Author: Nick Farrell

EU might suspend data agreements with the US

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News

Russia-State-Cultural-Ideological-Policy-Weapon-West-US-Europe-Bodhita-NewsThe EU Justice Commissioner  is considering suspending a commercial data-sharing agreement between the European Union and the United States if Washington  doesn’t stop spying.

Vera Jourova said in written answers to EU lawmakers that the so-called Safe Harbour agreement allowing companies to transfer personal data to the United States could be suspended if negotiations between Brussels and Washington go nowhere.

Jourova said that suspension was an option on the table for me, but we are not yet there.

Under the EU’s strict data protection laws, companies may only transfer personal data outside the 28-member bloc if a country is deemed to have adequate safeguards for that data. Only a handful of countries worldwide meet the required standards and the US is not one of them.

In 2000 the EU adopted a Safe Harbour agreement under which US companies certify themselves that they meet the EU’s data privacy standards.

However the agreement was rendered a joke after last year’s revelations about mass US surveillance programs involving EU citizens which showed that  US technology companies were just handing over data to spooks.

And if negotiations with the US are tough now, it is expected that things will get worse when Jan Philipp Albrecht of the Greens group takes over  in November as the new Justice Commissioner. The Greens have no love of the US’s spying antics.

More than 3,246 companies were certified under Safe Harbour, including Google and Facebook.

The Commission announced a review of Safe Harbour in November last year after former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed details of Washington’s eavesdropping on Europeans’ phone calls, including those of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The Commission gave Washington a 13-point list of issues to address before it would put forward a revised data sharing agreement. One of them was that the US would use the national security prerogative to access Europeans’ data only when strictly necessary and in response to a specific threat.

Apparently this is causing a problem because the US sees everyone as a threat, even loyal allies.

Jourova asked for more time to continue working in a constructive spirit with the United States building on the progress made so far. Theoretically, the Commission could roll over and allow the US to have its wicked way with Europe, but it is likely that the European Parliament would throw its toys out of the pram if it did so. Most feel that the Commission is a US lapdog and it is about time it gave the land of the Free a Chinese burn until it stops being such an international douche.

Kaveri makes this Acer Aspire E5 sing

Posted on October 7, 2014 by - News, Opinions, Products

Acer E5-551_1AMD has been making a big noise about its Kaveri chip range of Mobile APUs and we got a look at what it could do to Acer E5-551 15.6 laptop.

AMD A-Series APU family, codenamed Kaveri, is starting to pop up in systems from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Toshiba. According to AMD, the new mobile APUs mark the debut of Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) features and Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture for mobile. Acer’s Aspire E5 is first to arrive in the UK and will be sold through Debenhams so this makes it interesting from a user or a channel perspective.

The AMD A8 Kaveri chip is now powering the new Acer E5-551 laptop is designed for multi-tasking from gaming and light photo-editing to running multiples instances of software and streaming music. The E5-551 features a DVD reader and writer for long plane flights where you need a better movie. It is also well placed for the school market as it can practically anything a school kid could throw at it.

The machine is priced for about £409 which makes it a good budget model for smaller companies who are providing portables for those who have to do work, rather than just look at tablets. Normally there is not much between computers in this range. Most have WXGA screens based on TN technology and conventional hard drives and plastic bodies.

 Acer E5-551_9The Spec

Processor: AMD Quad-Core A8-7100

Mainboard: AMD A76M

Memory: 8192 MB, DDR3L, 1600 MHz, dual-channel, 2 memory banks, both filled

Graphics adapter :AMD Radeon R6 (Kaveri), Core: 533 MHz, DDR3L, shared memory, bus: 64 Bit

Display: 15.6 inch 16:9, 1366×768 pixel, AU Optronics AUO47EC, TN LED

Connections: 2 USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0, 1 VGA, 1 HDMI, 1 Kensington Lock, Audio Connections: 1 combo audio in/out, 3.5 mm jack, Card Reader: SD/SDHC/SDXC,

Networking: Realtek RTL8168/8111 Gigabit-LAN (10/100/1000MBit), Atheros Communications AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter (b g n ), 4.0 Bluetooth

Optical drive: Matshita DVD-RAM UJ8E2Q

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 64 Bit

Weight: 2.5 kg

Battery: 56 Wh Lithium-Ion

 Acer E5-551_10Design

The Aspire A5 design is, bluntly, a bit of a snooze and not its strongest feature. Certainly, it is thinner than many laptops in this range but it is not that thin. It is lighter and easy to carry than others we have had. Certainly in comparison to the bricks that are available in this price range it is certainly not bad. Besides, for £409 design is something that happens to other people’s computer.

