Dropbox is an indispensable part of many a computer users’ arsenal, including several here at 2dayblog. But, the company hasn’t had a viable option for businesses who would have an obvious use for a tool that allows you to easily sync files between PCs, share them amongst users and always have backups in the cloud. The boys and girls at the Y Combinator startup know that there’s lots of money to be made in the enterprise space and that’s why they’ve unveiled Dropbox for Teams. The general experience is the same, but rather than individually managed chunks of storage, teams share one large repository, starting at 1TB for five users. The base plan costs $795 a year and additional users, which also includes 200GB of storage, can be tacked on for $125 annually. The business offering also includes special tools for administrators to add or delete users and dedicated phone support.

This new Firefox features Bing as its default search engine instead of Google. According to Mozilla, the browser is an extension of the “partnership” the company announced with Microsoft in 2010.

For Mozilla, the “Firefox with Bing” browser is certainly a good idea, as it is an opportunity to diversify its revenue and become at least a bit more independent of Google’s search revenues. However, from Microsoft’s perspective, this is a remarkable move because it is featuring the Firefox download from its own website. However, in its battle against Google, Microsoft may have concluded that a partnership with Mozilla cannot do much damage at this point, and may even help its Bing unit to divert some advertising revenues from Google toward Bing.

StatCounter market share data indicates that Firefox will post its ninth consecutive month of market share loss for October and end the period with about 26.4 percent share. IE also suffered heavy losses this month, despite a newly launched marketing campaign, and cross the finish line with about 40.2 percent. Google has picked up more than 1.3 points of share and will be listed with a share of about 24.9 percent. If the current trend continues, Mozilla will lose its position as second most popular browser in November. In South America, Chrome has become the dominating browser with daily market shares in excess of 40 percent this month, according to StatCounter.

Teaming up with Mozilla may be a good idea for Microsoft at this point, as every other strategy to fend off Chrome has failed so far. If Microsoft keeps losing market share at the current pace and if Chrome keeps gaining share at the same time, Google may surpass IE share as early as June 2012.

SOURCE via Mozilla

Google just released the stable version of Chrome 15. There are plenty of security fixes and the new tab page sans bookmarks is now live.

The new release also features a record sum of rewards paid to security researchers – more than $27,000 for a total of 27 published security issues. The Chromium revision log suggests that Google 15 has more than 5000 revisions over Chrome 14. Chrome has changes on the surface as well, as it now features the revised new tab page that has much more focus on applications and horizontally sliding pages. Future Chrome versions will get Most visited, Apps, and also a Bookmarks page, which is already live in developer versions of the browser.

Also noteworthy is that apps and extensions are now presented in a tab page that can be accessed via the browser settings page.

The developer channel of Chrome has just been branched to version 16 and indicates that the next version of the browser will have at least 5500 changes over version 15. Version 17 is in the nightly channel.

SOURCE via Google

A recent discovery made by Geek.com shows that, for example, Volkswagen tells its supplier partners that the best way to use its website is, in fact, IE6.

Of course, the recommendation only applies to vwgroupsupply.com, not the general vw.com website. You could be making fun of VW and how it tells its partners to use a decade-old browser, while Microsoft spends millions of dollars in an effort to convince users that IE6 is risky to use and IE9, or, at the very least, IE8, is a much better choice.

However, with a more reasonable approach, we take the guess that the recommendation has to do with the fact that this website ties in with Volkswagen’s internal information architecture, which may be standardized on IE6. Large corporations have standardized their software environment on one very specific browser version and a transition or re-qualification of another browser is a major pain in the neck and requires substantial investment. Until Volkswagen does not see a need to update all of its internal applications, including manufacturing software, there will be no change in the browser requirement.

Microsoft currently states that IE6 usage around the world is about 9 percent. More than half of the world’s IE6 users are in China. According to data provided by Internet World Stats and Net Applications, the IE6 user base in the U.S. may be about 6.3 million users, which suggests that a good portion of IE6 users, may, in fact, be locked up in industrial applications.

