Microsoft will launch its newest version of the Internet Explorer browser, IE9, at the South by Southwest festival March 14, the company said in a blog post Wednesday.

From the Texas site of SXSW, as the event is known, the tech giant plans to create “a more beautiful Web” starting at 9 that night.

Among the more interesting features is tracking protection, a privacy feature that will let users select which websites to block from gathering information.

IE9 will be available to those with Windows Vista and Windows 7, though not XP.

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-- Tiffany Hsu [follow]

Photo: Rob Mauceri, group program manager of Internet Explorer for Microsoft Corp. Credit: Chip Chipman/Bloomberg

Microsoft Corp. has posted a new Web page urging the millions around the world who still use its 10-year-old Internet Explorer 6 browser to just stop.

"It's time to say goodbye," the page says.

"The web has changed significantly over the past 10 years," it continues. "The browser has evolved to adapt to new web technologies, and the latest versions of Internet Explorer help protect you from new attacks and threats."

Indeed, the page is largely a promotion by Microsoft to get people to upgrade to the much newer Internet Explorer 9, which is debuting now. The new browser has a cleaner look and snappier feel, more like its leaner competitors Firefox and Google Chrome.

Microsoft says only about 12% of global Internet users still use IE6, a 9% drop from last year. The goal is to get that down to less than 1 percent, the company says. 

Counting all of its versions, Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser worldwide, now used by more than 50% of Web surfers internationally, according to StatCounter. Firefox is second, with 31.3% of the market, followed by Chrome with about 10%.

The lion's share of users still employing the decade-old product are in China, where about half of the remaining 12% are using the browser. The U.S. is in a distant second, with about 0.7%, followed by South Korea and India.

Newer versions of Internet Explorer, as well as those of any other browser, are free and relatively easy to download and install. If you're not sure which version of a browser you have, look for a menu option that says "About Internet Explorer," or "About Firefox," somtimes under the "Help" menu.

-- David Sarno

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Image: Microsoft's IE6 countdown meter on ie6countdown.com. Credit: Microsoft

The first "do not track" legislation was introduced in Congress on Friday, raising the possibility that Web users will be able to prevent advertisers from recording their online behavior for marketing purposes, similar to the Do Not Call Registry created in 2003.

The bill, called the "Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011," would give the Federal Trade Commission the right to create regulations that would force online marketers to respect the wishes of users who did not want to be tracked.

"Failure to do so would be considered an unfair or deceptive act punishable by law," noted a statement from the office of Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who is sponsoring the bill.

Speier also introduced a second bill that would enable consumers to better control financial information collected about them by banks and other institutions. That bill includes a provision that would prevent companies from sharing consumer financial information without explicit pre-approval from the consumer, a process known as opting in.

“These two bills send a clear message — privacy over profit,” Speier said in a statement. “Consumers have a right to determine what if any of their information is shared with big corporations, and the federal government must have the authority and tools to enforce reasonable protections.”

In recent weeks, several browser-makers have said they will add mechanisms that make it more difficult for advertisers to track user behavior.

Google’s Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft’s newer Internet Explorer 9 will have some protections built in, but critics say those features are not always easy for the average user to operate, nor do they block every type of tracking.

In December, the FTC released a report urging for stronger online privacy controls, including a Do Not Track mechanism. The Commerce Department also recommended stronger controls, but stopped short of recommending legislation.

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-- David Sarno [follow]

Photo credit: Anemoneprojectors / Flickr

Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox Web browsers are each gaining new features that will block advertisers from tracking Web surfing habits.

Firefox's feature, announced Sunday, will be called Do Not Track and is under development. Chrome's utility, announced Monday, is called Keep My Opt-Outs and available now.

The two tools to help protect user privacy follow a December Federal Trade Commission recommendation that all Web browsers add do not track features.

Shortly after the FTC recommendation, Microsoft said its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 will have a feature that will enable users to create lists of websites they do or do not want tracking them.

Alex Fowler, Mozilla's technology and privacy officer, said in a blog post that Firefox's upcoming Do Not Track feature will be the nonprofit group's first step toward improving user privacy.

"When the feature is enabled and users turn it on, web sites will be told by Firefox that a user would like to opt-out of OBA [online behavioral advertising]," Fowler wrote. "We believe the header-based approach has the potential to be better for the web in the long run because it is a clearer and more universal opt-out mechanism than cookies or blacklists."

Google too announced its blocking tool in a blog post.

Sean Harvey and Rajas Moonka, two Google product managers, wrote that Keep My Opt-Outs will allow users to opt out of tracking from advertisers by way of a downloadable browser extension that will allow users to defer from personalized ads "from all participating ad networks only once and store that setting permanently."

Both Google and Mozilla's tracking blocking tools do, however, have a caveat.

The tools only apply to advertising companies that offer opt-out options. So far, advertisers have been slow to add such options themselves, though Google noted that the advertisers that are members of the Network Advertising Initiative offer such options, as do some Web advertising trade associations. 

Web advertisers track which websites consumers visit online in large part to offer Web ads that would appeal to a user based on the user's surfing habits.

Google said once its Keep My Opt-Outs feature could lead to users seeing repeat ads or ads that are less relevant to their interests. Google, a major seller of Web advertising, also offers the option of users tailoring ads they see in Chrome by telling the Mountain View-based company what types of ads they'd like to see.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Image: A screenshot of the downloadable webpage for the Google Chrome extension Keep My Opt-Outs. Credit: Google

The World Wide Web Consortium -- also known as the W3C -- released its logo for HTML5 on Tuesday, with the help of Microsoft.

