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The Browser market share is always changing, and there are plenty of sources for global browser stats, however, the most divergent methods are user-based or hit-based. Simple illustration, if you have a small website and 5 different users visit one day all with different browsers. Each has a 20% share. But if 4 of them just look at one page, and the 5th user looks at 10 pages, then the user-based stats are still the same at 20%, but the hit-based stats have changed radically in favor of that guy looking at 10 pages.

Whilst, Internet Explorer 10 directly trails the path of IE9, these improved IE versions are taking the top slots with IE11 solidly in first, at least in many regional stats.

The most reputable and commonly cited source, NetMarketShare has the following results (February 2014):

NetMarketShare:

  1. Internet Explorer: 58.19%
  2. Mozilla Firefox: 17.68%
  3. Google Chrome: 16.84%
  4. Safari: 5.67%
  5. Opera: 1.23%
Ironically, the NetMarketShare stats has IE8 as the number one IE version at 22%, which is supported by the fact that some regions like China, with qazillions of users, have many users still stuck on very old Microsoft operating systems with older versions of Internet Explorer.

Browser Wars: Desktop Browser Usage Trend for First Quarter 2014

Microsoft's support for Windows XP ended on April 8, leaving out the aged OS access to future security updates. And Oracle announced that it too will stop providing official support for Windows XP, with rumors claiming that the upcoming security update for Java 7 and future releases might not work on Windows XP.

The company has dispelled the rumors that the upcoming security update for Java 7 and those it will release in the future might not work on Windows XP.

Oracle maintains that all versions of Java that were supported prior to the Microsoft de-support announcement will continue to work on Windows XP according to a blog post. Even as the next security updates for Java 7 is scheduled for Tuesday and will fix 20 security issues which could be exploited remotely without authentication, Windows XP users may still continue to use Java 7 updates at their own risk, but support will only be provided against Microsoft Windows releases Windows Vista or later.

The point remains that Oracle can no longer provide complete guarantees for Java on Windows XP, since the OS is no longer updated by Microsoft.

The company, however have strongly recommend that users upgrade to a newer version of Windows that is still supported by Microsoft in order to maintain a stable and secure environment.

Why is Java no longer supported on Windows XP?

Microsoft announced a milestone in its effort to strengthen encryption across its networks and services by the introduction of Transport Layer Security encryption (TLS) for its webmail services, including Outlook.com, Live.com, and MSN homepage. What this means for users is that when you send email, its encrypted and thus better protected as it travels between Microsoft and other email providers. However, this requires that the other email service provider also have TLS support.

In addition to the availability of TLS, Outlook.com has also enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support for sending and receiving mail between email providers, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections.

Matt Thomlinson, VP, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Security, announced in a blog post on the company's comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen encryption across its networks and services with the goal to provide even greater protection for data across all Microsoft services.

Also, Microsoft Cloud computing service, OneDrive now has PFS encryption support enabled as well. OneDrive customers now automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive online (https://onedrive.live.com), or via the OneDrive mobile application and sync clients.

As with Outlook.com’s email transfer, this makes it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections between their systems and OneDrive.

Outlook.com gets Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption for both outbound and inbound email

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