SOURCE via Geek

There is a new feature that has just popped up in the Webkit snapshot releases of future Chrome versions, also known as Chromium releases. Chromium 17 includes an HTTP Pipelining flag.

Google is a bit late to the party with this feature. Opera has had pipelining support since version 4 and Firefox has also included some customization freedom for users to adjust pipelining to alleviate the page load delays that are cause in high-latency situations.

Pipelining can be enabled via a flag in chrome://flags and will result in Chrome sending off multiple http requests before a response is received. The purpose is to shorten load times of pages especially on slow client-server systems. The improvement is very limited at this time and highly subjective. Google is unlikely to offer this feature for customization, but indicated that Chrome will automatically select the best number of pipelines. There is no proxy support and there is no way for the system to deal with servers that do not support pipelining or incorrectly implement pipelining. Google said that it will be fixing this feature in the future.

It is unclear when pipelining will be available by default. However, Chrome 17 is about 12 – 14 weeks from its final release and there is plenty of time to prep the feature. You can test drive pipelining in Chrome by downloading a recent Chromium snapshot. The feature is integrated in the browser in build versions 106364 and higher.

Let’s be honest: There have not been many features that have blown your socks off in Photoshop recently and for those who actually have to pay for the software themselves, the reasons that justify an upgrade have not been very compelling.

However, I predict that this is a feature that you will want — one that you’ll pay for — if it works as Adobe promises. And I promise, that this will blow your mind.

Adobe recently demonstrated a deblurring feature for a future version of Photoshop. They did not say which version they are targeting, but it seemed a bit rough around the edges, so I would be cautious about speculating that it will be in CS6. The feature was integrated into Photoshop via a plug-in and can magically correct blurred images and come up with a sharp picture. Magic?

Common sense tells us that if you screw up a picture, you screwed it up and especially if its blurred, your options to make it look better are very limited. How would Adobe be able to deblur a picture?

Adobe’s approach is interesting – and quite compute-intensive. The analysis of the picture tries to trace the path a picture was blurred – it basically attempts to recreate your hand movement during the time a picture was taken, based on the blurring in the picture. Depending on the size of the picture, this process can consume some time, but the effect that Adobe presented on stage was breathtaking. In one example, the software even revealed a blurred phone number in a picture.

Adobe declined to confirm a release date of the feature. But even if it is just half as good as it worked in the demo, this feature will be reason enough for many Photoshop users to upgrade.

We know that data input via touch will have to evolve at some point. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University believe that a more sophisticated system that can distinguish between different parts of the finger could be one approach.

Called TapSense, the technology can tell the difference between the tap of a fingertip, the pad of the finger, a fingernail and a knuckle. The researchers said that this technology could be handy, for example, when typing on a virtual keyboard. “For instance, users might capitalize letters simply by tapping with a fingernail instead of a fingertip, or might switch to numerals by using the pad of a finger, rather toggling to a different set of keys,” a press release states.

Similarly a painting app could leverage such a technology to control different color palettes or brushes. We could also imagine that this could be interesting for touch games. “TapSense basically doubles the input bandwidth for a touchscreen,” said Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. “This is particularly important for smaller touchscreens, where screen real estate is limited. If we can remove mode buttons from the screen, we can make room for more content or can make the remaining buttons larger.”

There was no information whether this technology will actually make it into actual products. However, the integration would be fairly easy: TapSense uses a microphone and analyzes the sounds made by tapping on the touch screen surface with different parts of the finger. The researchers claim that their technology is able to distinguish between the four types of finger inputs with 95 percent accuracy.

StatCounter data suggests that, on a global basis, the number of people using Chrome exceeded those who were using Firefox last Sunday. Chrome beat Firefox with a market share of 26.22% versus 26.16%. It’s not much and it was just one day, but it is a significant event as Chrome has caught up with Firefox on weekend days.