The plastic case also seems to pick up every type of grease that a hand can generate and make the machine slimy.

 The chip

The important part of this computer is an AMD Quad-Core A8-7100 which is a quad core with eight GPU cores to carry out the AMD Radeon R7 series graphics. The idea of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is that it allows the CPU and GPU to work together by quickly dividing and directing the right tasks toward the appropriate cores to improve performance and efficiency. The chip managed to make running software a breeze and it even passed our Firefox running trillions of opens tabs trick without any problems.

 The Graphics

The graphics on the Kaveri platform is far better than Intel’s equivalent HD graphics cores integrated into the Haswell chips. This makes Kaveri armed laptop owners able to play reasonably demanding games and videos. Playing Civ 5 was not only possible it was a quality game on Acer E5-551, something that I have only seen on our other home laptop, which has a dedicated card, when there was nothing else running. HD films came out very well, limited only by the screen which for a budget machine was still not too bad.

Connectivity

The machine has an HDMI socket, Ethernet connection, two USB 2.0 sockets, a USB 3.0 connection and a VGA out.  Not bad not great.

Communication

The Atheros AR9565 Wi-Fi module supports the IEEE 901.11 b, g and n standards,  Bluetooth, version 4.0. The signal connections were fairly standard and nothing to right home about

Battery

The 56 Wh Lithium-Ion managed 4.5 half hours before needing a recharge, which was not too bad given the thrashing we were giving it.  Again, this is due to the lower power draw of the AMD A8 chip.

Noise and heat

There was no noise coming from the machine at all. This was unheard of in any laptop in this price range, particularly one with an ordinary hard drive. One could almost believe it is fanless. The heat levels were also not to bad.  The laptop did get warm, but not hot and was comfortable to put on your lap.

Keyboard

The flat, roughened keys were not bad and were capable of fast touch typing.

Touchpad

The ClickPad which is a large, single-surface which you press when you want to ‘click’ was reasonable in comparison to the alternatives we have used.  Generally, if you are not going to have a touch screen on a laptop you are always going to be better with a mouse. When such use was impossible though once you got used to it was fine. Most of the touchpad surface can be pressed, which is interpreted as a left click except for in the lower right of the Clickpad.

 Hard-drive

The hard drive is 1TB which is more than enough for any portable music or movie collection.  It is not an SSD but we never heard it in operation.

Summery

The Acer E5-551 would be a normal budget laptop where it not for the Kaveri chip making it into something special. It enabled speed, enhanced graphics, extended battery life, and quiet operation something which we have not seen from Intel equivalents in the market.  It is still a budget machine, limited by the lack of a quality screen, but for that price it it is jolly useful.

The Eyes have it

four-stars

 

 

 

Good value for money.

 

The real reason for Windows 10’s name revealed

Posted on October 6, 2014 by - News

magritte-windowWhen software giant Microsoft declared that its new operating system would be called Windows 10, many of us wondered what was wrong with Windows 9 as a name.

After all, the number, nine has a good reputation. There were, for example,  The Nine Worthies – nine historical, or semi-legendary figures who, in the Middle Ages, were believed to personify the ideals of chivalry. There are nine muses in Greek mythology including Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania.

Of course, there were nine circles of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, but that was unlikely to put people off buying an operating system. Microsoft claimed that Windows 10 was so cool and so unlike the doomed Windows 8 that it was unfair to call it Windows 9, which is about as unlikely as Mark Hurd returning as the CEO of HP.

Now it seems a Microsoft developer has spilled the beans. Microsoft skipped Windows 9 and went  straight to 10 fearing a problem like the Y2K bug.

The developer “Cranbourne” told Rededit  that  “early testing revealed just how many third party products had code in the form of Windows 9”, referring to benchmark operating systems Windows 95 and Windows 98.

He said: “This was the pragmatic solution to avoid that.”

Basically there was a lump of short-sighted code short cut designed to differentiate between Windows 95 and 98 that was too stupid to grasp that there was now a Windows 9.

