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SAN FRANCISCO–Just days after launching Internet Explorer 8 in March 2009, Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch wrote a memo about what the company really needed to do with the next version of its browser. “A browser is only as good as the underlying operating system,” Hachamovitch said in an e-mail to the Internet Explorer team and others [...]

Google on Wednesday introduced a faster version of its search engine called Google Instant that begins displaying results as soon as users type in queries. According to the company, the feature shaves off 2 to 5 seconds from user searches since it brings up results nearly as fast as it does for its auto-suggest feature. [...]

Google’s Chrome 6 is 17 percent faster than the version it replaced, putting it in a virtual dead heat with the speed leaders, Opera and Safari, according to benchmark scores. When Google celebrated the second anniversary of Chrome’s launch last week, Brian Rakowski, the browser’s director of product management, said: “A lot of things have [...]

Internet Explorer’s growth slowed once again, and Chrome shook off its slump in August, new statistics show. Although Microsoft made progress in its goal to exterminate IE6 in favor of IE8′s more modern and secure design, Internet Explorer overall slipped from 60.7 percent to 60.4 percent of global usage, as measured by Net Applications. Chrome [...]

Microsoft is getting close to releasing a beta version of Internet Explorer 9–the company’s latest bid to regain lost ground in the browser market. At last month’s financial analyst meeting, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner casually mentioned that the beta would be coming in September. Microsoft has already shown the revamped IE9 engine through a [...]

The fourth and final developer’s preview of Internet Explorer 9 was released on Wednesday, with significant updates to standards compliance and rendering speed, according to Microsoft. Microsoft said in a blog post that the developer’s previews had been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, indicating that despite Internet Explorer’s plummeting market share over the past [...]

After years of losing ground to Firefox and other rivals, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser posted its second consecutive monthly gain in share, according to a market researcher. For July, Internet Explorer snagged 60.74 percent market share, according to Netmarketshare. That’s up from 60.32 percent share in June and up nearly a full percentage point since [...]

Internet Explorer 8, with the help of its SmartScreen Filter, has “blocked 1 billion attempts to download malware,” Microsoft product manager James Pratt said in a blog post Friday. The SmartScreen Filter evaluates URLs and their associated servers. If the software recognizes a server as containing malicious content, it displays a warning, saying it’s unsafe [...]

Microsoft has launched a new self-support service for Windows XP and Vista users that relies on technology baked into Windows 7. The combination of desktop client and back-end service gives users of older versions of Windows some of the same functionality that only Windows 7 provides by default, Lori Brownell, Microsoft’s general manager of product [...]

A delayed flight didn’t stop Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Weinmann from scoring a cool $15,000, a brand-new iPhone, and a trip to Las Vegas at the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest in Vancouver on Wednesday. The security researchers developed an undisclosed attack on the iPhone’s mobile Safari browser to get access to a phone and then [...]