Just three weeks after the release of Platform Preview 6, Microsoft has released a seventh preview of Internet Explorer 9. The highlight of this new release is not new standards compliance but rather performance.

Improved performance has been a key goal of Internet Explorer 9's development. The new browser version relies heavily on GPU acceleration to provide high-speed graphics rendering and animation, and it includes a new JavaScript engine, codenamed Chakra, that compiles JavaScript in the background to achieve JavaScript performance that's tens or hundreds of times faster than Internet Explorer 8.

Throughout the development process, Microsoft has emphasized that the focus is on real-world website performance, not on popular but narrow benchmarks like the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. Internet Explorer 9's SunSpider performance has improved over the course of its development, but the company says that this has been a side-effect of its real-world focused improvements rather than a deliberate objective.

Even if SunSpider wasn't the main goal, the browser's performance is impressive: with the new beta, Microsoft is claiming better performance than Chrome 8 beta, Opera 11 alpha, and Firefox 4 beta 7, making the company's JavaScript performance the best around. This should be taken with a pinch of salt; there are some indications that Internet Explorer 9 is, for one reason or another, optimizing some benchmarks functions particularly aggressively but not performing similar optimizations to near-identical functions. This might indicate a bug in its optimizer, or it could indicate cheating.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is something of a polarizing figure. His loud, bombastic style on stage stands in stark contrast to the generally more reserved demeanours of other CEOs, and his tendency to gloss over what he sees as irrelevant detail with a cavalier "blah blah blah" rubs many the wrong way. Even after thirty years at Microsoft, Ballmer is nothing if not enthusiastic about the company and the work it does, and sometimes that enthusiasm boils over.

The contrast is particularly striking when we look at Apple. Though there are certainly similarities between Jobs and Ballmer—neither CEO is a straight-laced, buttoned-down, ordinary businessman, both have high-profile public images and personas, and both, apparently, have tempers—Steve Jobs is seen as almost the diametric opposite of Steve Ballmer. Steve Jobs does go off the reservation from time to time, but his manner is orderly, precise, and controlled.

Microsoft has updated the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit to include Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. As has been the case with previous service packs, soon after SP1 hits the RTM milestone, it will first go out on Windows Update (WU), and then eventually Microsoft will push it out via Automatic Updates (AU).

Users who don't want SP1 will be able to simply disable AU. Many businesses, however, prefer to keep AU on, but block the service pack so they can first test to make sure it works with all their software. The service pack blocker will allow them to continue having Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 update automatically without SP1. The tool is valid for 12 months following general availability of the service pack. After that, Microsoft will push out SP1 to everyone with AU on, regardless of whether it has been blocked.

The tool kit consists of three components: a Microsoft-signed executable, a script, and an ADM template. All of them set or clear a specific registry key that is used to detect and block the Service Pack download from WU. Companies can choose the one that works best with their computer management infrastructure.

Microsoft released the Release Candidate (RC) of SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, two weeks ago. Microsoft says it expects to release the final version of SP1 in the first quarter of 2011. Microsoft typically updates the Service Pack Blocker Tool Kit two months before a service pack's release. If Microsoft sticks to this timeline, we can expect SP1 in January 2011.

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Not content with suing Motorola in October over alleged patent violations in its Android phones, Microsoft has decided to chuck another lawsuit Motorola's way. This time, the company is claiming that Motorola has reneged on its duty to provide reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) agreements for patents the company holds that cover both H.264 video compression and 802.11 (WiFi).

As a member of both IEEE (the body which defines the WiFi specification, among other things) and ITU (which oversees H.264's development), Motorola is committed to providing RAND licensing for any patents it has that cover those technologies. Microsoft asserts that the patents are not essential to its products—including Xbox 360, Windows 7, and Windows Phone 7—as they enable only optional, secondary features, and in its filing does not accept the necessity of Motorola's patents to the standards in question: the purpose of RAND licensing is to allow companies to avoid patent controversies and endless arguments about which patents are or aren't necessary to a particular specification and instead make reasonable, nondiscriminatory agreements covering any relevant intellectual property. However, the company says that the licensing terms that Motorola is offering for its patents are excessive and unreasonable and as such fail to meet the RAND obligation.

The suit claims that Motorola is seeking royalties that are based on the retail price of the products in question—Xbox 360s, Windows Phone 7 smartphones, and Windows 7 PCs—rather than based on the price of the component software and hardware that actually relates to the patents named in the suit. Motorola is allegedly doing so even though these end products include significant amounts of hardware and software (and hence cost) that have nothing to do with Motorola's patents. By setting royalty rates in this way, Motorola is charging royalties that are, in Microsoft's view, excessive and unreasonable.

Microsoft is asking the court to declare that Motorola's royalty demands are not reasonable, can no longer be demanded, and that the company is obliged to offer reasonable licensing as part of its commitments to IEEE and ITU. Microsoft wants the courts to award it damages to compensate for the amount lost due to the excessive royalties.

