Stories about: Microsoft

Taking aim at the Microsoft Office franchise on the Macintosh, IBM announced Tuesday that its free Lotus Symphony suite of personal productivity applications will come out of beta for the Apple Inc. hardware platform later this month.

Web sites saw visitors deserting Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser in favor of Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome in December, according to Web analytics company Net Applications.

A "clerical error" by Mozilla Corp. omitted one of the security patches that was supposed to be included in the Windows version of yesterday's Firefox 2.0.0.19 release, a company executive said today.

A recently-approved technology standard should help software developers to tap the latent processing power of graphics chips and transform regular computers into veritable supercomputers -- at least for certain applications. Poised to take advantage of the technology first is Apple.

Window Snyder, the head of security at Mozilla Corp., will resign her position at the end of the year, she said in a blog post Wednesday.

When Microsoft completed its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Powerset in July, it acquired more than just search-engine technology. In the HBase component of Powerset's product, Microsoft also acquired open-source code that is actively being redistributed back into the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop project.

Mozilla Monday released Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, the first version of its flagship browser to turn on a much faster JavaScript engine and sport a working privacy mode.

Open Invention Network, which buys patents related to the Linux operating system and licenses them royalty-free, Tuesday launched a program aimed at encouraging open-source developers to document information about their work so that it can be easily read and used by patent offices and lawyers.

When people think of software pirates, they usually envision college kids downloading games off BitTorrent, or adults getting too-good-to-be-true bargains off eBay, or street stalls lined with DVDs in Third World cities.

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a free plug-in for Firefox to translate Open XML documents, an update to its document translator and a toolkit for Java developers that was built under the umbrella of its Document Interoperability Initiative.

The market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) dropped under the 70 percent mark last month for the first time since Web metrics vendor Net Applications started keeping tabs on browsers, the company said Monday.