It’s bad news for Microsoft elsewhere as well with Bing only showing up as 4% of the total search engine market, or just under 11% when you also factor in the Bing-powered Yahoo! as well.  Even so those are terrible numbers for a search engine that’s been consistently losing money for the parent company.

Bing do even worse when it comes to mobile search with just 1.1% of the market and Google storming away with over 90% of the market.  This will be because Microsoft has failed to make inroads with its Windows Phone operating system and because both the iPad and Android mobile devices use Google’s search engine by default.

Elsewhere there has been little change.  Windows still has over 90% of the desktop market share with Apple climbing slightly to 6.9% and Linux holding steady at 1.2%.  With tablets the numbers reflect Apple’s huge lead over the competition with 61.6% percent of all tablets an iPad and over 62% of all mobile browsers their Safari (I can only assume there’s some margin for error with the results).

It is intersting in the mobile operating system share figures to see an unexpected Java ME sitting with 12.8% of the market while Nokia’s Symbian OS sits hovering just above oblivion with 3.5%.  Windows Phone doesn’t even make the top four.

The downward progression of IE in market share doesn’t seem to see and end.  Clearly Microsoft have plans to halt this with the new in-built Metro version of the browser in Windows 8, but how successful this strategy will be remains to be seen.

They praise Internet Explorer’s SmartScreen filter for protecting users against significantly more social malware than any other current browser, and by the looks of the chart below this is by some significant margin.

In their report the firm describe socially-engineered malware as…

Socially-engineered malware attacks pose a significant risk to individuals and organizations by threatening to compromise, damage, or acquire sensitive personal and corporate information; statistics from 2008 – 2010 show that this trend is increasing at a rapid rate. According to a recent study by AVG, users are four times more likely to be tricked into downloading malware than be compromised by an exploit; criminals continue to increase their use of malware as a cybercrime attack vector. Anti-virus researchers report detecting between 15,000 and 50,000 new malicious programs per day, Kaspersky Lab has even reported detecting up to “millions per month.”

They go on to describe IE’s SmartScreen filter as…

The SmartScreen Filter protection offered by Windows Internet Explorer 9 has two components: URL Reputation, which is included in IE8 and Application Reputation, which is new to IE9. IE9 caught an exceptional 92% of the live threats with SmartScreen URL reputation, and an additional 8% with Application Reputation. IE9 with SmartScreen offers the best protection of any browser against socially engineered malware. Protection against malware targeting European users matched our broader findings from the Q3 2010 global test.

The results are quite something, and other browser makers, Apple, Mozilla and Google will no doubt fight back rigorously with strong statements that their browsers are every bit as safe and secure as Internet Explorer, if not more so.

In the tests though, Internet Explorer 8, the previous generation of Microsoft’s browser, caught 90% of all live threats with IE9 catching 92% and reaching 100% of all threats when the known reputation of applications was factored in.

This is compared to the other browsers.  Apple’s Safari caught just 13% of live threats, Mozilla FIrefox 4 also caught 13% which had dropped from the 19% the browser caught in the same tests last year.  Opera 11 caught only 5% of all threats and Google’s Chrome browser caught, again, just 13% of all live threats.

StartScreen is not a widely talked about feature of Microsoft’s browser.  The company describes it as…

a feature in Internet Explorer that helps detect phishing websites. SmartScreen Filter can also help protect you from downloading or installing malware (malicious software).

They say that is “analyses web pages” as you visit them to “determine iof they have any characteristics that might be suspicious”, “checks the sites you visit against a dynamic list of reported phishing sites and malicious software sites” and “checks files you download from the web against a list of reported malicious software sites and programs known to be unsafe.”

This feature though is only as good as the people who keep the information up to date, which means that a 92% success rate today might not mean you’ll get that tomorrow.

Every week, new social malware is being discovered that is trying to trick users into installing it and surrendering personal information such as their credit card details with ever increasing believability.  The recent attacks on Apple Mac users by Mac Defender is an example of just how convincing this software can be.

The weak link with malware and viruses will always be the user, as it will always be this person who has to click or select something in order for malware to infect their PC.  It’s commonly said that the only safe PC is one that’s still in the box and has never been switched on.

