Joris Evers

America Online Inc. (AOL) on Thursday released the first public test version of Netscape 8, a new Web browser with features designed to protect users against online scams and malicious code.

By midyear, Microsoft Corp. plans to release a test version of a new Internet Explorer (IE) browser that better protects users from scams and malicious code while surfing the Web, the company announced recently.

An appeals court on Wednesday threw out a US$520.6 million patent infringement judgment against Microsoft Corp. and ordered a new trial in the dispute brought by Eolas Technologies Inc. In the case, Eolas and the University of California accused Microsoft of improperly including technology in the Internet Explorer Web browser that allows interactive content to be embedded in a Web site, a common practice on the Internet.

Microsoft Corp.'s silence on its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) architecture has some industry insiders wondering if the technology has been substantially delayed, or even axed. Microsoft unveiled NGSCB, formerly known by its Palladium code name, in 2002.

With Carly Fiorina's ouster at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), some partners are hoping for a more channel friendly and customer-focused leader at the company. During Fiorina's tenure as chairman and chief executive officer (CEO), HP hurt reseller and distributor partners by undercutting them and selling direct to customers as it battled for market share with Dell Inc., several HP partners said. Her successor could limit direct sales and strengthen the channel partnerships, they said.

Microsoft Corp. wants PC makers to mount cell phone-like displays on the lids of laptop computers so users can check the time, battery status, appointments or see if new e-mail has arrived without having to open and start up their PC.

Seeking to be more transparent to developers, Microsoft Corp. is weighing plans to make available more early versions of its software and share more source code, company representatives said Monday. Speaking to an audience of developers at the VSLive conference in San Francisco, Soma Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, said he wants to work closely with external developers for the benefit of the end user.

Reinforcing its positioning of Office as not just an applications suite, but a development platform, Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday kicked off its first Office System Developer Conference. The event at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, underlines the software maker's efforts to get developers to expand on Office. Microsoft has offered several tools to do so, including Visual Studio Tools for Office, an update to which will be demonstrated Friday in a keynote by Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates.