Windows 7 is nearly upon us; the word is that the first PCs with the new operating system pre-installed could be in the shops in time for Christmas. That would make it a little less than three years since Microsoft brought Vista into the world, promising PC buyers the ‘wow factor’.
But Vista has proven to be at least partly a failure. Sales of new PCs with Vista may have broken previous records but that’s more to do with demand for new PCs than love for the software.
Microsoft spent years shaping the requirements, tooling and cultural changes that have become indispensable parts of its Security Development Lifecycle. Today, the SDL is being revised to address emerging security threats, as well as new computing styles and paradigms that are changing the process of how Microsoft creates its software, said Steve Lipner, Microsoft's senior director of security engineering strategy.
Microsoft Corp. said this week that its own speed tests prove Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is faster than either Firefox or Chrome.
In a report released Wednesday, Microsoft spelled out how it tests browsers in-house, and again stressed that it doesn't buy the idea that benchmarks -- such as those that score JavaScript performance -- accurately compare the players. "These benchmarks necessarily characterize only a narrow set of the browser functions in a very constrained way," Microsoft's report said. "End users, however, do not operate in a controlled environment."
Microsoft is disputing an attempt to reinstate class-action status to an ongoing lawsuit against its Windows Vista Capable sticker program, a case that threatens to drag on and is reflective of the difficulties Microsoft has encountered by releasing its disappointing Windows Vista OS.
What can you expect from Microsoft's rebranded search engine? A new name, and not a whole lot else from the sound of it. As you've probably read by now, Kumo is the name that is most commonly associated with the search engine, though Microsoft has not officially named it.
You might think Microsoft had some big new search ideas to roll out along with such a rebranding, but reports don't exactly indicate as much. Microsoft Search Director Stefan Weitz told Silicon Alley Insider the company is only thinking in terms of "small tweaks."
After acknowledging a couple of weeks ago that it was changing direction with SQL Data Services (SDS), Microsoft officials are filling in the gaps about exactly what will be changing when.
Microsoft execs detailed the forthcoming changes to Microsoft’s hosted database service — one of the mid-tier layers of its Azure cloud-services platform — in a couple of new blog posts on March 10.
Microsoft released three security bulletins covering vulnerabilities in Windows as part of this month's Patch Tuesday. One of the bulletins, rated "critical," fixes an input validation situation related to GDI that could be exploited to run arbitrary code.
Microsoft has released three security bulletins for this month’s Patch Tuesday, including a patch for a critical vulnerability in the Windows kernel affecting the graphics device interface (GDI).
Over the past year, Internet Explorer has lost market share while browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari and even the nascent Google browser Chrome have made incremental gains.
Microsoft hopes to return IE to its past glory with Internet Explorer 8, which has been in release candidate since late January and has received praise for its security as well as criticism for being a memory hog.
Microsoft is prepping three security bulletins affecting Windows next week as part of Patch Tuesday. The most serious of the bulletins addresses a remote code execution situation. There is no word, however, on a patch for the Microsoft Office Excel zero-day Microsoft warned users about last month.
Microsoft plans to push out three security bulletins next week, the most serious of which is meant to squash at least one remote code execution bug in Windows.
Windows 7 will include features specifically developed for enterprise customers and partners in an unprecedented number of technology early-access programs Microsoft is offering for the forthcoming OS.
Microsoft invited more than 100 customers and partners to give feedback on Windows 7 early on in its development process in an attempt to learn from mistakes it made when building Vista, said Gavriella Schuster, a senior director of Windows product management, in an interview Tuesday.
