The IEblog is talking about how websites can prepare for Internet Explorer 8, early betas of which should be becoming more common as this year goes by. They laid out the User-Agent string for the new browser, which will be a simple:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0)
Unlike the IE7 beta, the IE8 beta versions will not have a special beta tag (the letter “b”) in the User-Agent, so that beta versions will work with websites the same as the final release. Also, the beta will ship with a new ability to “pretend” they are IE7, returning the IE7 User-Agent string just by clicking an option in the menu.
A lot of Yahoo shareholders are angry at the company for trying to weasel out of Microsoft’s offer to buy them out for tens of billions of dollars, and have filed a lawsuit against the board of directors. The suit claims the board is breaching its duties to get the most value for investors, and that the company is pursuing “value-destructive” deals with other companies, like Google, AOL, and News Corp., that are being described by many as “poison pills”.
The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Chancery Court on Thursday by lawyers representing Detroit’s police and fire retirement system and general retirement system, as well as “all other similarly situated public shareholders.”
Windows Live Search had a good January, according to ComScore, gaining 97 million new searches from the previous month, a gain of 10.5% to 1.024 billion queries. The overall industry grew 7.9%, giving Microsoft a negligible market share gain, though it didn’t suffer a shift of nearly a point lost to Google, like Yahoo did. Ask.com and AOL enjoyed double-digit search query gains.
Microsoft made the sequel to mega-hit Xbox 360 shooter Gears of War official this week, announcing Gears of War 2 at the Game Developers Conference. Gears 2 is coming this November, and all that is known is some box art, a teaser trailer (embedded below), and that when two players attack each other with chainsaws, it’ll turn into a back-and-forth chainsaw brawl.
Joe Wilcox is discussing the planned release of a version of Windows Live OneCare for servers. OneCare, Microsoft’s all-in-one security suite, will handle similar tasks similar to the desktop version, including server anti-virus, and will be bundled with Small Business Server and Essential Server 2008, along with a one-year subscription to Forefront for Exchange. As Joe points out, Microsoft would like to give OneCare for free with Windows, as well as Windows Server, but it can’t, because your politicians “protected” you from free software bundling with their antitrust legislation.
Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft’s free online storage service, has been released out of beta. SkyDrive’s also been pushed out into 38 countries, and storage has been severely increased, going from 1 gigabyte to 5 gigabytes. The countries were you can now get SkyDrive and enjoy the benefits of free online storage and file sharing:
Great Britain, India, the U.S., Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.