The first demonstration of the new browser, which adds support for CSS Gradients, CSS3 Flexible Box Layout and more, was seen at the company’s MIX conference only today, running in an ARM processor.

The news, which was broken by Engadget, seems to back up my own speculation that the next version of Windows will run happily, though probably a bit slowly, on a 1GHz processor.

It’s exciting news for the tech community as nobody was really expecting any live demos of Windows 8 until the autumn, and certainly not news already about the next version of Internet Explorer.

In a statement on their website they said…

The Chrome team is happy to announce our latest Stable release, 8.0.552.215.  In addition to the over 800 bug fixes and stability improvements, Chrome 8 now contains a built in PDF viewer that is secured in Chrome’s sandbox.  As always, it also contains our latest security fixes, listed below.  This release will also be posted to the Beta Channel.

The browser is available for download at www.google.com/chrome and is the company’s latest response to Microsoft’s forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 which, so far, is being hailed by some as where the bar for future web browsers will be set.

That said, Google’s Chrome browser is still gaining market share and some people are predicting that it will overtake Mozilla Firefox as the alternative browser of choice some time in 2011 of 2012.  This is a huge achievement for Google and shows just how popular the lightweight and fast browser model is (which is no doubt why Microsoft copied it for IE9).

Apparently there are new features including a download speed indicator for the download manager and there are some speed and general performance enhancements as well.

This is still beta software and, more importantly, is not an official release from Microsoft.  Not only does this mean that installing or running it could cause your computer to become unstable, you can guarantee that shortly after criminal gangs read about its leak, a malware loaded version will be on torrent sites everywhere.

As always we caution against running beta software and its clear that this release doesn’t offer much over the official beta that is available from www.beautyoftheweb.com.

However, IE 9 is clearly a very polished browser and nearing completion.  It should not be very long now before we will be able to report the final release.

Bit9′s CEO, Harry Sverdlove said “A variety of vulnerability types – including buffer-overflow and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities – impacted these applications.  Some exploits of vulnerabilities could allow attacks to compromise the user’s desktop entirely and perhaps pose a risk for the entire organization. A list like the annual ‘Dirty Dozen’ highlights trends and the need to make sure software is kept updated.

The biggest surprise is that Google’s Chrome browser tops the vulnerabilities list with 76.  Safari and Firefox also scored badly with 60 and 51 respectively.  Conversely, Internet Explorer had only 32.  The complete list is below.

1. Google Chrome – 76
2. Apple Safari – 60
3. Microsoft Office – 57
4. Adobe Acrobat – 54
5. Mozilla Firefox – 51
6. Sun JDK – 36
7. Adobe Shockwave Player – 35
8. Microsoft Internet Explorer – 32
9. RealNetworks RealPlayer – 14
10. Apple Webkit – 9
11. Adobe Flash Player – 8
12. Apple Quicktime and Opera Web browser (tied) – 6

This will obviously be inflammatory news to anyone who doesn’t like Internet Explorer (though recently versions of the browser cannot be compared to IE6) and there will people who will point to all the ‘undiscovered’ vulnerabilities in the browser.

However it pans out over time, it’s clear that Microsoft’s recent strategies are paying dividends for the company in terms of helping increase their reputation around the world.  It will be interesting to see how IE9 stacks up against the other browsers in 12 months time.

Recently though the company has taken a more pragmatic approach and has moved, slowly admittedly, towards full standards compliance.  With their next browser, Internet Explorer 9, they’ve said it will be fully compliant and recent tests from the W3C organisation certainly bear this out.

The figures, reported today by Engadget, put IE9 slightly ahead of the next best browsers for full compliance with the new web standard.  Admittedly the top three browsers are all betas and so we can expect these figures to move, sharply and quickly, but for now it’s an excellent sign.

Internet Explorer has lost significant market share in recent years after the cataclysmic calamity that was IE6 (I try and find stronger and more colourful adjectives every time I mention the god-awful thing).  Now Microsoft are desperate to grab some market share back and, by all accounts, IE9 could do it through a combination of complete standards compliance and new features that people actually want and will use.