Chrome has substantially higher market share on weekends than during the week and the current data implies that the browser needs about four to six weeks to catch up with any number on a weekend on an average market share basis. If this trend holds up, then we should be seeing Chrome match average Firefox market share by mid- to end-November.

For the first half of the month, Chrome averaged 24.85%, which is more than 1.2 points up from last month, while Firefox is slightly down to 26.68%. IE has fallen for the first half of the month below the 40% mark and was estimated at 39.99%.

Chrome market share is, just as it is the case with all other browsers significantly fragmented across the world. In North America, for example, Chrome share is only 20.01%, while it is at 40.82% in South America, according to StatCounter.

Microsoft has just released vulnerability data collected from its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), Bing, Windows Live Hotmail, Forefront and Defender during the first half of this year.

There are few surprises, but there is a wealth of data that delivers the current state of computer security and vulnerabilities over 168 pages.

According to the report, java remains the most dangerous platform for security exploits as Microsoft detected more than 6 million cases during the first month of the year. Operating system exploits made a huge jump to more than 5 million due to a Windows shortcut flaw that was discovered in July of last year and heavily exploited by attackers. HTML and JavaScript exploits are next in line, followed by document reader exploits and Flash vulnerabilities. Microso said that Flash vulnerabilities are still uncommon, but increased substantially (more than 40x) from the first to the second quarter of the year.

Windows XP SP3 remains the most vulnerable OS among the currently still-supported Microsoft operating systems. The data released show that 10.9 of every 1000 Windows XP SP3 (32-bit) were infected during the first half of the year. In comparison, the number dropped to 8.8 for Vista SP1 32-bit (6.7 for 64-bit), to 5.7 for Vista SP2 (4.4 for 64-bit) to 4.0 for Windows 7 RTM (2.7 for 64-bit) and to 1.8 for Windows 7 SP1 (1.1 for 64-bit).

Malware is most commonly distributed via adware with a share near 24 percent, followed by “unwanted” software (20 percent) and trojans (18 percent), worms (12 percent) and trojan downloaders (10 percent). Spyware has become insignificant as a malware transportation vehicle.

Microsoft detected most of the malware infections in the U.S. (10.5 million in Q2). Brazil was second with 3.7 million and France third with 2.7 million compromised Windows systems.

Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report v11 can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website.

SOURCE via Microsoft

We’ve already mentioned that Opera’s GPU-accelerated Opera 12 browser will soon be available, and well, it is already here. However, Opera did warn those who download the software that this is an alpha version and hiccups (and even blue screens) may occur. Those warnings are reasonable and not exaggerated to say the least. Opera 12.00 alpha is a very early preview that has plenty of issues and should not be used for everyday tasks.

What is new in this browser is acceleration for WebGL content as well as well as full hardware acceleration that goes beyond the previous software-accelerated backend Vega. When Opera says “full” hardware acceleration, it means “full”, as there is not just acceleration for features such as Canvas, but also renders the entire user interface of the browser on the GPU. There is only a hardware accelerated OpenGL backend available, however.

It is difficult to get an idea how well hardware acceleration will work in Opera 12. I noticed that benchmarks such as Webviz do not run at all in Opera 12 and the IE Fishtank WebGL port from Mozilla shows errors in Opera 12.00 alpha. However, the Asteroids Canvas 2D benchmark delivered a score of 2165 on my Phenom II X6 1055T system, which was up from 1580 of the previous Opera Next release without hardware acceleration. In comparison, Chrome 14 scored 2575, Firefox 7 1227 and IE 9.0.3 2864. In Microsoft’s Mr. Potato Gun test, 12 alpha scored 15,399 points versus 1141 of the non-accelerated version. However, Chrome scored 34,876, Firefox 7 34,988 and IE 9.0.3 52,344.

It is too early to draw any conclusions how fast Opera 12 will be in those tests, once the browser is more stable. So far, it is just a download for die-hard Opera fans. Originally, the hardware acceleration feature was promised to be released with Opera 11, which was announced in December of last year.