It sounds daft, but Indie developer Christer Kaitila pointed out that more than 4,000 applications use the ancient coding cock-up somewhere under the bonnet of their software.

Microsoft would make each of them think that they were looking at Windows 98 rather than Windows 9 and when it could not find the floppy drive, or see a hard-drive bigger than a GB, they would pack a sad. Microsoft was never very good at software, to be fair, but excellent at marketing.

Software king backs Bitcoin

Posted on October 6, 2014 by - News

gates372Software king, Sir William Gates III, has thrown his support behind Bitcoin.

Gates told the Sibos 2014 financial-services industry conference in Boston that Bitcoin was better than cash for low cost payments.

When asked about Bitcoin’s potential to ease the cost of payment transactions for moving money from one place to another Gates said Bitcoin was exciting because it is cheap.

Talking to Erik Schatzker during a Bloomberg TV’s Smart Street show Gates said that Bitcoin was better than currency in that you don’t have to be physically in the same place and, of course, for large transactions, currency can get pretty inconvenient.

He thinks that financial transactions will eventually “be digital, universal and almost free.

But Gates is not happy about Bitcoin’s anonymity which he thinks opens it up to criminals.

“The customers we’re talking about aren’t trying to be anonymous,” he told Schatzker. “They’re willing to be known, so Bitcoin technology is key and you can add to it or you could build a similar technology where there’s enough attribution where people feel comfortable that this is nothing to do with terrorism or any type of money laundering.”

The last time Gates publicly commented on Bitcoin was last February, the day Bitcoin currency conversions debuted on Microsoft’s Bing search engine.  He avoided most questions on the subject but shifted the focus to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-backed  a mobile phone-based money transfer called Vodaphone M-pesa,and a microfinancing service in  Kenya.

Gates said that his organisation is “involved in digital money, but unlike Bitcoin it would not be anonymous digital money”. He went on to predict that “digital money will catch on in India and parts of Africa and help the poorest a lot” over the next five years.

 

Microsoft makes a billion dollars a year from Samsung

Posted on October 6, 2014 by - News

Scrooge-PorpoiseMicrosoft made a billion dollars from Samsung from its patents on Android.

According to a Samsung court case, Microsoft collected $1 billion in patent-licensing royalties last year. Samsung originally signed two contracts, a cross-licensing agreement and a business collaboration agreement, with Microsoft in 2011.

This was before Samsung started selling  so many  Android phones and late last year Samsung decided it was tired of paying on time, or paying interest when a late payment was finally made.

Microsoft took Samsung to court and the Korean company insists it wants to walk away from the original deal because of Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s phone business.

Samsung claims the acquisition invalidates the business collaboration agreement, but Microsoft doesn’t agree and wants the company to pay $6.9 million in unpaid interest from last year.

Samsung continues to build Windows-based smartphones, tablets, and PCs, so Microsoft is biting the hand which feeds it to some extent.

Microsoft is sure it will win and insists that Microsoft values and respects its long partnership with Samsung.  After all, a billion here, a billion there and soon you are talking about big money.

 

HP to cut itself in two

Posted on October 6, 2014 by - News

steven-ho-conan-watermelonUpdate: The news has now been confirmed. The Wall Street Journal has penned a piece which claims that the maker of expensive printer ink, HP, will announce that it will split into two today.

HP wants to separate its personal-computer and printer businesses from its corporate hardware and services operations.

The company is expected to make the split through a tax-free distribution of shares to stockholders next year.

If the split happens there would be two publicly traded companies, each with more than $50 billion in annual revenue.

Break-ups are very now amongs big companies.  eBay broke up lately, in part because of a belief that operations with different growth profiles are best managed as separate entities.

HP has suffered sharp sales declines and sees better long-term potential for its corporate hardware and services business than for its printer and PC unit so it is best that its hardware bits were lopped off, the Wall Street Journal claims.

Former chairman Ralph Whitworth said in a text message Sunday that it would be a brilliant move at just the right moment in the turnaround. It would liberate significant trapped value.”

The news has also resurrected the rumoured merger  of HP with data-storage equipment maker EMC. The talks recently ended, but the separation could pave the way for HP’s corporate hardware and services business to be combined with EMC.

