Microsoft have a plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PCs having OS – Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Starting from January 2012 for customers in Australia and Brazil for customers who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. However point to be noted here is that Windows XP is not compatible to have latest version of IE i.e. IE ver.9 so how would this plan will be accomplished for Windows XP user to have latest version of IE.

As per W3C statistics of Browser market share IE (all version) has 21% of market share. Web Developers and designer always have hard time to make specific coding for each versions of IE be it 5,6,7,8 or even 9. The CSS and javascript standards that these version of IE browser follows are far different and shows drastic variation comparing to any other browsers such as Firefox, Safari or Chrome as these browsers are least effected across their versions as far as UI CSS or javascript coding is concerned.

China, South Korea, Japan and India are major areas of world that still uses IE 6 comparing to rest of the all world, however Microsoft has chosen to initiate this from Australia and Brazil as of now.

But in China, over 90% of OS software is pirated, most Chinese users never connect to Windows Update or even upgrading their web browser as they disable the automatic windows update process fearing that it would catch their pirated OS installation as under software countrfiet,  now questrion arises here how would China be off from older versions of IE browser, inspite this kind of initiative of microsoft.

More or less this initiative of Microsoft is welcomes as no matter how much it would eradicate the old web standards but still it will do it gradually, as something is better than nothing atleast the more oolder version will soon be hostiry to web users.

Via – WindowsSteamBlog

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Presently, Only Google Chrome users can drag attachments out of their email messages to save them on their desktops. It is the welcome feature for those doesn’t like saving everything at one place like Chrome downloads folder or respond to a dialog box where a file should go.

In order to download your attachments, Chrome users just need to hover your mouse pointer over the attachments download link. A tool tip appears appealing you to “Click to view OR drag to your desktop to save”. Just Click and hold to drag the file and drop anywhere in your computer file system to save it to the proper destination.

Gmail is working hard to provide efficiency and power to its users by implementing these time saving features with HTML5. It has already introduced drag-and-drop feature to add attachments, which is really time saving one when multiple files needed to be attached in email.

On the other side, Hotmail is trying hard to increase its user base by rolling out some interesting features. It certainly has some great appealing new features that make Hotmail stand better than Gmail. But with this effort, Will Hotmail will be able to become the favorite webmail service? The question is still unanswered.

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If you are curious about knowing how’s life at Googleplex or dreaming of joining Google then you must be aware of what are the pros and cons of being a Googler.

I have cited few thought-provoking excerpts from the thread which you may like to go through:

CinoBoo Said:

“I’ve been there for about 5 years. You can read about the good parts anywhere, so I’ll try to offer a counterpoint based on having worked at other software companies.

A common problem is that it’s easy to become spoiled by all the perks. Several offices have developed distinct cultures of entitlement, and people whine about the quality of the fudge on the free brownies. It’s embarrassing to be around people who’ve become like spoiled children.

An engineering-specific problem there is that there’s a lot of support for operations — that is, lots of people whose job it is to keep the systems running. Engineers don’t habitually carry pagers and are on-call relatively infrequently. The plus side is that they can focus on development, get adequate sleep, and be more productive. The downside is that they can easily lose touch with what’s really going on in the data centers and sometimes even their customers.

Last, the company is big into “generating luck”, which means trying a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off. The practical net effect of this on leaf-node employees is that you can wind up working on three, four, even five or more failed projects in a row.”

GoogleEmployee22k said:

“Google is a great place to work. These are the things I like about my job:

1) Everyone is super smart

2) 18 different cafes

3) Free Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

4) The food is gourmet quality (e.g. omelet bar, chefs that make custom sandwiches for you, sashimi, free drinks 24/7, free snacks of all sorts 24/7.

5) The 7 person conference bicycles

6) Every Friday, Larry, Sergei, or Eric takes questions from us (in person), and we get free beer (e.g. Downtown Brown)

7) Gyms all over, Free Laundry done for us, amazing free automated massage chairs in every building.

8) Free bicycles that we can just get on and ride to different buildings

9) Always pickup soccer games, or basketball games going on.

10) You can bring your dog with you to the office every day (1 out of 4 employees always has their dog with them)

11) Free shuttle to and from work everyday. (The shuttle has wi-fi). It even goes to SF.

The very best part about working for Google is that the campus has a very collegiate feel. There is no dressing up, ever (you will get strange looks if you do), everyone is amazingly smart and nice, we dedicate 20% of our time to whatever project we want, and the food is the best I’ve ever had. It’s all self sustainable. It’s like a glorious hippie engineering commune.”