Motorola, for its part, says that it has made a "fair offer" to Microsoft to license the patents, but that no agreement between the two companies could be reached.

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Microsoft last week published a security advisory alerting users to a flaw in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 that allowed remote code execution. At the time of the advisory, the flaw was seeing limited exploitation in targeted attacks. That situation could now change with reports that exploits of the security flaw have been incorporated into an exploit kit.

The result is that anyone with a few hundred dollars to spare has access to an Internet Explorer zero-day attack, opening up the door to widespread exploitation of the browser. Proof-of-concept code has been available since Microsoft's original advisory, but the inclusion of the exploit in the Eleonore exploit kit makes it much easier for relatively unskilled hackers to develop monetizable exploits that deliver payloads of their choosing.

Though the initial attacks were reportedly blocked by countermeasures such as DEP, and hence could not exploit Internet Explorer 8 in its default configuration, this too could change as the flaw is combined with existing DEP workarounds. The existing proof-of-concept code leaves such improvements as an exercise for the reader.

Though Microsoft is aware of the flaw, a patch will not be included in today's Patch Tuesday patches. Thus far, the company has not said when a patch will be released, though inclusion of an exploit in a toolkit means that it will be under additional pressure to release an early patch rather than waiting for December's Patch Tuesday.

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In recent months, Microsoft has made a couple of moves to make its Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus software more widely used. First, the company relaxed licensing restrictions, making it permissible to use MSE in businesses with ten or fewer PCs; prior to this change, the software was only licensed for home users. Now, the company has started to distribute the software through its Microsoft Update distribution system.

Last month Ars asked antivirus vendors their thoughts about the expansion of MSE into small businesses. Their responses could best be summed up as "it's good that Microsoft is raising awareness of computer security, but our software is still much better."

The broader distribution of MSE to consumers might not be as welcome. When Ed Bott at ZDNet asked Symantec and McAfee their thoughts, their stance was much the same as it is was before: "Microsoft's software offers only basic protection; ours is so much better, people really should use it." Infoworld is reporting that Trend Micro might not be so conciliatory.

Speaking to Infoworld, Carol Carpenter, the general manager of the consumer and small business group at Trend Micro said, "Commercializing Windows Update to distribute other software applications raises significant questions about unfair competition." She continued, "Windows Update is a de facto extension of Windows, so to begin delivering software tied to updates has us concerned. Windows Update is not a choice for users, and we believe it should not be used this way."

Trend Micro's response shows a poor understanding of the action Microsoft has taken. MSE is being offered not through Windows Update, but through the related Microsoft Update service. Microsoft Update, which updates a broad range of Microsoft products and occasionally offers new ones, requires a deliberate opt-in: it isn't enabled by default. Moreover, MSE will only be offered to customers who do not have an existing antivirus product installed—and in any case is offered as an optional download.

Though an antirust suit over an optional download that is only offered after enabling an optional feature seems unlikely, that competitors would even raise such concerns shows Microsoft's uniquely peculiar position in the industry. The third-party software vendors are more than happy to insist that Windows needs antivirus software and that using a Windows machine without such software is dangerous—but if Microsoft agrees with their assessment and tries to improve the situation itself, they threaten to cry foul.

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According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue three Security Bulletins addressing 11 vulnerabilities on Tuesday, November 9. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions the following day.

The first of the vulnerabilities is rated "Critical" while the other two are marked as "Important." The first two vulnerabilities earned their rating through a remote code execution impact, meaning a hacker could potentially gain control of an infected machine. All the three of updates may require a restart.

To the standard reasons to move to the cloud—greater scalability, reduced administrative costs, improved availability—Microsoft is hoping to add another reason: a lower carbon footprint. A new, Microsoft-sponsored study suggests that small businesses can reduce their carbon footprint by up to 90 percent by switching from on-premises Exchange, Sharepoint, and Dynamics CRM to cloud-hosted alternatives.

The argument makes sense; small businesses tend to have servers with capacities greatly in excess of their needs, leading to a lot of waste—an idle server may use 50-60 percent of the power of a fully-laden one. Cloud service providers use multi-tenancy to ensure that their servers run with little spare capacity, getting far more useful work out of each ton of carbon dioxide. Their specialization also allows them to build data centers with higher efficiency than conventional standalone servers.

The gains for larger organizations with 10,000 or more users were accordingly far smaller: larger organizations tend to push their servers harder, making them more efficient. But even for these, reductions in the range of 20-80 percent are claimed, depending on workload. The study suggests that if every US company with between 100 and 10,000 employees were to switch its e-mail service to a cloud-hosted alternative, the total carbon emission saving would be equivalent to taking 100,000 passenger cars off the road.

Data centers are already a significant user of electricity, and a greater switch to cloud computing will make them even more power-hungry. Their greater efficiency, however, means that the use of cloud services could still be a net win. While carbon savings are unlikely to be a significant factor in the thinking of all but the most environmentally conscientious of corporations, the greenwashing potential of the study's findings could yet stimulate greater cloud adoption.

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