It seems that the break-up has been on the cards for some time. HP mentioned the idea in 2011, when it announced the ill-fated acquisition of UK software company Autonomy.   At the time HP said then it was exploring a separation of its PC business, only to decide two months later to hold on to it.

Intel backs misogynistic gaming Taliban

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News, Opinions

taliban-1Intel has stuck two fingers up at all women everywhere by bowing to a misogynist campaign to silence women who complain about sexism in computer gaming and the IT industry.

Intel has pulled an advertising campaign from video gaming website Gamasutra after it dared to back a campaign calling for better gender representation in video games.

A group called Operation Disrespectful which normally targets writers, journalists, and developers who fail to agree that women should be sex objects, apparently leant on Gamasutra’s advertisers – in this case Intel. Operation Disrespectful supporters have been linked to campaigns of harassment against prominent women in the industry – calling for them to be raped or beaten up.

Operation Disrespectful called on its supporters to contact companies that advertise on video game-focused websites such as Gamasutra and Kotaku in order to complain about five specific articles that suggested the concept of the “gamer” as an identity was fading away.

Now the group has claimed a victory now that Intel has pulled its advertising from website Gamasutra.

Intel has confirmed the move in a chat to Recode. “We take feedback from our customers very seriously especially as it relates to contextually relevant content and placements.”

So in other words, if the majority of gamers are sexist idiots who want to treat women like scum then Intel does not want to hack them off.

Intel called a serious of articles by Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander “controversial.” Her article argued that the games industry has now ballooned that it had outgrown its niche origins, making a gamer’s image – that of a spotty Herbert playing in his mother’s basement and never seeing a real girl no longer correct.

But the piece quickly drew flak from those who are still living that image and are particularly resentful of “feminist gamers” who want a more realistic depiction of women in games.

Operation Disrespectful was born from the #GamerGate hashtag which was first used by anti-left actor Adam Baldwin when he made reference on Twitter to independent game developer Zoe Quinn. Their antics have the backing of US right-wing groups such as the American Enterprise Institute.

Intel admitted it was difficult to work out how pervasive support for #GamerGate is in the wider gamesplaying community, but it is clear that it does not want to take any risks.

Gamasutra, which will presumably lose income because of Intel’s decision, is an outlet that caters to video game developers, hosting diaries from industry professionals and maintaining job listings for those who make games for a living.

However, it is clear that Intel failed to understand that the #GamerGate “movement” is exactly the sort of thing which is keeping the gaming community in the dark ages. While women are increasingly playing games, they have to deal with an industry which sees women as sex objects to be bullied by men. If women want to play computer games it is probably better that they use gear from AMD, Nvidia and ARM and see the Intel inside logo as a symbol of all they hate about the gaming community.

In backing a campaign like #GamerGate, Intel has insulted women gamers, and indeed women everywhere. Since half of Intel’s customers must be women, maybe it is time for them to boycott a company which supports pressure from those who treat them in the same way as the Taliban.

Apple to lose Siri to Samsung

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News

Anovità-apple-2013pple could lose the core technology behind its voice-command assistant Siri to its rival Samsung.

Siri is the product of SRI International, a research lab that has created many technologies and biosciences products. The digital assistant was spun out as Siri which Apple acquired in 2010, but the voice recognition engine is provided by Nuance Communications.

In June, Nuance and Samsung began merger talks, and everything “slowed” due to “complexities”.

Now it appears that the talks are back on and Nuance  redeemed $250 million in 2027 convertible notes to save a  future acquirer around $50 million from a debt-to-share conversion.

If Samsung buys Nuance, then Apple is in trouble. It would not want to buy the outfit because it is too expensive for what it would get and Jobs’ Mob would get all sorts of businesses like health care and imaging it does not want.

Samsung on the other hand could lap that side of the business up.  It already has a small healthcare business, and it would get access to 450,000 clinicians, 10,000 healthcare institutions, 50 percent of radiology reports and 98 percent of most connected hospitals.

If Apple had not done so much to hack off Samsung, maybe the outfit would have let it buy a licence, however after all the court cases this is not likely to be the case.

Schmidt is Steve Jobs fan

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News

19th c. fan068While Google and Apple are bitter rivals, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt said he was a Steve Jobs fan.

Schmidt said last week that the competition between the two companies is more “brutal” than ever, and Apple CEO Tim Cook and Schmidt have taken jabs at each other’s companies.

