Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

M$ updating programs to better battles competitors

Filed under
Microsoft

Linux is just one of Microsoft's headaches. The software giant is facing competitive threats in nearly every part of its business.

Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, has steadily lost market share in the last year and now holds less than 90 percent of the market, according to NetApplications.

The biggest beneficiary has been Firefox, a browser that, like Linux, was created by open-source software developers.

As with Linux, Microsoft has awakened to Firefox's challenge.

It announced this summer that it would update Internet Explorer for Windows XP instead of reserving new browser features for its upcoming operating system, Windows Vista.

The new Internet Explorer, a trial version of which has already been sent to developers, has browsing "tabs" that allow users to access multiple sites without opening new windows.

It takes the first steps toward incorporating RSS feeds, a type of syndication service for Web sites. And it includes space for a search engine in the toolbar.

In short, it does a lot of the things Firefox does, plus some added security features to protect users from phishing scams.

"Even with the gains Firefox has made amongst early adopters, 85 to 90 percent of users are still using IE, and those users are going to love what they see" in the new version, said Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of Internet platforms and security product management.

Other competitive battles Microsoft faces:

  • Personal computer operating systems: Microsoft still dominates the desktop - and the laptop - but Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS has made a little noise lately. And in Europe, Linux is beginning to creep onto corporate PCs.

  • Music: Apple's iPod and iTunes online music store took the industry by surprise. Microsoft, meanwhile, is encouraging makers of music players and music sellers such as Napster to support a common standard for copyright protection. That strategy will win in the long run, Microsoft believes.

  • Cell phones and portable devices: Microsoft makes an operating system for "smart" phones and handheld computers, but it's battling PalmSource, Symbian, Linux and many more.

  • Gaming: Sony's PlayStation console still rules the market, but Microsoft has carved out a place in some gamers' hearts with the XBox.

BY CRAYTON HARRISON
The Dallas Morning News

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.