We’ll keep you informed about how this picture changes at gHacks.  The new HTML5 browsers are all due out in 2011 and it will be a very interesting year indeed for the web that we’ve all come to know and love.

Microsoft has now confirmed that they started working on Internet Explorer 9 and it seems that they have big plans for this browser. Three demo videos have been released by Channel 9 that show some of the Internet Explorer 9 developers showcasing some of the improvements that they already build into the web browser. The Sunspider Javascript benchmark comparison looks very interesting as the new Internet Explorer 9 JavaScript engine closes the gap to Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 to about 100 ms.

Standards and Interoperability

JavaScript performance:

Surfing On The GPU

The most interesting changes that have been announced so far:

• New Javascript engine
• GPU enhanced page rendering
• Better interoperability and web standards support

It is interesting that Microsoft is giving the public a chance to view the progress that they are making. They already changed their strategy during the Windows 7 development phase where they created blogs, videos and other means of showcasing the development progress and features to the public.

Users who want to test it can visit the Drupal User Experience website and start playing the first video on the page. They will notice that the cursor will start to disappear for short intervals on all tabs that are open in Firefox. Tests with other web browsers revealed that some show like Opera and Internet Explorer show the same behavior while others like the Google browser Google Chrome seems to be immune and show the cursor all the time.

The problem persists even after stopping the playback of the video in question. One solution is to close the tab that contains the website with the Flickr video which stopped the mouse cursor from disappearing in Firefox. Another solution offered by Roman was to block the Flickr video script with the Firefox add-on NoScript.

Support has been added for the following languages:

Internet Explorer 8 MUI pack applicable to Windows XP x86 and Windows Server 2003 x86 for the following languages –

* Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Hong Kong), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovenian, Slovakian, Thai

Internet Explorer 8 MUI pack applicable to Windows Server 2003 x64 and Windows XP x64 PRO for the following languages –

* Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese (Brazil)

Downloads are available for..

• Windows XP 32-bit
• Windows XP 64-bit
• Windows Server 2003 32-bit
• Windows Server 2003 64-bit

via IEBlog

Not everything is fine and shiny though. There are a few annoyances that are especially noticed by users who work with other web browsers as well. Listed below are the top 4 Internet Explorer 8 annoyances from a user’s point of view:

1. Internet Explorer 8 toolbars

The Internet Explorer 8 take up lots of screen estate. It is possible to hide toolbars to decrease the space requirements. The annoying aspect here is that it is however not possible to combine toolbars. Users of the Firefox web browser for example can merge all toolbars into one while Internet Explorer 8 users sit there with lots of blank screen estate because of this. Hiding the toolbars might work for some Internet Explorer users but most would probably like one-click access to their favorites and access to the Internet Explorer 8 menu.

2. Webslices and Accelerators

The idea behind these two features that have been introduced in Internet Explorer 8 is to provide users with quicker access to information. The reality shows that barely any new add-ons are created for Internet Explorer 8. The add-ons gallery is everything but filled to the brim with add-ons and it seems that most are basic search add-ons that allow users to search a specific site in Internet Explorer 8. This is a feature that is not being used by many Internet Explorer 8 users. (check Internet Explorer 8 Add-ons for some good ones)

3. Creating shortcuts, dragging and dropping elements

If you want to create a page shortcut on the computer desktop you only need to right-click the page in Internet Explorer 8 and select Create Shortcut. The annoying thing is that Internet Explorer 8 will always display a confirmation dialog “Do you want to put a shortcut to this website on your desktop”. That’s practically the same annoyance that game developers like to use when exiting their games. You click on Exit Game and they display a confirmation dialog “do you really want to exit the game?”.

The same is true for dragging and dropping elements to the computer system. It is for example possible to drag images from the web browser to the computer desktop. Internet Explorer 8 will display a confirmation dialog as well asking the user to confirm the action.

This could easily be solved by a set of advanced configuration settings where experienced (or annoyed) users could disable those confirmation dialogs.

4. RSS Feeds

All popular web browsers display a RSS feed indicator in the address bar except for Internet Explorer 8. The web browser uses an icon in the command bar that gives access to RSS feeds which is not helpful if the user has set the command toolbar to hidden or does not pay attention to it. It also happens that some icons do not appear in the command toolbar but have to be accessed by clicking on the down arrow on the right of it which indicates that there are more items in the toolbar.

