Technologizer

Microsoft Discovers, Belatedly, That Vomiting May Offend Customers

Thursday, July 2, 2009

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft has pulled the online ad for Internet Explorer that showed a woman puking after viewing her husband’s apparently-disgustingly-pornographic browser history. The Journal quotes a Microsoft spokeswoman as saying that “While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found [...]

5Words for Wednesday, June 3rd 2009

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

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Is an evening 5Words acceptable? David Pogue’s Pre review. Leaked. And here’s Walt Mossberg’s take. Engadget weighs in, too. Positively. Gizmodo is less enthusiastic, though. Digg lets you digg ads. Is Microsoft the new GM? Hands on with PSP Go. Happy birthday to ya, Tetris! IE 6 likes Bing, apparently.

Google Makes Chrome Speed Boost Boast. Who’s Next?

Thursday, May 21, 2009

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Google is boasting that an update to Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and Webkit browsing component has yielded a significant improvement in performance. Yippee. Now, who’s next? The renewed browser war resembles more of a game of leapfrog than the big-bang releases of the 1990’s when one version of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator could change the [...]

5Words for May 13th, 2009

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

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Sorry, Twitter, you goofed here… Twitter tweaks @replies, dumbs down. Firefox: beating IE in 2013? Twitter vs. Fake Kanye West. Google’s Japanese photos: take two! Verizon tippytoes out of landlines. Microsoft patches up PowerPoint holes. Intel is out $1.45 billion. Early Windows Mobile 7 details?

Hijacking a User’s Default Browser is Never Acceptable. Repeat, Never.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

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The standard “Express” installation of the Windows 7 RC does something I thought software had stopped doing years ago: If you upgrade from a previous version of Windows, and choose the “Express” option when installing, your default browser will be changed to Internet Explorer. Needless to say, this behavior has immediately sparked complaints from Mozilla and [...]

IE 8.1 Leaks, Microsoft Cozies Up to Firefox

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

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[UPDATE FROM HARRY: Smashing Magazine--which I like--has a wacky sense of humor. And maybe it's April Fools Day where it is, or close enough.] Builds of IE 8.1 have leaked out into the wild, and while it is not going to be a release that users will notice much difference visually, underneath the hood significant changes have [...]

IE Users Seem to be Returning to the Familiar

Monday, March 23, 2009

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With the launch of IE8 on Thursday, a fairly decent chunk of the Web surfing populace at least tried out Microsoft’s latest and greatest. However, it appears many have made the decision to downgrade to IE7. While IE8 reached a high of 2.6% over the weekend, it has since fallen nearly a half a percentage [...]

5Words for March 23rd, 2009

Monday, March 23, 2009

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Happy Monday, everybody. Reading material: Wow, they still make mainframes? White House sides with RIAA. Hulu adds 10 million viewers. Intel chip flaw is theoretical. New 17-inch iMac: Old! The art of laptop stickers. Samsung unveils 11-hour netbook. IE 8: Losing users. Already! Dell cancels phone…buys Palm? The personal supercomputer is imminent. September: an Acer Android phone? Apple caters to business buyers.

Attention: Everybody. Your Browser is Insecure. Deal With It.

Friday, March 20, 2009

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Yesterday’s most significant browser-related event wasn’t the release of Internet Explorer 8–it was the upshot of day one of the Pwn2Own browser-hacking contest at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The competition offered cash and hardware incentives to attendees who could exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome, Firefox, IE 8, and Safari. The results? Chrome [...]

IE 8 Web Slices: Great Idea! Mediocre Execution!

Thursday, March 19, 2009

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Now that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 has officially launched, I wanted to take a look at the final incarnation of what may be the browser’s most strikingly new feature: Web Slices, which let you add buttons to your Favorites bar that provide little snippets of Web content when you click them. Here, for instance, is [...]

Internet Explorer 8 Arriving on Thursday

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

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Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has published a lengthy review of Internet Explorer 8 that says the final version of Microsoft’s new browser will be available for downloading on Thursday at noon ET. Walt likes it quite a bit, except for the fact that he found it slow in some instances. (He did [...]

Microsoft Does Its Own Browser Benchmarking

Thursday, March 12, 2009

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In recent months, the hottest topic in the world of Web browsing has been speed. Apple says its beta version of Safari 4 is the world’s fastest browser. The first thing Google tells you about Chrome is that it’s “faster.” Better performance is a key feature in Mozilla’s upcoming Firefox 3.5. Opera says that its [...]

5Words for March 4th, 2009

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

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San Francisco’s too rainy today: Apple layoffs? Supposedly not true. Will Washington prohibit iPhone exclusivity? Windows 7 for Netbooks: dicey? Disney might take on iTunes. Nvidia reaps Mac desktop windfall. IE: Nukable from Windows 7. Hackers mock Apple’s Safari browser. Office 14 beta? Fairly soon. Obscure, good Microsoft Web services. Sprint’s Treo Pro: March 15th. Julius Genachowski tapped for FCC. California legislator: blur Google Earth!

One Windows. Multiple Browsers. Bundled. I Like It!

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

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Once again, those wacky Europeans are making life difficult for Microsoft. A site called EurActive is reporting that Microsoft’s ongoing antitrust tussle with the European Commission will result in the company being forced to help European Windows users opt for a browser that isn’t Internet Explorer. The details are yet to be worked out–the OS [...]

Microsoft Research Envisions Leap in Browser Security with “Gazelle”

Monday, February 23, 2009

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Microsoft Research has re-imagined the Web browser to include its own operating system. In a technical report published on February 19, researchers argued that a radical change in browser architecture is necessary, because Web sites have evolved from static documents into dynamic Web applications that draw content from multiple sources. Their proposed solution is a browser, [...]

Browsers: More Important Than Ever. Also More Boring.

Friday, February 6, 2009

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[Note: This item first appeared in Technologizer's T-Week newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.] This piece was inspired by spending the past few days using the RC1 version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8. But it’s really a sequel-of-sorts to a blog post I wrote for PC World back in March of last year, when the [...]