Windows News Digest [#2]

We introduce you the first news digest in 2011!

Microsoft demonstrated at a press conference on January 5 the “next version of Windows” running on ARM processors. At the press conference Microsoft Windows President Steven Sinofsky showed off an early build of Windows 8 runnong on new systems-on-a-chip (SoC) platforms from NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments on ARM. To prove Microsoft isn’t abandonning the x86 architecture with Windows 8, company officials also showed off Windows 8 running on x86 SOC.

Opera will show a Browser for Windows 7 Tablets at CES. Opera say that they are going to show off some Windows 7 tablets and netbooks which will be running this latest edition of their browser at CES. The current Opera browser is custom built for smartphone devices, but this tablet friendly version has been optimised to fit on larger screens and enhances the ability to smoothly scroll and zoom webpages on the larger screens.

Microsoft is at odds with a researcher employed by Google who published a zero-day Internet Explorer vulnerability on New Year’s Day. The vulnerability was discovered using cross_fuzz, a browser fuzzing tool created by Google researcher Michal Zalewski, who says he gave Microsoft more than six months of warning before going public with the flaw. That hasn’t stopped Microsoft from sharply disagreeing, however, with the company arguing that Zalewski has now put thousands of IE users at risk.

The year 2010 ended quite well for two products from Microsoft and Google, at least when it comes to specific market share numbers. Windows 7 passed the 20 percent mark while Chrome almost reached double digits. Despite IE8’s strong growth and the IE9 beta program, Internet Explorer has hit a historic low. Firefox is stubbornly holding on to its users, while Chrome and Safari continue their growth. Before we go into further detail with browsers, let’s take a peek into the world of Windows.

Over on the Windows Live Solution Center, a number of Windows Live Hotmail users have been complaining about missing e-mails. For the last three days, users have reported that their e-mails have been deleted from their Inbox and other folders or that e-mails sent to them never arrived. Microsoft has since fixed the problem, after declaring that the issue was not widespread. Less than 12 hours later, the company said the problem was fully resolved: “We have restored the e-mails to those who were [a]ffected. If you are still missing your emails, please post your issue here (please note that you need to be logged in to the windowslivehelp.com site to be able to post) with as much detailed information as possible (How much wasn’t restored, and any specifics that you may have). We sincerely apologize and thank you for your continued patience.”