But despite the fierce competition, when asked  who his heroes were he said: “For me, it’s easy. Steve Jobs,”

“We could all aspire to be a small percentage of Steve,” he said of Apple’s late co-founder.

Schmidt and Jobs met in 1993, when Schmidt was working at Sun Microsystems and Jobs was at NeXT, the computer company he founded after being ousted from Apple. Schmidt, then Google’s CEO,  was invited to join Apple’s board in 2006.

Schmidt describes Jobs as the quintessential “smart creative”. He added  “Exceptional people are worth hanging out with… because there is a good chance they are going to change the world.”

This adoration might explain why when Jobs suggested building an employment cartel to screw up the lives of Silicon Valley employees, Schmidt said yes.  It would also explain why, against all logic he fired whoever Jobs told him to.

Silver Lake to sell IPC

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News

wall streetPrivate equity outfit Silver Lake wants to sell IPC Systems which makes communication systems for Wall Street traders.

It will be the end of one of Silver Lake’s longest-held investments and the outfit bought IPC from Goldman Sachs Group private equity arm in 2006 for $800 million.  Ironically it has hired Goldman and Evercore Partners to auction IPC off.

IPC makes about $160 million a year and could be valued at more than $1.4 billion in a sale, including debt. It makes specialised telephony systems for financial institutions ranging from investment banks to hedge funds. It is present in 5,000 customer sites in more than 60 countries.

IPC could be become a little more of a risky investment as the outfit seeks faster growth in sales of data and network services to financial services customers. These services are highly commoditized and IPC’s competitors in this area have more dosh to fight the upstart.

In August, IPC announced it had named Neil Barua, a Silver Lake operating partner and interim chief executive of IPC since February, as its permanent CEO.

Private equity funds typically hold companies three to seven years, making Silver Lake’s ownership of IPC for more than eight years unusual.

Silver Lake also wants to get rid of another financial technology company this year – the high-frequency trading outfit Virtu Financial.

 

UK allowed to copy digital content

Posted on October 3, 2014 by - News

copyDecades behind the rest of the world, the UK is finally permitted to make personal copies of digital content they have legally bought.

Consumers are allowed to keep the duplicates on local storage or in the cloud.  However you are not allowed to share the data.

This is the law that many people in the UK thought they already had, indeed most of the world has some fair use law for digital copying.  In the UK though ripping CDs to other formats had previously qualified as copyright infringement, although cases were rarely prosecuted.

The changes were detailed in June, when the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) issued guidance, but had not come into effect until now.

The minister for Intellectual Property, Baroness Neville-Rolfe said the changes are going to bring our intellectual property laws into the 21st century.

“They will mean that the UK IP regime will now be responsive to the modern business environment and more flexible for consumers.”

Also included in the law is permission to create parodies of copyright works. Previously, there has been a risk of being sued for breach of copyright if clips of films, TV shows or songs were used without consent.

Many EU nations place a levy on sales of recordable media, such as blank DVDs, memory cards and hard disks,  and some also add a charge to MP3 players and video recorders, with the proceeds passed on to the media industry.

All that is dying out along with physical formats.

 

Chinese snoop on iPhone protesters

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

apple fanboysThe Chinese government appears to be cracking down on Hong Kong protesters who use an iPhone or iPad.

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a computer virus that spies on Apple Inc’s iOS operating system for the iPhone and iPad, and they believe it is targeting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

Dubbed Xsser, the software can steal text messages, photos, call logs, passwords and other data from Apple gear.

Researchers with Lacoon Mobile Security uncovered the spyware while investigating similar malware for Google Android operating system last week that also targeted Hong Kong protesters.

Lacoon Chief Executive Michael Shaulov said that Xsser is the most sophisticated malware used to date in any known cyberattack on iOS users.

It is not clear what the Chinese government hopes to learn from an Apple fanboy’s account, there is just so much you can learn from a complete Coldplay collection and an undeletable U2 album.

It is unclear how iOS devices get infected with Xsser, which is not disguised as an app particularly as Apple claims that its software is super secure.

The code used to control that server is written in Chinese. The high quality of the campaign and the fact it is being used to target protesters suggests that it is coming from a sophisticated attacker in China.

“It is the first time in history that you actually see an operationalized iOS Trojan that is attributed to some kind of Chinese entity,” Shaulov said.

