msblogs

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser seems to be reversing its market share losses showing microscopic gains, according to research firm, Net Applications. The research group says the overall Internet Explorer share grew 0.42% worldwide in July 2010. While some of IE rivals showed a slight dip, Apple’s Safari and Opera saw their market share increase to 5.09 percent and 2.45 percent respectively.

Internet Explorer 8 logged a 0.98% gain in July 2010 and now accounts for about 30 percent of worldwide browser usage. On the Windows Blog, Microsoft’s Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing, Ryan Gavin blogs:

While the continued IE8 momentum is encouraging, developers and browser enthusiasts are equally as excited by the future of Internet Explorer. There is great buzz around the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Previews – with 2 million downloads of the Preview and over 16 million page views to the IE Test Drive site.

Related content from GigaOM Pro: (sub req’d): What Does the Future Hold for Browsers?

GigaOM

Bing continues to (dare we say it?) innovate, and while some of the improvements aren’t earth-shattering, and indeed some bits of news aren’t even included in Bing (yet), we wanted to make sure to note them here even in the midst of all the #NewHotmailHere excitement.

You may have seen this already, but it’s worth a look anyway: this week Microsoft Research released a video of a new research project building on the Bing Streetside technology, dubbed Street Slide:

(Microsoft Research Street Slide – 190k YouTube views as of this posting!)

If you remember way back in the first days of Virtual Earth 3D Maps and an attempt there to include embedded ads into the 3D maps, well the Street Slide approach seems to be a much more fluid, interesting, and useful way to include potential ads for businesses, now some 4 years later.  Of course Street Slide also includes some pretty cool technology, check it out!

A couple of recent blog posts on the Bing Search blog point out some more new stuff, available now: Bing Highlights for Safari, and New Games Come to Bing.  Another post points out Camera Scanning on the iPhone app, available since the Bing for iPhone app came out in late June.

Oh and one more thing about Bing Maps – our friend Chris Pendleton has published an article on the IEEE website – “The World According to Bing”, congrats Chris!

LiveSide.net

Apple today announced the release of Safari 5.0.1. What’s significant in this point release is that Apple has turned on support for the Extensions Gallery. When Safari 5 was released in June, it included support for extensions so that developers could start building them, but without access to the Extensions Gallery, users had no easy way to find and install those extensions.

The Safari Extensions Gallery is accessible from the Safari menu or via extensions.apple.com. Users can download and install extensions from the gallery with a single click, with no need for a browser restart. Extensions can be automatically updated and are managed within Safari.

Safari Extensions are built with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript web standards. Every Safari Extension is signed with a digital certificate from Apple to prevent tampering and to verify that updates to the extension are from the original developer. Safari Extensions work in a sandbox, so they can’t access information on a user’s system or communicate with websites aside from those specified by the developer.

While the Safari Extension Gallery is launching with a range of extensions from the likes of Bing, the New York Times, Twitter and eBay, it’s nowhere near to matching the usefulness of Chrome’s extensions, let alone Firefox’s gigantic range of add-ons. Apple’s decision to include extension support in Safari is a smart one, but until developers start porting the most useful extensions to Safari, I’ll find it tough to switch from my favorite browsers.

You can download Safari 5.0.1 for both Mac and PC for free from Apple.

What Chrome or Firefox extensions would you like to see ported to Safari?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

GigaOM

Apple released an update to Safari today, upgrading to version 5.0.1, that introduces extensions to the Safaris user base. Extension tools were available in the original 5.0.0 release, but for developer use only. Since then, developers have working to prepare their extensions for today’s release date. Some of the extensions…

Neowin.net