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03 March 2010 Filed under Industry News
As of 1st March 2010, Microsoft are rolling out an update providing a choice of web browsers for installations of Windows XP, Vista and 7 in Europe
This follows a legal agreement between Microsoft and the European Commission regarding competition law. Microsoft committed in December to use the Windows Update service to present a browser choice screen for any user in Europe using one of the above systems and who have Internet Explorer set as the default browser
The Browser Choice Screen (originally called "Browser Ballot") offers 12 browser options, including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera, and a number of smaller market share browsers using variations of the rendering engines of the major players. And of course, IE 8 is an option
Part of the agreement is that the browsers will be shown in random order.
How much difference this will make to Internet Explorer's market share remains to be seen, but one feature of the update service is that users can install multiple browsers, so there are benefits for end users as well as alternative browser manufacturers.
More information:
Update 5th March:
The smaller browser vendors represented are not happy about the fact that users have to scroll to see their browser offerings. By default only the big five browsers are shown (albeit in random order), and users have to scroll to the right to see the remaining seven options.
Six of the seven smaller browser makers have signed a petition requesting that more could be done to indicate to users that these additional options are available.
BBC News: Browser makers demand screen time
22 February 2010 Filed under Google | Industry News
Google Buzz, the internet giant's latest foray into the websphere, is a social networking application widely touted as a contender to the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
Launched on 9th February, the service caused outrage amongst Gmail users who were automatically allocated "friends" based on people they emailed regularly, and in many cases the default profile settings allowed anybody to see who Gmail users corresponded with.
The company responded quickly with changes to the application, including methods to placate those with privacy concerns, but many critics are still unimpressed, and it's reported that a class-action lawsuit has been filed in California.
At the time of launch, Gmail had over 170 million users.
Google Buzz Raises a Stink Far and Wide
http://www.enterprise-security-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=71743
Google Buzz 'breaks privacy laws' says watchdog
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8519314.stm
Gmail Users Sue Google for Google Buzz Launch
http://www.kokeytechnology.com/google/google-gmail/gmail-users-sue-google-for-google-buzz-launch/
11 February 2010 Filed under Google | SEO
Towards the end of 2009, Google announced that the speed of web page loading was likely to become a scoring factor in the search engine's ranking of pages - the slower a page was to load, the more negative impact it could have on your page's ability to rank well.
There's been a lot of discussion since then as to how important this is going to be, and recently on Google's YouTube Webmaster Central Channel, Matt explains how relevant page speed might be compared to other factors:
10 February 2010 Filed under Google
On their Official Google Enterprise Blog, Google announced last week that they intend to begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 from March 1 2010, beginning with Google Docs and Google Sites:
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/modern-browsers-for-modern-applications.html
Google recently suffered a targeted attack on its Gmail infrastructure, reportedly from China, exploiting a flaw in IE.
Microsoft are continuing support for IE6 until 2014. Many corporate infrastructures are locked into older browser versions due to the huge cost implications of upgrading their intranet applications.
YouTube also intends to phase out support soon, and visitors accessing the site with older versions of certain browsers may see the following banner at the top of the page:
At the time of writing, Internet Explorer 8 is the current version. It becomes time-consuming and expensive to maintain support for older browsers, and here at RO Web Solutions we are phasing out support for IE6 too. Typically our sites will render quite well in IE6 but there may be some small differences in appearance and behaviour. If IE6 compatibility is required then we can of course offer this support for an additional fee.