Lacoon said on its blog that it is possible the attackers might have deployed the Trojan in other places, in addition to spying on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

“It can cross borders easily, and is possibly being operated by a Chinese-speaking entity to spy on individuals, foreign companies, or even entire governments,” they said in their bog.

 

Backdoors save children, claims US

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

back doorUS Attorney General Eric Holder has backed police who fear that a client-side encryption in consumer devices will make their job difficult.

But Holder has a novel argument for this gross invasion of privacy – he is trying to convince people that it will save childrens’  lives.

Speaking before the Global Alliance Against Child Sexual Abuse Online, Holder insisted that it was possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy.

However, rapid access to customers’ phone data can help law enforcement to protect victims and combat the activities of sexual predators and kidnappers.

Holder’s comments have been prompted by security features which encrypt the data on the device based on a cipher derived from the personal security passcode that the owner generates.

His view appears to be that the American people will suffer any atrocity provided a child is able to grow up until they reach an age where they can lose all their privacy.

Police are increasingly worried that they will no longer be able to depend on desk-bound, net-based investigation and might have to get out onto the streets again.

 

Lotus 1-2-3 is dead as a dodo

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

ex-parrotLotus 1-2-3 officially ended its existence yesterday as IBM’s previously announced execution date passed with barely any attention from the tech press.

Big Blue only stopped selling Lotus 1-2-3 last year after more than 30 years of stirling work.

Lotus 1-2-3 was a spreadsheet program developed by Lotus Software, which is now part of IBM. It managed to be the “killer application” which sold the PC to business. Its first victory was kicking the first spreadsheet, Visicalc out of the market. Lotus 1-2-3 was a three-in-one, integrated program which could handly spreadsheet calculations, database functionality, and graphical charts. It needed a dongle though.

The Lotus Development Corporation was founded by Mitch Kapor, a friend of the developers of VisiCalc. 1-2-3 was originally written by Jonathan Sachs, who had written two spreadsheet programs for Concentric Data Systems.

The fact it was written for IBM’s new PCs meant that it became the software test for the new range of PC clones that flooded the market.  Because it needed large amounts of memory, 1‐2‐3 helped popularise greater RAM capacities in PCs and soon a huge 640k was required.

However its days were numbered as Microsoft had a spreadsheet called Excel. As its Windows operating environment grew in popularity so did Excel and a revamp of 1-2-3 for Windows failed to make much impact. Excel didn’t need a dongle. It had Steve Ballmer, instead.

Lotus 1-2-3’s demise was not helped by the fact that Microsoft punished IBM for its use of 1-2-3 by charging IBM higher prices, a late licence for Windows 95, and the withholding of technical and marketing support. IBM punished Microsoft by declaring OS/2 was a better window than Windows.

As a result, Big Blue wasn’t granted OEM rights for Windows 95 until 15 minutes prior to the release of Windows 95, August 24, 1995. IBM machines were sold without Windows 95, while Compaq, HP, and other companies sold machines with Windows 95 on the day of release.

Despite all that, Lotus 1-2-3 had an extremely long run with a large chunk of the world’s business carried out using it. It needed a dongle, though.

Internet Explorer still popular, shock

Posted on October 2, 2014 by - News

shockData gathered by Net Applications has revealed that despite the domination of press by its rivals, Microsoft Internet Explorer is still the world’s most popular browser.

Microsoft’s product accounts for almost 60 percent of the market and it does not appear to be going away anytime soon.

Chrome, which is IE’s main rival, has been expanding its reach and has grown to 21 percent up from 19 percent just a month earlier. That growth has mainly been at the expense of Firefox, which now accounts for only 14 percent, down from around 20 per cent a year earlier. Finally, Safari is holding steady at the five percent mark while other browsers are also slowly declining in usage.

Internet Explorer IE 8, which is the default browser in Windows 7, has slowly gained users and now accounts for over 22 percent of the market.

Newer versions of the browser, such as 10 and 11 have declined in numbers. IE 11, the current browser version only accounts for 17 percent.

As Internet Explorer 12 coming as part of Windows 10, formerly known as Windows 9, Microsoft may soon find itself in a situation where it’s desperately trying to get its users to upgrade.

Also it is telling that the impact of mobile browser use is negligible – both Apple and Chrome do not seem to benefit much from a “mobile effect” on the figures.