SAN FRANCISCO – Even as questions remain about Microsoft’s commitment to its Silverlight rich Internet plug-in platform, the company made available on Friday version 5 of the technology, featuring a variety of new capabilities.

Silverlight 5 includes hardware decode of H.264 media, which improves performance with the decoding of unprotected content using the GPU. Also featured is Postscript Vector Printing to improve quality and file size, and an improved graphics stack with 3D support using the XNA API on Windows gains low-level access to the GPU for drawing low-level 3D primitives and vertex shaders, Microsoft’s Silverlight team said.

Also featured in Silverlight 5 is a “Trusted Application” model extended to the browser. This means that when the model is enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, users will not need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks, such as multiple window support.

“Silverlight is part of a rich offering of technologies from Microsoft helping developers deliver applications for the Web, desktop, and mobile devices,” the Silverlight team said in a blog post. “Download Silverlight 5, a free plug-in less than 7 MB in size that can be installed in less than 10 seconds.”

But Microsoft’s commitment to Silverlight appears less than solid. Recently, the company said no plug-ins, such as Silverlight, would work with the Metro-style interface planned for the Internet Explorer browser. Metro is new UI and mobile-oriented application mode planned for the Windows 8 OS. Instead, HTML5 will be the technology of choice. And Scott Guthrie, a Microsoft corporate vice president who has been a key advocate for Silverlight, moved over to the Windows Azure cloud platform team several months ago.

Nonetheless, Microsoft marches on with Silverlight.

Analyst Al Hilwa, of IDC, still sees significant potential for Silverlight 5, for the time being. “There is a considerable body of existing apps or websites written in Silverlight, and those apps and their users will benefit from the improvements in the Silverlight runtime, especially the hardware acceleration. Addressing large user populations with HTML5 on desktop browsers is still a challenge because many users will continue to use non-HTML5 browsers for the next two years.” Hilwa added, though, that he expects that in five years, fewer websites will be supporting Silverlight and Silveright on the desktop is “strategically challenged.”

SAN FRANCISCO – According to a report from Forrester Research, consumer desire to purchase Windows 8 tablets has suffered a massive decrease, slumping from 46 percent in the first quarter of the year to a mediocre 25 percent six months later. That’s not good news for a product still a close to a year away from seeing an official launch.
Can Microsoft produce a tablet operating system for both consumers and business users to rave about? Yes, especially if the Windows 8 development team takes the time to consider and act on these five points.

1. Ensure Ample App Offerings

Unfortunately, not all Windows 8 tablets will be created equal. Where some will no doubt boast powerful Intel chipsets, loads of RAM, and a luxurious amount of storage space, other more reasonably priced devices will come packing ARM mobile processors and more modest storage and memory sets. These less-powerful devices won’t have the horsepower to run the full desktop iterations of Microsoft Office, FileMaker, or other software that many businesses rely on daily to make the wheels go ’round.
In order to make Windows 8 tablets not only a viable but an attractive alternative to consumers, Microsoft must have a substantial launch-day library of useful applications to offer potential customers. It needs key third-party developers on board with ARM-compatible offerings that allow the power of their desktop software to be enjoyed on a low-powered, tablet-based sibling.

2. Work Toward Unification

Since I’ve already mentioned that not all Windows 8 hardware will be created equal, the time is right to discusss whether users of the various flavors of Windows 8 will be able to communicate and collaborate easily. SkyDrive will play a significant role in Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy. This has document sharing and communications covered. But it leaves open whether users of a Windows 8 desktop or Intel tablet with access to a full version of Microsoft Office would be able to collaborate with users packing ARM-powered tablets and their less-capable iterations of Microsoft’s productivity tools. If Microsoft can crack this nut, it will be well on their way to capturing the hearts and minds of business users.
3. Do Away with Past Frustrations

While users of Windows 7 tablets can leverage the power of desktop software on the go, doing so has been an exercise in frustration, thanks to the operating system’s lackluster touchscreen interface features. Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft is taking steps to address this with Windows 8. The virtual keyboard offered as part of the developer’s build of the OS offers the best tablet typing experience on the market today, handwriting recognition is respectable, and the Metro UI was made for poking and swiping. When using legacy applications such as Microsoft Word and Tweetdeck, window closure options as well as maximize and minimize buttons are all a touch-friendly size.

Unfortunately, despite all of these features, the relatively small amount of screen real estate doesn’t allow for easy use of legacy app interface items, such as PowerPoint’s ribbon interface, or the selection of individual cells on an Excel spreadsheet. If Microsoft finds a way to do away with such interface frustrations without forcing users to invest in new, tablet-oriented versions of software they already own, it could have a serious win on their hands.