Feel free to add any annoyance that you have encountered while using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8.

Expired Cookies Cleaner is a free portable application for the Windows operating system that can remove the traces of expired cookies effectively. It will automatically scan the computer system and delete expired cookies from it. The software will also optimize the files that store cookies on the system. These files usually contain expired and valid cookies. The expired cookie remover will delete the expired cookies and optimize the storage space of the remaining cookies.

The software will list every expired cookie that it found in a list. It will furthermore display statistics about the amounts of the files and cookies that were found on the computer system, the number of cookies that have been removed, the number of optimized files plus the time it took to complete the process.

Customize Google for Internet Explorer is a similar add-on for Microsoft’s web browser. The current set of options is not as vast as those in its Firefox counterpart though which can largely be attributed to the early build number of the add-on. The Internet Explorer add-on can be started from the Windows start menu after installation. It will display a configuration menu with options to start and stop the Customize Google add-on for Internet Explorer.

Google services and settings are divided into categories in a sidebar. The most popular Google services like web search, Google news or Google Mail are already included in the list. A click on any entry will display the configuration options for it in the right window.

Check boxes define if an option is enabled in Internet Explorer. Security conscious users may want to disable click tracking and Google cookies that can track user behavior while using any of the Google services.

The Internet Explorer add-on does not feel feature complete at his point in time when compared to the Firefox add-on of the same name. It does however provide the security and privacy options that many users seek which should be enough reason to give it a try.

While Internet Explorer Privacy Manager would not have helped with that problem it does help in work environments where other users should not be able to access or see the websites that are opened. The software will install a Browser Helper Object in Internet Explorer that can be configured to either make the Internet Explorer web browser revert to the default home page or make the Internet Explorer browser to close after a certain time.

The time that it takes before the desired option will be applied can be configured in minutes by the user. The default time is set to five minutes and the default action is to go back to the default page of Internet Explorer.

The Internet Explorer Privacy Manager itself is a portable software program for the Windows operating system. It should work with most versions of Internet Explorer. The developers do not provide information about supported operating systems and Internet Explorer versions though.

The software can be downloaded directly from the developer’s homepage.

If a user accesses the Internet with multiple computers he might want to use the same security zone settings on all of them. The easiest way to do that would be to export the security zones on one computer and export them to all others instead of adding sites to the zones manually on all computers.

Internet Explorer is storing the security zone information in the Windows Registry. To export the settings of the currently logged in user one would have to open the Registry with [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [Enter].

The Registry key is located at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains

A left click on Domains will select that key. The next step would be to open the File Menu and select Export. Enter a name and save the data as a file on the computer.

The newly created file has to be transferred to another computer. A right-click on the file at the new computer will open a context menu. The entry Merge will add the data to the correct Registry key so that the zone information of the first computer will be added to it as well.

Repair IE is a portable application for Windows operating systems that provides access to the five tabs Appearance, Browser Features, Network and Connections, Search Features and Security. Each tab contains so called items that enable or disable certain functions and features in Internet Explorer. The current value column gives information if the item is currently set to its default value or a custom value set by the user.

Most custom values are shown as Yes (True) or No (False) values with the occasional string for values that require path information. A double-click on an item changes the value of it. A Yes or No value would be inverted. If the inverted value is the default value the field would be cleared.

A path can be changed in a small popup window instead. A confirmation dialog is always shown before changing values.

Repair IE is an excellent Internet Explorer tweaking utility that can be used to change a lot of settings in Internet Explorer. The software developer designed the tool to fix malicious software leftovers after cleaning a computer system. An option to set everything to its default value would make the software program easier to handle.

What about Firefox 3 ? Will it continue to drive market shares away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or will the expansion stop eventually ? And then we have the Internet Explorer 8 which has such a huge market share mainly because it’s bundled with the operating system. Will Internet Explorer 8 be able to stop the fall ?

