Microsoft has renamed Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh. Redmond often rebrands its Windows Live products, but there's more than a simple name change to today's announcement.

Windows Live Mesh will support syncing hidden files and will show a list of files that might be missing in a synced folder. Complaints that 2GB is an insufficient amount of storage have resulted in 5GB becoming the cloud storage limit again. Microsoft has also been working on cutting the application load time in half, speeding up syncing large numbers of folders or adding multiple devices to a sync folder, and optimizing memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as when idle.

Windows Live Mesh has had two previous names. Microsoft bought FolderShare from ByteTaxi in November 2005 and released it in March 2008, renaming it to Windows Live Sync in December 2008. The "Windows" moniker isn't the best, since Sync (as well as Microsoft's other online services) is available for the Mac. 

These name changes remind us that Microsoft's syncing/storage strategy is a mess. When the Windows Live Wave 4 beta arrived two months ago, we were happy that Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh were being merged. Microsoft would finally be offering just one product (Sync/Mesh) and just one service (SkyDrive, for uploading photos, files, and documents for sharing) that would happily work together, right? Wrong.

Although SkyDrive is integrated better than it was previously, users still don't have access to its entire 25GB for sync (remember, Microsoft just went from 5GB, to 2GB, and back to 5GB). 

"While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive," explains Microsoft. "This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios." Maybe the merge will be complete by Wave 5?

Microsoft should have its syncing/storage strategy ready for this year's Windows Phone 7 release, but it won't. Windows Live Mesh will not support mobile phones when it's released. This would be tolerable if the original Live Mesh didn't support syncing between PCs and devices, but it did. With Wave 4, though, Microsoft eliminated mobile support and won't say when it's coming back.

Currently we have 25GB of space for SkyDrive, an infinite amount for Hotmail, 200MB for MyPhone, and so on. Why not offer 100GB on SkyDrive and make it accessible via all of Microsoft's products and services? That's so simple it just might work.

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Facebook has announced that it will soon end Internet Explorer 6 support for Facebook Chat. The kill date is September 15—the same day Microsoft plans to release the first IE9 beta. Today's announcement comes just a week after Microsoft launched a beta version of Windows Live Messenger that integrates with Facebook Chat.

Facebook explains its decision by saying that many users have complained about unstable chat sessions, or ones that stop completely. In order to improve the way connections are established and messages are sent, however, the social networking giant must make changes that aren't supported by older browsers.

Microsoft plans to support IE6 along with Windows XP until April 2014; the software giant insists that "dropping support for IE6 is not an option." Instead, the company has resorted to marketing and promoting IE8 while criticizing IE6.

Meanwhile, a growing number of technology firms have taken the problem into their own hands. The IE6 hater is Google: the company has killed off support for the obsolete browser in Google Docs and Google Sites, Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as YouTube. Even Microsoft has taken some baby steps in this direction; the new Office Web Apps don't support the browser either. 

Facebook's decision is reason for IE6 haters to celebrate, but unfortunately it's not going to spell doom for the ancient browser. The majority of IE6 users come from the corporate world, and as we've discussed before, one of the reasons that world keeps IE6 around is exactly because it doesn't work well with social networking sites like Facebook. Facebook's changes may mean fewer IE6 users using the chat feature, but this won't be because the change will spur people into upgrading—they can't upgrade their office machines. It will be because they won't be able to chat at all.

Last month, IE6 had a usage share of just under 17 percent; at the start of the year it had just over 20 percent. Major sites putting an end to IE6 support for popular features is not enough to kill the browser, but the rapid growth of Windows 7 should make slow but steady progress in eradicating it from the Internet.

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The Microsoft Exchange team has announced that Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1 is available for download now. This comes after a short public beta period; announced in April, and released in June.

Among other things, the Service Pack adds new replication features to improve robustness, a new mailbox online repair mechanism for when things do go wrong, the ability to import historic e-mail directly from a PST into a mailbox, better load balancing, improved mailbox searching, IRM support in OWA when using Safari, the reintroduction of themes in OWA, and a raft of other improvements.

The new version should also usher in the availability of hosted Exchange 2010 solutions. Multi-tenant support, which allows one Exchange installation to provision services for multiple customers, means that service providers can use regular Exchange to provide cloud-hosted Exchange. Previously, this required extra components that only supported Exchange 2007, with the result that hosted service providers have not been able to offer Exchange 2010 (with perhaps one exception). Service Pack 1 should enable such providers to offer Exchange 2010 capabilities.

