Internet, Web Browser | featured news

The European Union has fined Microsoft €561 million ($733 million) for breaking a pledge to offer personal computer users a choice of Internet browsers when they install the company's flagship Windows operating system.

The race is tightening up, but Google Chrome remains the Windows Web browser to beat, in terms of speed, features, and support for new standards.

Mac computers have stopped running programs written using the Java programming language in their browsers, as Apple blocked it because of security problems.

The Department of Homeland Security says despite some fixes to Java, it continues to recommend users disable the program in their Web browsers, because it remains vulnerable to attacks that could result in identity theft and other cyber crimes.

...It’s an echo of the so-called browser wars of the 1990s, when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator fought for dominance on the personal computer. This time, though, the struggle is shaping up to be over which company will control the mobile world — with browsers on smartphones and tablets. Entrenched businesses are at stake. Google’s browser-based business apps, for instance, threaten Microsoft’s desktop software, and mobile Web apps threaten Apple’s App Store.

Advertisers are girding for battle against browser mechanisms intended to offer more online privacy. At stake is nothing less than the future of the surveillance economy.

Microsoft has rushed to issue a patch for a previously unseen bug affecting IE 9 and previous versions of its browser. The problem, which affects hundreds of millions of IE browser users, is being used by attackers to install the Poison Ivy trojan. This piece of malware is used to steal data or take remote control of PCs.

Google Inc will pay $22.5 million to settle charges it bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple Inc's Safari browser, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday.