead, third parties can provide lists to end-users. As such, the lists may come from privacy advocacy groups, ad-blocking advocates, or individuals who want to block certain content. The lists will update themselves automatically on a weekly basis.

Internet Explorer already contains a feature, InPrivate Filtering, that attempts to block third-party scripting and tracking devices. However, InPrivate Filtering operates on a heuristic basis. It can both fail to block certain tracking devices, and it can also block too much third-party scripting, leaving sites inoperative. Tracking Protection Lists, in contrast, will be curated, and so should be less susceptible to these issues.


Specifics of the Tracking Protection Lists are not yet finalized. Microsoft has proposed a file format for the lists, and it promises that the final specification will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Support for Tracking Protection Lists will first arrive in a release candidate of Internet Explorer 9. Redmond did not give a date for this, but it is likely to be early next year.

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That's a million dollar question! Undoubtely Internet Explorer 9 beta is the one of the major releases of IE since long time. With this Microsoft gave away cluttered User Interface and seems to be following route of other browsers with adherence to Web standards.

IE9 is a crucially important browser for Microsoft, and hopefully it eventually will represent the future on mobile devices, too. Microsoft needs to be as competitive, if not more, in mobile browsing as PCs. According to the U.S. State Department, 5 billion of the world's 6.6 billion people use cell phones. The total install base of PCs is about 1 billion units. Granted, the percentage of PCs capable of browsing the Web is higher than the percentage of handsets.

For now, Microsoft must recover lost territory on PCs. According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer usage share was 60.4 percent in August. Before Mozilla released Firefox 1.0 in November 2004, IE commanded more than 90 percent usage share, according to combined analyst reports.

The excitement and efforts around IE9 gives encouragement. Will it be IE9 for Microsoft?

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Janco Assocoiates, a management consulting firm, has released data regarding Browser and Operating System Market Share. What is nice to see is windows 7 has clogged 14.8 percent of the OS market. This is more than Windows Vista users on any day. It comes as a relief to Microsoft which faced a lot of heat on its Vista OS.

However one interesting fact is that Microsoft has been through rough patch in last six months. Its Internet Explorer market share which is taking it on back foot as its market share has fallen to the level that it was in 1998.

The top five browser market share rankings are: Microsoft's IE 67.73 percent; Firefox 17.88 percent; Google (Desktop & Chrome) 5.40 percent; Mozilla 1.36 percent; and Safari 0.98 percent.