FormerGoogler said:

“I worked for the company for over four years before leaving. In the beginning the balance was great: I could easily have worked a 9-5 if I didn’t come in a bit early for breakfast and leave a bit late to catch dinner. 9-6:30 is typical for someone in software engineering between releases and outside of pager duty.

It’s a competitive environment, though, and without good personal restraint things can really start to pile up. By the end my typical day was 14 hours long and I was starting to underperform on my primary responsibilities. Of course, this is true for any job to a greater or lesser degree. The fast pace and competitive environment simply make it an easy trap for Googlers to fall into.

Ultimately it comes down to self-restraint. Google was my first job out of college, and having worked other jobs since then I think I’m in a lot better to deal with such challenges in the future.”

Solyanik writes:

“ Worked there in 2007-2008, Kirkland/Seattle, and at Microsoft before and after.

Good things, in no particular order:

1) Young company, lots of energy

2) People are talking about how to build cool things, not about how to beat competition.

3) If you perform well and people want you on their teams, easy to change teams, so you get to learn a lot of cool stuff in a very short period of time (I got to work on Gmail, Maps, and Voice in just over a year)

Not so good things, in no particular order:

Despite free food and fun projects, Google has a very high attrition rate among the engineering. Vast majority of people who I knew at Microsoft throughout my 12 years there still work at Microsoft. Most people who I knew at Google have moved on (startups, etc).”

At the end, whatever people may say about Google but it will still be the dream company for the young software engineers. After all everything in this world has its pros and cons.

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The new Bing entertainment lets you listen songs, play movies or browse games right from the search results without navigating you away to any other site. In each section it is aimed to provide the searchers with quick and correct results. In Bing Music, users will now be able to preview complete song from the vast song library containing more than millions of songs. Moreover, you can get full lyrics, information about upcoming concerts and events, artist profile info and can buy tracks. Similarly, Bing Movies brings visual search results with customer reviews, related real time updates from Facebook and Twitter, and Bing map integration for all the information you need to plan an outing.

Bing Games help you in finding the best games for you and assist you to choose which games to buy. It provides you with detailed information on over 35,000 games, including in depth reviews, cheats and walkthroughs for all your favourite games. You can also play these games online free, from within Bing with complete safety and without any hassle of separate installation just to try out a game. With all the features it has also included some fun social features that allows you to actually invite friends from your own social networks to play with you without navigating anywhere else.

The new entertainment features included in Bing is really a different approach to find information context wise. For now it would be difficult to comment how appealing it would be for the whole world. But it’s sure that these astounding features can pose interesting competition in the market for the rivals.

Try Microsoft Entertainment : http://www.bing.com/entertainment/

(Source)

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Here is the change log (Since Opera 10.53)

• Prevented Opera from being used as a vector for a font issue in the underlying operating system, as reported by Microsoft’s security team; see our advisory.
• Fixed an extremely severe issue; details will be disclosed at a later date.
• Fixed a highly severe issue; details will be disclosed at a later date.
• Fixed a moderately severe issue; details will be disclosed at a later date.
• Fixed a less severe issue; details will be disclosed at a later date.

As you can see, the Opera software has been vague while describing the security vulnerabilities patched with Opera 10.54.

As in Last Week, Opera Software released Opera 10.60 Beta1, with major new features such as WebM support for HTLML5 video (demo), HTML5 Offline web Applications (demo), Geolocation (demo), Web workers (demo), Major update for Cross-Document Messaging (demo) and improved User interface. The annoying “O” button has been replaced by a more obvious “Menu” button and the repulsive taskbar tabs have been disabled (in previous versions it can be done from Opera Config).

The new Opera 10.6 features many stability improvements and bug fixes. However, keep in mind that this build is not completely ready and may contain several bugs but if you are already using Opera 10.60 Beta1 then you are already protected and there is no need to downgrade to Opera 10.54.

Download Opera 10.60 or 10.54 for Windows

(Source)

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Internet Fraud Alert (iFraudAlerts.org) will be providing an effective mechanism of a centralized alerting system which on one side will have participating experts/ researchers to report consumer identity theft, stolen account information discovered online such as username & password , login information for online services or compromised credit card numbers to the appropriate institution responsible for that account. Now this centralized alerting system (iFraudAlert) will quickly inform companies about compromised credentials which in turn help them to take the appropriate action to protect their customers stolen credentials or important private data.

