Microsoft links Skype voice, video calling to Outlook.com
Microsoft is rolling Skype in with its free Outlook.com email service, giving customers the ability to fire up VoIP calls directly from their mail inbox.
Microsoft is rolling Skype in with its free Outlook.com email service, giving customers the ability to fire up VoIP calls directly from their mail inbox.
Mozilla has added automatic third-party cookie-blocking to a preview version of Firefox 22, a move that will put the feature in most users hands by late June and the company on a collision course with the online ad industry.
Avaya unified communications products can get along with Microsoft's Lync Server, and many customers will probably choose to deploy both rather than just one, says Avaya's CEO.
Europe's antitrust chief on Wednesday announced a €561 million (NZ$879 million) fine on Microsoft for its failure to include a browser choice page in its upgrade to Windows 7 in 2011.
Figures don't lie, the old aphorism goes, but liars can figure. And after nearly 20 years covering technology, I've realized that you could update that saying to: Benchmarks don't lie, but liars can benchmark.
Mozilla has garnered unfriendly attention lately after a former volunteer criticised the group's slow responses to bug reports. The timing of the post and the resulting response from observers is notable: It all comes in the wake of Mozilla's "rapid release" initiative, through which the group has pledged to roll out an updated version of its Firefox browser every 16 weeks, possibly sans version number. Mozilla's decision to dramatically speed up its development cycle has met enough resistance to put the group's chair, Mitchell Baker, on the defensive.
Further, the criticism of Mozilla's bug-handling procedures comes at a time when Firefox continues to lose both market share and credibility in the browser space. In terms of the latter, a recent report from NSS Labs (PDF) on browser security found that Firefox 4 caught only 7.6 percent of live socially engineered malware threats, far less than Internet Explorer 9, which snagged 99.2 percent, and behind Chrome, which detected 13.2 percent. Firefox's results were 11.4 percent lower than the 19 percent protection rate observed in the Q3 2010 global test, according to NSS, indicating an overall drop in protection for Firefox.
The author of the now-controversial blog detailing Mozilla's bug-processing shortcomings was Tyler Downer, who stepped down as a Mozilla volunteer out of frustration. In a post dated August 27, he wrote that while he supported the rapid release initiative, he was frustrated by the impact on how it affected the triage group -- that is, the people responsible for processing and confirming end user-submitted bug reports.
His argument (which he clarified in a follow-up post): Triage doesn't have the time or resources to go through all the reported bugs to keep up with Firefox's accelerated release cycle. "With the old model of releasing a new major version once a year, triage had a bit more time to go through a massive pile of bugs, to find regressions and issues, and there was a pretty good chance that most bugs would get caught, just because we had time on our side.... Or so went the theory. Even this process failed us," he wrote.
Tyler did not elaborate on how the process had failed previously, but Firefox did rank No. 5 on Bit9's top 10 list of buggiest software for 2010, behind Safari (No. 2) and Chrome (No. 1).
To illustrate the challenge triage faces with rapid release, Tyler said that Firefox currently has 6,000 unconfirmed reported bugs -- not to be confused with 6,000 real bugs. ""Out of those 6,000 bugs, there are duplicates, bugs that have already been fixed, bugs that are user error, bugs that are caused by third-party software, and so on. I simply wanted to suggest that we need to do a better job of going through the bugs that are submitted. Without going through the list, it is difficult to determine which bugs are real and which are invalid," he wrote.
Tyler provided some recommendations for Mozilla to better handle bug reports, including being more responsive and polite to users who submit them, as well as embracing better coordination within the Mozilla community to investigate bug reports in a timely, efficient, and coordinated manner, perhaps with the implementation of a software tool for better managing the bug reports.
Ultimately, Tyler was not entirely pessimistic about the fate of Mozilla Firefox. "The situation with triage is not hopeless. I have been in talks over the past few days, and I see a good possibility that Mozilla means business in improving triage.... There is a new 'Tell Us More' input tool in the works, which will implement some of my desired changes (such as a separate product for unconfirmed bugs)," he wrote.
New Zealand-based Mozilla developer Rob O'Callahan has taken exception to claims Microsoft has made about the recently-released IE9 web browser.
Chrome was the only browser to gain significant usage share last month, and again trounced rival open-source Firefox, according to monitoring firm NetApplications.
Mozilla yesterday confirmed a critical vulnerability in the newest version of Firefox, and said it would plug the hole by the end of the month.
Recent market share statistics deliver good and bad news for Microsoft. The company saw its Internet Explorer browser lose more ground, seemingly to Google Desktop and Chrome, while its Windows 7 operating system quickly gained market acceptance.
Mozilla has now unblocked a Microsoft add-on thought to pose a danger due to a software vulnerability, but a second add-on remains blocked, the organization said on Sunday.
Developers building functional Add-ons for the Firefox browser can request financial contributions from users through an effort launched this week by Mozilla.
Just days after a hacker released code that could be used to attack the Firefox browser, Mozilla developers have a fix.
Gains made by Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) since its launch last Thursday have come at the expense of the older IE7, according to data from Irish metrics firm StatCounter.
Web sites saw visitors deserting Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in favor of Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome in December, according to Web analytics company Net Applications.