By instituting automatic updates, Microsoft takes user out of the equation by bringing them the latest version of Explorer silently. The goal, Microsoft says, is to make the web a better and safter place. The most common features of any web browser update are speed and security improvements. Newer browser versions are also generally better adapted to the most recent advances in web-based technology, such as the relatively recent rollout of HTML5. Using an up-to-date browser gives users a safer and better internet experience. Often, however, users neglect to keep their browsers up to date, for a variety of reasons. Automatic updates relieve them of the need to fuss over whether their browser is as up-to-date as possible, while delivering them a safer and better internet experience, and making the jobs of web developers easy by making sure more people can see pages designed to the latest web standards and using the latest technologies.

This move brings Microsoft into line with its two main rivals in the web browser business: Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. The practice began with Chrome, and Firefox followed suit in October. Chrome, which has only been around for three years, has been gaining rapidly on its two main competitors recently. One study found that Chrome has overtaken Firefox in global market share to become the second most popular web browser worldwide, though Firefox still leads int he US. Another study showed that the most recent version of Chrome, Chrome 15, is the most popular single browser version in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8 by 0.1%. When all versions are taken together, however, Explorer still has a substantial lead over both Chrome and Firefox. Though it has been losing ground to Firefox and Chrome, Explorer has been the default browser on every Windows computer for years, allowing it to piggyback to the top on Windows’ market share, which is almost unassailable.

Apparently, IE users aren’t quite the smartest citizens of the interwebs – at least when compared to users of Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Here’s how the test went: AptiQuant offered online IQ tests to over 100,000 people and charted the results based on which browser they used to take the test. Simple as that.

The results show that IE users of all versions performed the poorest of all browsers tested. And the older the version of IE you’re using, the lower your IQ. IE 6 users and IE 7 users average a score of barely over 80. IE 9 and IE 8 users averaged around 95 and 90, respectively.

Next were Firefox users, followed by Chrome and then Safari. The real bright bulbs turned out to be Opera users, who average an IQ score of just under 130.

They also measured these results against results from 2006 and found that IE users have dropped on the scale over the past 5 years.

AptiQuant concluded this –

The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual’s cognitive ability and their choice of web browser. From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers. This hypothesis can be extended to any software in general, however more research is needed for that, which is a potential future work as an extension to this report.

Of course not all people who use IE lack intelligence. But these findings have to make you wonder; why do those other browsers appeal to a more intelligent crowd?

“If you’ve used Instant on google.com or in Chrome, you’ll be right at home with Toolbar Instant,” says Google’s Allen Huang, Associate Product Manager on the Toolbar. “Just start typing in the search box and search predictions and results will appear instantly as you type, getting you the results you want faster.”

As a Chrome user, I can honestly say that I can hardly remember what it was like before Google Instant from the browser, even though it’s not been available for that long. Most people seem to like it.

“This new version of Toolbar is simpler, cleaner and emphasizes what’s important to you. The tools that you use most will remain visible on the toolbar, while buttons that you haven’t used recently will be moved to the new ‘More’ button,” says Huang. “s you discover and use particular tools that help your browsing experience, like Share or Translate, they’ll automatically appear on the toolbar, making your most relevant tools easy to access. This personalization is stored only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google unless your usage statistics are enabled.”

The toolbar also comes with new privacy settings accessible from a single menu, where you can adjust your preferences for things like PageRank, spell check, and SideWiki.

The toolbar is available in English only, but will be available in other languages in the future. Current Toolbar users will be automatically upgraded over the coming weeks.

“We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best Web experience on Windows,” says IE Corporate VP Dean Hachamovitch. “IE10 continues on IE9′s path, directly using what Windows provides and avoiding abstractions, layers, and libraries that slow down your site and your experience.”

“We’re about three weeks into development of IE10, and based on the progress we’ve made, we want to start engaging the development community now,” he said. “At the MIX conference today, we showed the new browsing engine along with several new browser test drives that anyone on the Web can try out.”

The test drives can be viewed here. New HTML5 demos include: strict mode, tweet columns, Griddle, CSS3 Flexbox Flexin’ and The Grid System.

Internet Explorer 9′s adoption rate has been five times higher than that of IE8′s according to the Microsoft.

The browser is facing rampant competition these days. Firefox 4 is doing pretty well (currently with nearly 80 million downloads) and Chrome’s market share continues to grow. Mozilla and Google have both boosted their release process to launch more versions at a faster pace.

