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Recently, Net applications released their January browser market share report and it appears that Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) version 8 now has a 22.37% usage share, making it the most-used browser on the planet. (Source: netmarketshare.com ) ... Another report by Microsoft's Windows Team Blog has confirmed similar results, stating that IE8 now has 25.6% market share across all operating systems (OS) on a worldwide-weighted usage share basis, making it the most popular browser of choice worldwide. (Source: windowsteamblog.com ) Either way, Internet Explorer 8 is clearly leading the pack. ... (view more)

China has flat-out denied any involvement in recent hacking attacks on Google . China also said its regulation of Internet access and content is justifiable and fair. Google's Gmail email servers recently came under attack. It's speculated that ... hackers sent email to targets containing links to websites which contained a specially-crafted exploit in order to bypass Operating System security. Chinese Deny Google Attack There's no evidence to indicate who carried out the attacks. However, because the victims are believed to have included political activists, suspicion fell upon the Chinese ... (view more)

Microsoft has made its next move against competitor Google by publicly announcing that it will remove the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of logged searches from its servers after 6 months of storage. Back in September of 2008, search engine ... goliath Google announced it would begin anonymizing IP addresses logged in its servers after nine months, a reduction by half from its previous 18. Cookies would also be removed after this time. Google Critics: Time Frame Still Not Enough Privacy advocates have criticized Google for not doing enough, since the company only bothers to remove the last of ... (view more)

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says his company will not pull its operations out of China. The issue arose after Google said it could be forced to leave the country after deciding to no longer censor website results. Ballmer did not discuss the ... censorship issue directly, but told CNBC that "We've been quite clear that we're going to operate in China." He added that "I don't understand how [pulling out] helps us and I don't understand how that helps China." (Source: washingtonpost.com ) Questioned about recent hacking attacks on Google that appear to have originated in China and may have prompted ... (view more)

Microsoft has uncharacteristically spoken out against Google over the two firms' free online storage offers. The comments follow Google's announcement that it is extending the size and type of files eligible for free back-up. To date, users of ... Google Docs had been severely limited in the amount of data they could store online. Storage could only be used for specific types of document file, namely: word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files. Free Google Docs Storage Balloons to 1GB The firm now says users will be allowed 1GB of free storage, with extra space available for 25 cents per ... (view more)

Google has made a formal and public apology to Chinese authors after including their works in its book search project without permission. It's a striking contrast to the way the firm responded to similar complaints in the United States and Europe. ... Google Book Search involves scanning books with optical character recognition so that the text can be searched. The firm argues that this is simply to make it easier for users to find information in books and that they are limited to seeing the relevant pages rather than it being a free way to read an entire book. The firm has consistently ... (view more)

Small Canadian companies are having big success against even bigger opponents of late. Just a week after a U.S. judge confirmed Toronto tech firm i4i's claim against Microsoft's use of XML technology in Word, an Oakville, Ontario company has won its ... domain name case against search giant Google. For those who've missed the news, Microsoft last week lost its appeal over an August decision that forced it to remove XML functions in its very popular Word, a big part of Microsoft Office. On the winning side was small Toronto-based i4i; the court decision means Microsoft must remove the conflicting ... (view more)

Google makes tens of billions of dollars each year through advertising sales. Yet it has now allowed independent developers to produce tools which block ads from appearing on pages viewed with its Chrome browser. Since last month, the latest beta ... edition of Chrome has been able to run extensions, third-party tools which offer functions similar to those available for open-source browser Firefox (where they are known as add-ons). The current plan is to keep the extensions in the next full release of Chrome. Programmer, Student Create Ad Blocker An independent programmer from Athens, Georgia and ... (view more)

Australia's federal government has announced that it is proceeding with controversial plans to censor the Internet after government-commissioned trials found that using a blacklist of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down web use. ... Critics, including Google , Electronic Frontiers Australia and Greens communications argue that the censorship policy is fundamentally flawed and the trial results are not surprising. Stephen Conroy, Australia's Communications Minister, will introduce legislation just before next year's elections designed to force ISPs to block a blacklist of refused ... (view more)

Reports suggest Google will soon unveil its own smartphone running Google's own Android operating system. However, analysts are split on how significant the move is and whether it will have a major impact on the market. Rumors of a "Google-phone" ... have been rampant ever since the company launched its open-source operating system Android, which now appears on a growing number of handsets, most prominently Motorola's Droid phone. Blog Posting Drops Strong Hints Officially, the firm has only said "We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative ... (view more)