Here is what I think will happen. Opera will not gain a huge market share and remain a niche browser. It’s a wonderful browser but it is somehow not accepted by the mass market. Firefox will gain some momentum and market shares from Microsoft but it won’t be able to drive Internet Explorer from its throne yet.

The release of Internet Explorer 8 will not change this trend. Can you imagine that Firefox users go back to Internet Explorer 8 ? Microsoft would have to deliver a faster, more secure and overall better browser to make this happen and who is believing that they can do that ? Internet Explorer 8 will be solid, will be compatible to web standards which is probably the biggest news for web developers.

What’s your opinion ? Which will it be for you ?

A button to launch the email or ftp client, messenger or statistics tool could come in handy. The application accepts executables in exe, com or bat format. A text for the button, an icon and a status bar and tools menu text can be selected during creation. The button should be visible immediately on the toolbar.

Internet Explorer should be closed during the creation to avoid complications. If the button does not appear in the toolbar it needs to be added manually using the Customize menu of Internet Explorer.

Buttons that have been created previously can be edited and deleted at anytime. I received an error on my system during first start which told me that the file COMDLG32.OCX was not registered on my system. I quickly found a website that offered the file for download and explained how to register it.

The major problem that I have with index.dat files is that they raise privacy concerns. They cannot be opened in a text editor but are easily viewable with the right viewer. One of these tools that you can use is the Index.dat Suite which is probably the most advanced software that is freely available.

Before I start I would like to mention that Internet Explorer uses three different index.dat files which contain the history, cookies and cache. Other applications make use of index.dat files as well, Microsoft Office for instance uses it to save the recent documents.

When you first start the Index.dat Suite you are asked to perform a scan of your system for index.dat files. You can speed up the process if you filter the scan by drive. All my applications that produce index.dat files are located on drive C which meant that I only scanned that drive.

The list will be huge. Each user account has index.dat files in the home directory. Most of those are default files if the account is not in use actively with a size of 16,32 or 128 Kilobyte. The interesting files are those of active accounts because they contain data that is viewable, if Internet Explorer is used that is.

I discovered a 4 Megabyte index.dat file on my system dating back to Internet Explorer 5 that contained many urls that I visited at that time.

Once the scan finished you can right-click any index.dat file in the list and use the internal viewer to see its contents. The contents depend on the type of index.dat file that you open, you either see a history file, Temporary Internet Cache or cookies.

The suite does not only provide ways to view the contents of the files. It is furthermore possible to clean them effectively. They are however created anew when Internet Explorer is started again.

‘Youtube is banned you fool, The administrators didn’t write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!’

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how this had happened so I decided to search and see if this problem had cropped up somewhere else. Turns out, it’s pretty common. These messages are courtesy of the W32.USB worm. This worm copies itself to removable drives as Microsoft Power Point.exe and will infect your PC when you connect the infected drive to it. The infection is via a hidden Autorun.inf file.

Luckily, it’s fairly easy to get your browsers back to normal. Just follow the following steps.

1. Right click the system tray and select the ‘Task Manager’ or just hit ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del’. Once the task manager is open, navigate to the ‘Processes’ tab.
2. Under the ‘Image name’ column, look for all entries marked ‘svchost.exe’, which are running under your USERNAME ONLY (not system, local or anything else). Terminate these processes by hitting the ‘End Process’ button. Close the task manager.
3. The next step is to delete the files itself. Open ‘My Computer’ and type ‘C:\heap41a’, then hit Enter. The folder will have the files ‘svchost.exe, script1.txt, standard.txt, reproduce.txt, and an audio file.’ Delete all the files in the folder and then delete the heap41a folder itself.
4. Now we have to delete the registry entry as well. Go to ‘Start –> Run’ and type ‘regedit’. Once the registry opens, on the menu bar, go to ‘Edit –> Find’ and type ‘heap41a’. After searching, you should have some entries with ‘heap41a’ in them. Delete all these entries.
5. Your PC is free of the worm.

However, you also need to get rid of the worm from the USB drive, lest it infect your computer again. Connect your drive to the computer’s USB port (disable the drive from auto playing) and delete all entries marked with ‘autorun’. They may sometimes be in a separate folder. Once these entries are gone, your USB drive is clean as well.