Google, Software | featured news

Last Thursday, Microsoft announced several new features to the upcoming IE10, which will launch as part of Windows 8. One of these features, which turns on “Do Not Track” by default, has caused quite a stir over the weekend as new outlets and bloggers have discussed the potential benefits and ramifications of this feature.

A court ruled that Google infringed on copyrights held by Oracle, but it also said that Google had not violated other important parts of Oracle’s software known as Java.

Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker is sitting on a ticking time bomb. The survival of her company, which pledges to make the web a better place, is at the mercy of one of its main competitors, Google.

Microsoft, struggling to dent the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone market, is aggressively courting app developers for its Windows Phone.

Google has released the newest version of its Chrome Web browser, and in the process fixed nine security glitches and folded in the updated Adobe Flash Player that allows users to set the software to update automatically.

Google’s Chrome browser became the most-used browser in the world for one day last weekend, according to web analytics company StatCounter.

In 2010, Google gave its search engine a jolt, moving the web’s de facto gateway onto a new software platform dubbed “Caffeine.” Designed by Google itself, Caffeine was a way for the company to more rapidly add new links to its massive index of websites, including news stories and blog posts and chatter from web forums. According to the company, it provided “50 percent fresher” search results than its previous indexing system, which was based on a seminal Google creation called MapReduce.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 for public testing on Wednesday in the hope that it will help the brand win back some of the ground it has been losing to Apple and Google.

The web giant and other ad companies bypassed privacy settings in Apple's Safari browser on mobile devices and computers – tracking the online habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

Google has beefed up security on its Android mobile-device software to better prevent "malicious" software from residing in its app store.