Web design blog

Consider the logo for the new Microsoft Edge browser:

Now consider Sega’s iconic game hero Sonic the Hedgehog:

Coincidence? Clever marketing ploy? Ninja-style infiltration of Microsoft by Sega?

You be the judge.

From a recent post at Slashdot:

Yesterday Microsoft released IE9 and since then we’ve been getting tons of submissions about it: It’s hard to tell if it is a threat to web development or the fastest thing on the web or even a waste of time. You’ll just have to decide for yourself … if you are one of the 9% of Slashdot readers who actually uses IE.

— IE 9 Released, Media Has Opinions @ Slashdot

From the comments:

I’m glad we’re at least finally able to have a discussion about IE’s competitive performance versus other browsers, instead of the number of rendering bugs, workarounds, and hacks required to support it. I don’t exactly pay a lot of attention to the latest browser benchmark news with regard to cheating, but it’s clear that the IE team has made enormous improvements. Look at the relative performance of IE8 versus the field, and IE9 versus the field. They’ve gone from orders of magnitude behind to being one third of the front-of-the-pack regarding performance. I never thought I’d see a performance battle between IE, Opera, and Chrome for the top spot, but here we are. Firefox will catch up I’m sure, but I’m still extremely impressed with the ground that the IE team has made up.

— Slashdot comment

News from the Search Engine Wars:

Bing has overtook Yahoo for the first time worldwide in January and increased its lead in February according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37% in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google’s 89.94% of the global search engine market.

— Slashdot

As browser-based exploits and specifically JavaScript malware have shouldered their way to the top of the list of threats, browser vendors have been scrambling to find effective defenses to protect users. Few have been forthcoming, but Microsoft Research has developed a new tool called Zozzle that can be deployed in the browser and can detect JavaScript-based malware on the fly at a very high effectiveness rate. Zozzle is designed to perform static analysis of JavaScript code on a given site and quickly determine whether the code is malicious and includes an exploit. In order to be effective, the tool must be trained to recognize the elements that are common to malicious JavaScript, and the researchers behind it stress that it works best on de-obfuscated code.

— Slashdot

A series of critical breakthroughs – massively increased bandwidth, the demand for rich media, cloud computing, the advent of wireless connectivity and the rise of mobile devices – has created the foundations for the next generation of rich internet-based apps.

Each of the big three computing companies – Microsoft, Apple and Google – has its own radically different vision to promote, as does the world’s biggest creative software company, Adobe

The stage is set for an enormous battle between these computing titans, and the value of the prize is incalculable: what price can you put on a company that holds the keys to the internet?

— Tom Arah @ PC Pro

Via Slashdot.