It has been a year of transition for Microsoft. Microsoft introduced its cloud operating system Azure, and released online versions of Exchange and SharePoint, two of its most popular infrastructure servers. In addition, the company revealed it was developing for the first time Web-based online versions of popular Office applications. It's all a setup for what will define Microsoft's 2009.
The newly released Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and Chrome 0.4.154.33 compete into JavaScript performance testing. Firefox remains the leader on the SunSpider test, with a score of 2.110, chrome edged very close with 2.140. A lower score is better, because of some variation in results, the nubers are an avarage of several runs.
Amethyst Personal Edition (PE) is an editing and project management
environment for developing Adobe Flex and AIR applications using Visual
Studio. In the first quarter of 2009 a Professional Edition release including extended features is intended.
The internet telephone company Truphone released a free application that helps mp3 player transforms into a mobile phone. The application allows users of a Wi-Fi connection to make and receive phone calls via VoIP with other iPod Touch owners, users of the Google Talk's messaging service, and customers of Truphone's internet telephone service.
The Pulitzer Prize Board announced that it will consider entries from online-only publications in addition to print outlets for the 14 journalism categories that once were prestigious but now few care about.
On Monday Mozilla released the second beta of Firefox 3.1 that comes with lots of changes. The new version features support for video and audio built into Web pages, a built-in service for telling Web sites a user's location, private browsing , Web workerand the TraceMonkey engine for running Javascript programs.
The alpha of Opera 10 was the first browser to fully comply with the Acid3 test. The latest version of the desktop browser scored 100 out of 100 on the Acid3 test, which was created to assess whether browsers comply with a range of web standards around features such as rendering and Javascript.
Microsoft is increasing periodically the total number of beta testers for Windows Vista SP2. The final release is scheduled for April 2009.
Read MoreGoogle has published its plan to build into Chrome what is arguably its most requested feature: the ability to accept extensions that can customize how the open-source Web browser operates.
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