The IE10 Platform Preview can be downloaded here.

We don’t know exactly when we’ll see the fruits of the company’s partnership with Nokia, but that could be an indication right there. While nothing has been officially announced in terms of dates, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop did suggest that Nokia Windows Phones would come out this year.

Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President of Internet Explorer said, "We’ve worked closely across the Windows Phone and IE teams over the last few months to deliver the same IE9 browsing engine—the same code, the same standards support, the same hardware acceleration, the same security and privacy protections—for Windows Phone as we’ve delivered on the desktop."

"As a result, when you compare different browsers side by side using official W3C standards tests, for example here, you can expect very similar results for IE9 on Windows Phone and the Windows desktop," he added. "When you compare side by side browser performance, for example here or here, or running the FishIE Tank demo, you can still expect very similar results. You can also expect similar results comparing the security and privacy protections, for example here and here."

MicrosoftComing to Windows Phone in 2011: Twitter in the People Hub, additional SkyDrive support, Internet Explorer 9, and expanded multi-tasking. Visit Microsoft News Center for the full details, then come back here and share your thoughts.1 hour ago 207 likes 44 comments

Other things announced by Ballmer:

First Major Update 
A free customer update will be made available for all Windows Phones in the first two weeks of March, which includes new capabilities such as copy & paste and faster application performance.

Availability on CDMA Networks 
With added support for CDMA networks, Windows Phone will be available to even more customers on mobile operators such as Verizon and Sprint in the first half of 2011.

Twitter Integration in the People Hub 
The popular social networking service Twitter will be integrated into the People Hub in the second half of 2011.

Office Document Storage in the Cloud 
Document sharing and storage in the cloud via Windows Live SkyDrive will be added to Windows Phone in the second half of 2011.

Additional Multi-tasking Capabilities 
We will add the ability to switch quickly between applications, run applications in the background (such as listening to music), along with a number of other capabilities in the second half of 2011. Developers will learn much more about this during April’s MIXconference.

According to a recent report, Microsoft outbid Google for the Nokia deal, and is paying billions for it. 

As reported in PC Advisor, Google Chrome’s blog announces the latest beta of Chrome. Google had dropped the beta tag back in December but it is back as well as the beta channel that is designed for feedback. No indication why that happened but they are Google after all and they can do what they want. The greatest change according to Google is its increase in speed.

“The best thing about this new beta is speed – it’s 25 percent faster on our V8 benchmark and 35 percent faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version (of Chrome) and almost twice as fast compared to our original beta version,” said Brian Rakowski, Google product manager.

Google’s philosophy is to give users the changes as they go rather than save them up for a big release. Other features to look for are autofill, autoscroll and the ability to drag tabs for side by side views.

While Google’s blog gave its point of view, the new IE 8 from Microsoft, which will be available at noon today, was reviewed in the WSJ today by Walter S. Mossberg. From a 30,000 foot fly over point of view, the review was that the new features are fantastic but the trouble is speed. On that note he did not let the new IE 8 unseat Mozilla as his favorite browser for Windows but it appears as if the latest version of the most widely used browser has made strides to be better.

Some of these features can’t be matched out of the box by its main rival browsers. For instance, related tabs are color-coded, the search field can show images along with text, you can get instant fly-out maps of place names in Web pages, and you can easily hide your tracks online from the prying eyes of advertisers.

The review is very detailed and looks at improvements in search functions, privacy features and compatibility, which appears to be pretty strong for the most part which will help ease the nerves of designers and developers who wonder what the impact may be on existing sites.

In a kind of informal survey tell us what browser you currently use and if it isn’t one of these two would you be willing to switch for any reason? Also, which is a bigger event today; the release of IE8 or the start of the NCAA tournament?

Comments

This new test will put more pressure on the browsers to attempt to adhere to further standards with JavaScript. Hopefully they will all pass it soon with their push towards adopting web standards as they are written.

Hopefully we will be seeing IE8 and Firefox 3 released very soon. There are of course already versions of Firefox 3 available for download. However, not many of the extensions work on the beta browser yet. Until they do I don’t plan to fully switch over to Firefox 3. I would like to say that Firefox 3 renders pages incredibly fast and loads and runs very fast within Windows also. I’m awed by the new version.

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