4. Keep It Simple

One of the key reasons that the iPad has become such a staggering success is the device’s simplicity of form and function. Microsoft would do well to take note of this and keep things simple. With the Metro interface system of floating, resizable, and moveable tiles, it would appear that Windows 8 is on the path to the zen enlightenment that could make it the tablet computing hit we’re hoping it will be. But a lot can happen between now and when the OS is released later next year. Here’s hoping it stays on target.

5. Watch Quality Control

As any PC user will tell you, an operating system is only as good as the computer it’s paired to. When installed to a high-quality machine with respectable tech specs and excellent build quality, users can expect a superior computing experience. When that same operating system is installed to a rig that barely meets the OS’s minimal requirements? Not so much. With Microsoft’s history of offering the Windows OS to any grey box manufacturer under the sun as an OEM installation option, we’re betting to see any number of tablet manufacturers adopt Windows 8 as an alternative to Android.
That said, we’d like to see Microsoft hold off on making Windows 8 available to every tablet computing vendor under the sun, even if it’s only for a little while. In order for the OS to be considered a true contender in mobile computing, it needs to be showcased on well-spec’ed hardware developed by premium manufacturers such as Asus or Samsung with an eye to quality and performance.

This would allow consumers to have an opportunity to see what the OS is capable of on top-drawer hardware, before choosing to go slumming for kit available at a bargain basement price.

SEATTLE – Microsoft will build a Kinect device specifically for use with PCs, as the company prepares to launch a program to support commercial products developed for Kinect and Windows.

Kinect is the motion and voice technology that Microsoft first introduced as an add-on to the Xbox. Gamers with Kinect play games by moving their bodies, rather than pushing buttons on a controller.

In a recent video, Microsoft showed some possible applications for Kinect with Windows, including people playing musical instruments by moving their hands in the air; a surgeon flipping through X-ray images without touching the screen; a teacher controlling a display of the night sky by moving his arms; and a technician remotely controlling a robot that defuses a bomb.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released a software development kit to let developers build applications on Windows that make use of the Kinect sensor. The Kinect device Microsoft will build for PCs has a few adjustments that should make it better suited for use with computers.

“Of particular interest to developers will be the new firmware which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 50 centimeters in front of the device without losing accuracy or precision, with graceful degradation down to 40 centimeters,” Craig Eisler, general manager of Kinect for Windows, wrote in a blog post.

This “near mode” will be more suitable for someone sitting at a computer, as opposed to standing in front of a TV. It’s been one of the most requested features from developers already working on products, Eisler said. The new hardware will also have a shorter USB cable for connecting to computers.

When Microsoft first released the SDK for Kinect for Windows, it limited developers to non-commercial use only, saying it would release a commercial package in the future. It recently promised to launch that program early next year.

Some developers may be worried about how much to invest in their products without knowing more about the commercial program. Eisler wrote that users have said they want assurance of support and continued innovation from Microsoft. He hinted that the commercial program will give licensed customers access to ongoing updates in speech and human tracking technology as well as full support for Kinect hardware for Windows.

Microsoft recently announced an incubator program for getting startups with Kinect ideas off the ground. A Microsoft spokesperson said that Kinect for Windows will be commercially available prior to the incubation phase of Kinect Accelerator. Microsoft is accepting applications through Jan. 25 and the program will start in March.

By Gregg Keizer
October 4, 2011

FRAMINGHAM – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) last month continued to shed users, losing the largest chunk of share since December 2010, Web measurement firm Net Applications reported Saturday.

During September, IE lost nine-tenths of a percentage point of share to slip to 54.4%, a record low for the browser. Last month’s drop was the seventh straight decline and the most since last December, when IE fell by 1.1 points.

The beneficiaries of IE’s slide were again Google’s Chrome, which grew its share by seven-tenths of a point, and Apple’s Safari, which gained four-tenths of a percentage point.

Chrome ended the month with a 16.2% share, while Safari accounted for 5% of all browsers used worldwide.

Microsoft, however, preferred to look on the bright side by again plugging the success of IE9 on Windows 7.

Roger Capriotti, the head of IE’s marketing, used Net Applications’ data to highlight the gains of IE9 — the browser Microsoft launched last March — by noting its 21% global share of browsers running on Windows 7, an increase of seven-tenths of a point. Microsoft’s message has been consistent: It believes the future of IE is in the hands of its newest browser.

On Windows 7, IE9 is the second-most-popular browser, with a 21% share compared to IE8′s leading 31.6%. In third and fourth place, respectively, were Firefox 6 and Chrome 13 with 13.9% and 13.1%.

Microsoft has never outlined an alternate strategy for stopping IE defections. While the focus on IE9 may pay off down the road — perhaps when the huge numbers of Windows XP users finally retire that OS — it’s failed to slow defections. Since IE9′s debut, Microsoft has lost 4 percentage points of share.