As per APWG an Anti-Phishing Working Group phishing and malicious attack is all time high with more than 4,10,000 uniqiue phishing email reports. The iFraudAlert program will go into effect immediately today making a step forward in fighting online fraud and cybercrime.

Moreover in the shared interest of reducing online fraud and protecting consumers – any retailers, financial institutions, service providers, technology companies, academic researchers, consumer advocates and government agencies can become a partner of Internet Fraud Alert widen the group/ alliance of first of its kind centralized system to fight cybercribe and online ID theft.

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The new features enables you to eliminate clutter, which isn’t spam i.e. these clutter includes all the junk mails which you inadvertently signed up in past and always felt reluctant to cancel the subscriptions. To eliminate the annoyance caused by the junk mail cluttering Hotmail comes up with the new SWEEP feature, which is a virtual broom that lets you broom the unwanted emails out of your Inbox.

Large size attachments have always been the limitation in webmail services. But with new Hotmail you can easily share your vacation photos using windows live SkyDrive, the free online space up to 10 GB in a single message. All that you have to do is to upload your photos to the SkyDrive and send just like the regular attachments.

If one of your friends sends you a link to a video or a photo album, with the new “Active Views” feature of Hotmail you can view the video and browse the photo album right within the email message without navigating away from your inbox. Hotmail supports this feature for many sites like YouTube, Hulu, Flickr, SmugMug and Justin.tv etc.

Microsoft has completely reworked and redesigned the new Hotmail. The new features can please many who want faster webmail and dislike cluttering of their inboxes. Microsoft also has a strong focus on security with the new Hotmail. Soon Microsoft will be supporting SSL for the entire Hotmail sessions.

( Source )

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Since, all this effort of Google is to offer you personalization of your home page.  So, you can still choose an image or photo from your computer or your Picasa photo album.

So what have you been waiting for? Google is offering this Gallery only for next 24 hours.

( Source )

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It also aggregates shared link data from non-fan pages i.e. for all non-fan pages, you can get the popular shared links from Facebook users in aggregate form. The search results will only contain the links about the topic in aggregate, not any text or images. For example, if you search for the “FIFA world cup”, then you will be only showed with all the links that Facebook users are sharing on this topic.

Finally, besides all the above features, a redesigned, new home page is also coming up and will be showing the improved trending topics from both Facebook and Twitter data. For each Trending topic, it also shows the information about its trendiness.

From this announcement, it is quite clear that Bing is getting more social and Stylish too. It has been expected that loads of other social features will be added to the Bing soon.

By the time this article was written http://www.bing.com/social was not live yet. But it can be up anytime.

Source: Bing’s Official blog

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Brandon LeBlanc from Windows Team Blog point out few interesting points, as per him actual facts doesn’t go with assertion that were propagated as news overnight by media such as Financial Times which states that Windows is vulnerable to attacks on the contrary he affirms that Windows has surpassed all others when it comes to security and privacy concerns.

Some of the assertive points that Brandon stated for Windows overlooked security concerns are;

CNET, a computer & tech news portal published an interview with a Pro Hacker Marc Maiffret named as People Magazine’s 30 People Under 30 admits that Windows is doing better than any one in industry when it comes to security adding that Adobe and Apple must learn from Microsoft’s past.

Mashable a popular social media blog published a post in March this year that states that Yale University is holding back on Google apps on its process of switching its mail system to Gmail and education package to Google Apps over security risks and risk issues on how Google handles the data in its cloud.

Inforworld, an another technology and news portal published a report yesterday that Mac OS is under attack by high-risk spyware that was earlier a Windows varient can be future risk for Mac OS that spreads via a number of freely distributed Mac applications and screen savers found on a variety of Web sites.

Microsoft through its Windows blog affirms that Security is at highest priority for their customer and has always surpassed others as far as focus and investments are concerns in security, privacy and technological issues.

Brandon also describe some of the things Microsoft has invested efforts over security of their customers;

• We ship software and security updates to our customers as soon as possible through Windows Update and Microsoft Update to keep our customers safe.
• We highly recommend our customers enable Automatic Update to ensure they are protected from attacks.
• With Windows 7, we added improvements to BitLocker for disc encryption (we also introduced BitLocker-to-Go for external USB devices), and added enhancements to the built in Windows Firewall for better protection.
• Windows 7 has Parental Controls built in that can be combined with Windows Live Family Safety to create a safer experience on the PC for children.
• Windows 7 comes with Internet Explorer 8 which includes SmartScreen Filter that protects against malicious advertisement pop-ups, twitter like phishing scams etc.
• Windows 7 uses Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) as well by randomizing data in memory.

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