This fits in neatly with Microsoft's forthcoming Small Business Server "Aurora," which unlike previous Small Business Server versions, eschews a locally-hosted Exchange in favor of cloud services. This obviously becomes more attractive if those cloud services support Exchange 2010, as it means that Aurora will offer the same capabilities as standard Small Business Server, but without the administrative overhead.

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Though Microsoft has released four previews of Internet Explorer 9 over the past six months, none of them included much of a user interface. The company was keeping that under wraps, with the first public unveiling happening in a few weeks, on September 15. But with an apparent mistake by one of Microsoft's Russian Web properties, it looks like the secret might be out: the site posted a screenshot that apparently shows the new browser UI, as noticed by Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Though the blog post has now been deleted, it's still currently available in the Bing cache. As well as the single screenshot, the site described five features of the new browser. Some of these are well-known—standards compliance, performance—but the site also described new user interface features.

The first step of Yahoo's transition from an in-house search infrastructure to Microsoft's Bing platform is complete. Yahoo announced the completed conversion today: its Web, image, and video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now being served up by Bing. Microsoft meanwhile noted that the conversion currently only affects Yahoo's English search results in the US and Canada, with other languages to follow "in the weeks and months ahead."

The change comes over a year after Microsoft and Yahoo agreed to partner on search and ads in order to combat Google. The Yahoo search results still have the same appearance, except for the 7.5 point text stating "Powered by Bing™" at the bottom of the page.

We contacted both Microsoft and Yahoo to find out which countries will get the Bing-powered-Yahoo next but neither company was eager to share. "At this time, Yahoo! has not given details on international rollout, but I will keep you posted," a Yahoo spokesperson told Ars. Microsoft was only a bit more helpful. "As soon as we are up and running in North America, we will begin the work of scaling out internationally," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars.

As we noted on Bing's one year anniversary, Microsoft's offering has been gaining credibility where its predecessors failed. Depending on which market share numbers you follow, Bing should now have somewhere between 16 and 28 percent market share in the US thanks to Yahoo's help. The hope is that with the additional hits, Bing will over time learn to provide more accurate results as the number two search engine behind Google.

In addition to the search results in the center of the page, the two companies are also working on the sponsored results in the sidebars. The move of Yahoo's search ad infrastructure to Microsoft's AdCenter platform is due for completion "later this fall," but both companies have said they are willing to postpone the move till early next year as it may disrupt the holiday season. The revenue model for the Yahoo Search BOSS program still needs to be finalized, and many search-related tools for publishers will be released "in the months to come."

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Last week, HD Moore, creator of the Metasploit penetration testing suite, tweeted about a newly patched iTunes flaw. The tweet said that many other (unspecified) Windows applications were susceptible to the same issue—40 at the time, but probably hundreds.

The problem has been named, or rather, renamed, "Binary Planting," and it stems from an interaction between the way Windows loads DLLs and the way it handles the "current directory." Every program on Windows has a notion of a "current directory"; any attempt to load a file using a relative path (that is, a path that does not start with a drive letter or a UNC-style "\server" name) looks in the current directory for the named file. This concept is pretty universal—Unix-like systems have the same, called a "working directory"—and it's a decades-old feature of operating systems.

It has become a bit of a cliché: really innovative technology comes from garage-level startups. Once a company gets too large, it focuses its energy on keeping its existing customers happy, and loses its edge. But, for the most part, the technology we rely on for getting things done—providing the hardware and networking infrastructure, for example—comes from mature, profitable companies. So, we thought it might be interesting to take a step back and look at what tech companies are among the most successful at marketing products and services that are widely put to use.

Of course, any measure of "success" is inviting argument. Should it be profits, units sold, recent growth? We settled on two measures. The first is the market capitalization, which provides some sense of how the financial community views both a company's current fiscal strength and its potential for future growth. To provide some sense of how much of that is growth potential, we chose the price-to-earnings ratio as our other measure—the higher the number, the more the company's perceived growth potential factors into its market cap.

The second beta of Windows Live Essentials 11, the application bundle containing Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Sync, and more besides, was released today.

The update includes a load of stability and performance enhancements, along with several new or improved features: publishing videos to flickr from Movie Maker, better support of Gmail's special spam and trash folders, and larger video uploads to SkyDrive, to name a few.

Arguably the biggest new feature is in Windows Live Messenger. The first beta included the new social view with Facebook updates; with beta 2, this has been extended to include integration with Facebook chat. The 300 million Windows Live Messenger users can now use Messenger to chat with the 500 million Facebook users.