That was again illustrated last month: At the same time that IE9 gained eight-tenths of a point for a 8.7% share of the browsers running on all operating systems, the other editions collectively sloughed almost twice as much share. IE8, for instance, lost about two-tenths of a point, slipping to 29.9%, while IE7 and IE6 lost two-tenths of a point and 1.1 points, respectively.

IE6, which Microsoft has been trying to kill for more than two years, dropped by 1.1 points, the biggest decline since January 2011. Globally, IE6 — a decade-old browser introduced just before the launch of Windows XP — now accounts for an 8.6% share.

“And if you remove China’s figures, IE6 only represents 3.5% usage share worldwide,” said Capriotti in a Saturday blog .

Microsoft has been tracking the decline of IE6 on a deathwatch-style website for the last six months.

Chrome gained most of the share that IE lost, a trend in place since late 2009 when Mozilla Firefox’s growth stalled. Firefox lost about one-tenth of a percentage point in September to end the month at 22.5%.

Firefox is in danger of losing its second-place spot to Chrome: If the two browsers keep to their pace over the last year, Chrome will overtake Firefox in June 2012. That’s about six months later than projections based on data from rival metrics company StatCounter.

Chrome will crack the 20% mark in March 2012 if maintains its current tempo.

Apple’s Safari was the only other browser besides Chrome to gain share in September. Using a boost in browsing by Mac machines, Safari exceeded 5% for the first time, said Net Applications.

Net Applications calculates browser usage share with data obtained from more than 160 million unique visitors who browse 40,000 Web sites that the company monitors for clients. More browser statistics can be found on the company’s site.

By Richard Edwards, Ovum Principal Analyst
September 17, 2011

By Jason Cross
September 15, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft has spent so much time at the BUILD conference this week talking about how Windows 8 will operate like a tablet OS that you might feel left out if you plan to continue working on a desktop or laptop. But whether you’re an IT manager, PC enthusiast, or professional just trying to get some work done, Windows 8 will have enough new features to make it worth your interest.

First, there’s performance. Microsoft promises that Windows 8 will run on every machine Windows 7 runs on, but if our early demos are any indication, it should actually run better. A clean boot of Windows 8 should use less RAM and CPU resources than Windows 7 currently does. The new Metro-style, full-screen, immersive applications suspend themselves when you can’t see them, consuming no CPU cycles (though they still occupy some RAM).

Boot-up times are fantastic. The increased speed is most noticeable on new systems with the optimized UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface); but even if you have an existing system with no special hardware, you should see a massive reduction in the time it takes to go from pressing the power button to getting up and running.

Though the Start Screen is made for touch, it works just fine for keyboard-and-mouse users whose PCs lack touchscreens. Just start typing, and it instantly brings up the search interface, looking for applications as you type. The Windows key brings you back to the Start Screen from wherever you are, and keyboard shortcuts abound. Windows-D, for example, opens the traditional desktop interface. Move the mouse to the lower-left corner of the screen, and the five “Charms” of Windows 8 (Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings) pop up. The scrollwheel moves you left and right through your screens of tiles, but scrollbars also appear along the side and bottom when necessary.

I’ve used a keyboard and mouse with the Samsung test device, and while the arrangement certainly takes some getting used to, it doesn’t feel like a slow, cumbersome way to operate a Windows 8 PC. The best results come from a combination of using the touchscreen when it is most efficient and turning to the keyboard and mouse when that’s the quickest and most precise way to get things done.

We’ve all had to spend hours at some point reinstalling Windows, and then reinstalling all of our applications and user data, just to eliminate the malware, toolbars, messed-up file associations, and other junk that has filled our machines (or our parents’, kids’, or coworkers’ machines). The new Reset and Refresh features in Windows 8 should eliminate much of that pain.

Reset obliterates all data on your system and returns the computer to its out-of-the-box state in about 10 or 15 minutes. Refresh is even better, though–it preserves your user data (including the Metro apps you’ve downloaded from the online Windows Store) and clears out everything else. So you get a “fresh” PC, but you don’t have to copy your pictures, music, and documents to external storage and then back to your system. By default, Refresh won’t restore your standard desktop Win32 applications, but power users can modify its behavior: You install your core applications, getting your machine to the condition you want it, and then you use a command-line tool to ensure that when you use Refresh, the system will return to that state.

Tinkerers will love the new Task Manager, too. It’s cleaner and more attractive, providing a simpler look into how your system resources are being consumed. It also builds in some additional functionality that you used to find in other applications, such as real-time resource-use charts (as in Resource Monitor) and control over startup applications (as you would find in Msconfig).

Have other PCs to manage, or just like to log on to your home or work PC remotely? The new remote-desktop Metro-style application supports multitouch and multiple simultaneous remote desktops. If you prefer the traditional windowed remote-desktop tool, it will still be available.