The World Wide Web Consortium is a collaboration of sorts in which corporations including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Opera and nonprofits such as Mozilla contribute to international Internet standards. In all, the W3C has 322 member organizations.

The W3C's HTML5 logo, the group hopes, will be placed on websites built using HTML5, the programming language and technologies that are still in development but becoming an increasingly popular standard for the Web.

The logo, an angular orange shield, was designed by the W3C with input from Microsoft. And Microsoft is already helping to promote the logo's use.

Jean Paoli, Microsoft's general manager of interoperability, wrote in a blog post that "the logo links back to W3C, the place for authoritative information on HTML5, including specs and test cases. It's time to tell the world that HTML5 is ready to be adopted."

The logo can be downloaded and used or tweaked by anyone as he or she sees fit, under a Creative Commons license.

The W3C is giving away HTML5 logo stickers and selling logo t-shirts that read, "I've seen the future. It's in my browser."

"It stands strong and true, resilient and universal as the markup you write," the W3C wrote in introducing the logo. "It shines as bright and as bold as the forward-thinking, dedicated web developers you are. It's the standard's standard, a pennant for progress. And it certainly doesn't use tables for layout."

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Images: HTML5 logo and HTML5 logo T-shirts. Credit: World Wide Web Consortium

Microsoft announced Tuesday that users of its Internet Explorer 9 Web browser would soon be able to create lists of sites that they do and don't want tracking them.

The news of the browser update, which Microsoft said would arrive sometime next year, comes as the Federal Trade Commission is mulling over proposals to limit websites and online advertisers' ability to track how and what people surf on the Web.

The commission is looking to protect online consumers from companies tracing their "digital footprints" online, but some lawmakers worry such laws could hurt the economy of the Internet.

Internet Explorer's new feature, called Tracking Protection, will not automatically block websites from collecting data about how a user surfs the Web. Rather, users will have to create their own lists of specific websites and third-party sites that they'd like to block and not block.

"Some consumers today have been very clear that they have privacy concerns, like being unclear about what information is being shared and how it is used as they browse," said Peter Cullen, Microsoft's chief privacy strategist, in a statement.

"Some sharing is good -- you may want a shopping site to know your history -- but it is hard for anyone to differentiate today. The consumer challenge here is that the technologies involved are very complex and even the definitions -- what exactly constitutes tracking -- are still under development by the industry."

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

Image: A screen shot of "Tracking Protection" being used to block a third-party website from following a user of Internet Explorer 9. Credit: Microsoft

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, second from left; former Google China executive Kai-Fu Lee, center; and Google executive Johnny Chou, right, in better times. Credit: Doug Kanter/Bloomberg News.

In a statement, Microsoft admitted that Internet Explorer was one of the "vectors."

Microsoft said it is working with Google, partners and authorities. It is working on a patch for the hole, which could allow an attacker to gain control of a computer if the target clicks on a link in an e-mail or an instant message.

Earlier in the day, McAfee detailed how attackers targeted Google. 

Wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz: "As with most targeted attacks, the intruders gained access to an organization by sending a tailored attack to one or a few targeted individuals. We suspect these individuals were targeted because they likely had access to valuable intellectual property. These attacks will look like they come from a trusted source, leading the target to fall for the trap and clicking a link or file. That's when the exploitation takes place, using the vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer." 

Once downloaded and installed, malware allows the attacker to take over the compromised system.

Google stunned the world by going public with the attacks on Tuesday. It said the attacks originated in China and that human rights activists' e-mail accounts were targeted.

McAfee said it believes attackers named the operation "Aurora."

-- Jessica Guynn

Good news for fans of Internet Explorer 6, the version of Microsoft's online browser that debuted in 2001. Even though the company is now up to its eighth version of the browser, it will continue to support IE6 until at least 2014.

Not that Microsoft is happy about that.

"Friends do not let friends use IE6," said Microsoft's Amy Barzdukas, in an interview with BBC News. The company wants Internet users to upgrade to IE8, which is also free.

And many developers don't want to bother making their products conform to IE6. Mark Trammell of the Digg content rating site, blogged, "Here at Digg, like most sites, the designers, developers, and QA engineers spend a lot of time making sure the site works in IE6, an 8-year-old browser superseded by two full releases."

The developers even contributed to a site, www.ie6nomore.com.

But IE6 has the numbers on its side. As of July, according to Net Applications, IE6 was still the world's most popular browser, with just more than 27% global market share. IE7 was second at 23%, followed by Firefox 3.0 at 16%.

Some fans of IE6, who had their own Save IE6 site, were loathe to upgrade from a browser version that seemed to work just fine for them. Perhaps they were haunted by the 2006 switch from Microsoft's XP to Vista operating system, which for many did not go well, to put it mildly.

But the major obstacle to IE upgrades is business users, many of whom have hundreds or thousands of computers humming along with IE6. Upgrades bring about the possibility of software conflicts in all those computers.

As Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch put it on the company's Windows blog, the business user can't afford to upgrade for the fun of it, just to use nifty new features. "The backdrop might be a factory floor or hospital ward or school lab or government organization, each with its own business applications," he said.

"For these folks, the cost of the software isn't just the purchase price but the cost of deploying, maintaining and making sure it works with their IT infrastructure."

-- David Colker