We’re not going to follow this manically but it’s worth checking in on how much-hyped Google Chrome is doing since its Sept. 2 launch. Net Applications puts use eight days in at roughly 1 percent of surfers, compared with 0.74 percent share for Opera in August, according to NewsFactor.com.

Or for another comparison, IE 8 beta 2 had 0.34 percent use on Wednesday. Firefox, which recently upgraded was at 19.73 percent. What does it mean? Nothing really except that Google with its wide reach can get from zero to 1 percent and higher when it wants. (That reach would be one of the aspects the Department of Justice is exploring now.) Can it keep share and keep building?

I stopped my first trial after a few video crashes and will wait a while before giving it another shot. Chrome has a lot of appeal for those who want fast loading and the Google brand. But, as Yahoo’s ( NSDQ: YHOO) David Filo mentioned earlier today, Google has had mixed success.

Read more @ washingtonpost.com

From The Washington Post.

Taking on Blackberry with corporate email 

Nokia has extended Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support to all of its S60 mobile phones.

The move is set to help the Finnish mobile maker renew its battle for corporate email against the likes of Blackberry, which recently upped its share of the smartphone market.

Nokia also revealed that Mail for Exchange will be available as standard in all new Eseries and Nseries devices.

Provided the company is running an Exchange email server, this will allow workers to freely access their business email, calendar, contacts, tasks and company directory over a secure connection.

Read more @ theinquirer.net

From The Inquirer.

Google has released the very first beta of their new web browser, Google Chrome. Chrome is a browser that, for now at least, is focused on offering a full browsing experience within a minimalistic user interface. To skip past the P.R. phrasing, Google Chrome is designed to be simple to use without sacrificing any of the features required for daily web browsing.
To get a little more in depth, Google Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser, named Webkit. In recent history, the developers of Webkit have made great strides in creating what is, as of today, the fastest browser engine in terms of rendering speed. Google Chrome, currently version 0.2.149.27, seems to use a slightly older build of Webkit (version 525.13, to be precise), however, so some of the recent Webkit development gains will not have made it into the first release of the browser.
Other features of Chrome include a dynamic tab system which allows you to drag and drop tabs inside and outside of the browser window, an "incognito mode" in which the sites you visit are not added to your browsing history, and a feature similar to Opera’s Speed Dial, in which you are presented with your nine most visited websites, in thumbnail form, when opening a new tab.
If you wish to give Google Chrome a try, click the download link below. It’s an early beta, though, so don’t expect it to be perfect.

Link: Google Chrome
Download: Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 if installer fails, then use this.
Screenshot: View

Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.

The Mountain View-based company took the unusual step of announcing its latest product on the Labor Day holiday after it prematurely sent out a comic book drawn up to herald the new browser’s arrival.

The free browser, called "Chrome," is supposed to be available for downloading Tuesday in more than 100 countries for computers running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Google said it’s still working on versions compatible with Apple Inc.’s Mac computer and the Linux operating system.

read more @ sfgate.com

Windows Live Hotmail Wave 3 will be launched shortly. Whats new !?
Faster than ever. It’ll be up to 70 percent faster to sign in and see your e-mail. Of course, along with more speed, you’ll get powerful technology that deflects spam and helps protect you against viruses and scams.
Simpler, cleaner design. We’re combining the classic and full versions of Hotmail, so you get access to everything Hotmail has to offer. The reading pane will let you check out your e-mail without having to open it up.
Put more you in your e-mail. New themes and colors will let you design the look of your inbox, so your personality can really shine through.
Closer to your contacts. Just start typing in the "To" line and you’ll get a choice of e-mail contacts that most closely match what you’ve typed. Plus, it’ll be even easier to e-mail groups of people.

With every intention of evening up the score with Firefox 3, Microsoft opened up its public beta process for the first edition of IE8 to contain a full list of new features. Beta 1 (which was launched back in March) concentrated on making the engine work and rendering pages properly; now it’s Beta 2’s turn to dazzle the public.

"We looked very hard at how people really browse the Web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists," reads a blog post from IE General Manager Dean Hatchamovitch this afternoon.

To that end, IE8 will work to "one-up" Firefox in a number of regards, including a completely revised, color-coded tab bar that resembles something that’s only in the "laboratory" stage at Mozilla. "IE8…takes into account that there are often relationships between new tabs that users open, and the browser can make it a lot easier to figure out which tabs go with which," Hatchamovitch wrote.

Full story @ betanews.com

Download links: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx

Google has commented on our IE8 Beta 1 improvements, and we’ve made IE8 even faster since then. Some of the tests we have done show pure JScript performance improvements up to 2.5 times. We also measured the performance gains on common Gmail operations, like loading the inbox (34%), opening a conversation (45%) and opening a thread (27%) compared to IE7. Thus far, tweaks to the JScript engine have contributed to improve IE8’s performance on the SunSpider benchmarking suite by 400% compared to IE7.
The second area in which we are invested heavily in IE8 is in improvements to our memory usage. To date we have fixed just under 400 separate memory leaks in Internet Explorer. For users, these changes reduce the amount of memory consumed by IE, improve our startup times, speed up navigating between pages, and help IE remain stable for longer periods of time. As we started building IE8 it was clear that we could do more to take advantage of the increasing prevalence of high bandwidth connections. Two key improvements we made with IE8 were to unblock downloads in the presence of external scripts and to increase the number of parallel connections per server that we support.

View: Full Story at IEBlog

Last week Mozilla Labs, the R&D arm of the open-source browser maker, launched the Mozilla Labs Concept Series -– an open initiative to “explore and design future directions for the Web.” As Mozilla Labs VP Chris Beard told me, “we’ve been very good at recruiting and engaging tech collaborators, but our design efforts have been more haphazard.” The goal of the Concept Series is to bring more people and ideas into the discussion. He stressed that it is not an effort to “open-source design,” saying that he didn’t believe in “design by committee,” but that in the ideation phase, more ideas is better. In order to lower the barrier to entry, the initiative welcomes interactive prototypes, mock-ups, sketches, or even just ideas submitted without any visuals.

To kick off the project, Mozilla posted a three-part series of videos that imagined a Web browser of the future.

The videos and the hyper-interactive concept they captured – called Aurora — were created by the Web design firm Adaptive Path, one of the smartest working in the space. Sometime I&D columnist and Adaptive Path co-founder Jesse James Garret led the Aurora design. If you have any interest in Web design or innovation, you should watch the videos, which have sparked debate. (See here and here).

Read more @ businessweek.com

This week at the Black Hat Security Conference two security researchers will discuss their findings which could completely bring Windows Vista to its knees.

Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. have discovered a technique that can be used to bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft built into Windows Vista. These new methods have been used to get around Vista’s Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by loading malicious content through an active web browser. The researchers were able to load whatever content they wanted into any location they wished on a user’s machine using a variety of scripting languages, such as Java, ActiveX and even .NET objects. This feat was achieved by taking advantage of the way that Internet Explorer (and other browsers) handle active scripting in the Operating System.

While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren’t based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista’s fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, "the genius of this is that it’s completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over."

Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Or exactly what the company president said at the morning meeting?
Well, you’re not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life.
This week, the company unveiled software that uses images, sounds and text recorded on everyday mobile devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and events. Dubbed Pensieve, the software organizes bits of collected information, stores them and then helps the user extract them later on.

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