You know, it’s like we’re experiencing deja vu all over again. Microsoft is no stranger to problems concerning holding a monopoly and not giving consumers suitable alternatives. Back in 2009, Microsoft came to an agreement with the European Commission that it would provide Windows users with the ability to choose between multiple web browsers instead of automatically defaulting to Internet Explorer.

And they did, until the Windows 7 Service Pack was released in May 2011. With that Service Pack, Windows users were once again left with Internet Explorer as the default web browser out of the box. This went against the agreement that Microsoft had with the EU. Now the European Commission has fined Microsoft for the cool sum of $731 million.

“A failure to comply,” writes Commission vice-president Joaquin Almunia, “is a very serious infringement that must be sanctioned accordingly.” Microsoft says that it will not appeal the verdict and will just pay the fine. They “take full responsibility,” saying the “oversight” was due to a “technical error” and not because they just really want everyone to use IE.

[Source]

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This comes by way of Statcounter and it looks at the week of May 14 to May 20, 2012. During that time period, Chrome had a higher traffic share than IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or any other web browser. More tech-savvy people have a higher likelihood of using Chrome, but regular consumers still dominate the market of course.

In North America, Internet Explorer (37%) is still the leading browser (Chrome has 26%). The same can be said in Asia where IE has over 50% in Japan and nearly three-quarters in China and South Korea. IE continues its massive lead in Oceania too, whereas Firefox is the leader in Europe. So, where is Chrome making up its numbers? As it turns out, South America is where it’s at: Chrome has nearly a 50% market share there and along with incremental growth everywhere else, that was enough to dethrone Microsoft’s browser.

[Source]

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The Windows Phone has already made a few significant alterations to Internet Explorer 9 Mobile which will have the Mango browser. They located the address bar to the bottom part of the screen, and this bold move had caused some commotions among early adopters.

Mango: What has changed?

Mango, which is also known as the Windows Phone 7.5, has also changed. It is now sharing its engine with the IE 9, the advanced PC browser of the Microsoft Company. With this, the user can now experience a faster and smoother web-based video and animation because Mango has the ability to tap the phone’s built-in graphics processor. A speedier JavaScript engine is also featured in Mango to make sure that the user will have a great time surfing the net.

The Quest for Minimal Browser

Team behind the development of the Mango’s updated version is planning to create a faster and minimal browser that would get rid of any extraneous visuals on the smartphone’s interface. This is because they believe that too much of something can be bad, and too many things on the screen will just distract the user.

A simple and clean interface will be created and promoted by the team in order to give users faster access to the websites that they usually visit. Of course, this is not really an easy task when we’re talking about smartphones. Unlike a desktop computer which has a lot of screen real estate, a mouse and a keyboard which lets you make precise clicks and do some shortcuts, a smartphone has a smaller screen and it does not have a mouse. The challenge lies in making the surfing experience easier and more accessible given the concrete situation of phones.

The Browser that people use

The team also wanted to find out which buttons they need to get rid of on smartphones, and so they reviewed the anonymous usage data from Windows Phone owners which were voluntarily submitted to them. The address bar was the browser that is most frequently used on the phone because it also serves as a search box.

The Results

Oftentimes, developers suffer from the dilemma of choosing between design and functionality. Tradeoffs are often involved in the process, and so the makers of the IE 9 decided to move the address bar at the screen bottom and make the tabs and favorite buttons into a menu option. The Refresh/Stop button was also made bigger to make it easier to tap. Finally, the phone status info like signal strength, battery life indicator and many more were hidden to give the user a freer browsing experience.

[via Windows Blog]

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Google has long prided themselves on having the best spelling corrector of any search engine, but when the same results started popping up at the top of misspelled Bing searches as on their own site, Google engineers started growing suspicious.

To figure out exactly what was going on, Google used a bit of code to manually alter their search algorithm, matching a few jumbles of letters to a couple of obscure or unrelated websites.

The results tell all: Microsoft uses Internet Explorer to monitor what users search for on Google, the results they choose, and uses that data to refine Bing’s searches.

In a statement to Search Engine Land, Stefan Weitz, the director of Microsoft’s Bing search engine seems to confirm the allegation:

“As you might imagine, we use multiple signals and approaches when we think about ranking, but like the rest of the players in this industry, we’re not going to go deep and detailed in how we do it. Clearly, the overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search, so we can guess at the best and most relevant answer to a given query.

“Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites. This “Google experiment” seems like a hack to confuse and manipulate some of these signals.”

While it’s not technically illegal and it’s definitely not a far throw from some of Microsoft’s actions in the past, Google engineers say it’s not fair.

“It’s cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work,” says Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “I don’t know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating. Another analogy is that it’s like running a marathon and carrying someone else on your back, who jumps off just before the finish line.”

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