If you want to test software on various Windows installations, or maybe try out some beta programs without messing up your machine, Windows 8 gives you a way to do it: Hyper-V virtualization will be built into the Windows client.

The basic shell and Explorer will undergo several improvements, though we’re told that the standard desktop interface is by no means complete. Explorer’s new Ribbon interface is a contentious issue, but it certainly brings a lot of functionality to the surface. And everyone can appreciate little tweaks such as the Up button to the left of the location bar: It takes you to the folder one step higher in the hierarchy. (As opposed to the back button in the current version of Explorer, which takes you to the last folder you viewed.) You can directly mount ISO and VHD files from within Explorer, too. Double-clicking a virtual hard disk (VHD) file mounts it as a hard disk with a new drive letter, while doing the same to an ISO treats it as a new optical drive.

If you have multiple monitors, you’ll be happy to know that Microsoft is doing more to make your life easy. Windows 8 will finally enable desktop backgrounds that properly span multiple monitors. You can also fine-tune how the taskbar behaves. For instance, you can set up your taskbar so that the Internet Explorer icon moves from monitor to monitor as you move the app, meaning that the icon will always be right below the application window.

Some changes are purely under the hood, but should make significant differences in how snappy the OS feels. For example, apps should take up less memory, thanks to changes that handle RAM more efficiently. The memory manager uses a new “page combining” technique that will collapse identical 4K memory pages in use by multiple applications into a single page, until they are altered. If one of the apps changes its version of the memory page, it splits off into another page. This means that multiple applications loading the same resources will no longer duplicate data in memory.

Microsoft isn’t done talking about features for enthusiasts, business, and IT. The focus here at the BUILD conference is on the dramatically new Start Screen and Metro applications and their development, but we’ll hear more about PC fundamentals and features for power users over the coming months.

By Gregg Keizer
September 15, 2011

FRAMINGHAM – The company also dealt with more fallout from the June hack of DigiNotar by flipping the “kill switch” on SSL (secure socket layer) certificates issued by Dutch certificate authority, or CA.

But none of the information Microsoft released today about the five updates or the 15 bugs was news: On Friday, the company leaked drafts of the security bulletins, the term Microsoft uses for the advisories that accompany each update.

All of the updates and vulnerabilities were rated “important,” the second-most-serious rating in the company’s four-step system.

Two of the vulnerabilities are in Windows; five are in Excel, the spreadsheet included with Office; two involve non-application Office components; and six affect SharePoint and associated software, such as Groove and Office Web Apps.

Of the 15, two are “DLL load hijacking” vulnerabilities, a term that describes a class of bugs first revealed in August 2010. Microsoft has been patching its software to fix the problem — which can be exploited by tricking an application into loading a malicious file with the same name as a required dynamic link library, or DLL — since last November.

Apparently that job isn’t finished: Microsoft has yet to close a 2010 advisory that warns users of DLL load hijacking bugs in the company’s software.

The update users should deploy first is MS11-072, which includes bug fixes for all supported versions of Excel, including the newest Excel 2010 on Windows and Excel 2011 on the Mac, several security professionals said today.

“The Excel one because of the attack vector, through malformed files,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security, when asked which update should move to the top of the list.

Others experts agreed.

“Top priority should be given to MS11-072, which fixes an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in Excel,” said Wolfgang Kandek, the chief technology officer for Qualys, in an email. “It affects all versions of Excel including the most recent 2010 version…[and] to exploit this issue, attackers could create malicious Excel files, which, when opened on vulnerable hosts, can take control of the system.”

“Excel-related email attachments and links have commonly been used in attacks on organizations and this one should be addressed,” added Kurt Baumgartner, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

Other updates quashed bugs in WINS (Windows Internet Name Service), a component of Windows Server last fixed in May; and patched a cross-site scripting vulnerability in SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft’s collaboration software.

Alongside the five updates, Microsoft delivered yet another update to deal with the theft of more than 500 digital certificates from DigiNotar.

“We are releasing another update, adding six additional DigiNotar root certificates that are cross-signed…to the Untrusted Certificate Store,” said Pete Voss, a spokesman for Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, in a blog post.

Cross-signed certificates are those that DigiNotar issued, but then had co-signed by another CA — in this case Entrust or GTE — to allow them to be used by Windows PCs or browsers which were not already equipped with a DigiNotar certificate.

Certificates issued by Entrust or GTE will not be affected by the today’s update, said Storms.

Microsoft and others, including rival browser makers Google and Mozilla, and operating system competitor Apple, have scrambled for the last two weeks to block or ban DigiNotar certificates.

Today’s ban expansion came a week after Microsoft blocked others on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

September’s security patches can be downloaded and installed via the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, as well as through Windows Server Update Services.