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Microsoft's upcoming update for its web browser, Internet Explorer 9, puts a lot of focus on support for the HTML 5 standards. IE9 is also expected to beef up performance, offloading tasks within the web browser to the graphics processing unit (GPU), or using separate CPU cores for certain elements of web pages if available.

While still easily the world's most used web browser, Internet Explorer has seen its market share drop along with its reputation as rivals such as Mozilla and Google pump out more and more features, support and speed for their web browsers.

The new IE supports CSS3 features such as rounded corners and opacity, while also now supporting SVG even though Microsoft is pushing its own Silverlight platform for rich graphics. At a conference in Las Vegas where IE9 was demoed, Microsoft showed H.264 video running at 720p in the browser, with the support for the video and audio content built-in.

Microsoft Corp. has been ordered to pay $106 million in damages to a communications company by a jury overseeing a patent infringement lawsuit. The jury found that the Redmond-based software giant had violated two patents held by communications company VirnetX Holding.

The ruling followed a trial lasting a week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. Specifically, $71.75 million was awarded for violation of one of the patents, while $34 million was awarded for the other, bringing the total to $105.75 million.

Microsoft Corp. was disappointed with the ruling, and maintains that it does not violate any patents held by VirnetX Holding. The patents in question cover methods for establishing Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

Microsoft said that it plans to appeal the jury's verdict.

The Chinese government expects Google.cn to respect the country's rules with regard to censorship even if it plans to quit the country altogether. Shares of Baidu were up 4.8 percent on Monday, while shares of Google fell 3 percent as speculation mounts on Google's likelihood to leave the country.

The search giant announced in January that it would quit China if it had to maintain self-censorship of its search results. The ruling communist party forces search engines to filter out results for certain terms, or certain results that it deems inappropriate for Chinese citizens to see.

Google's threat to leave the country came after it, along with at least 20 other companies, was the target of a cyberattack aimed at stealing Google's Intellectual Property and at the e-mail accounts of Chinese activists.

"On entering the Chinese market in 2007, it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law," Yao Jian, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, said. "We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations."

"Even if it pulls out, it should handle things according to the rules and appropriately handle remaining issues," he added. Google entered talks with the Chinese government over the situation, but reports suggest that the company is almost certain to close its Google.cn site and quit the country, which has 384 million Internet users.

Large computer maker Dell has filed suit against five Asian tech companies this week, alleging that all five colluded as a cartel to overcharge for LCD panels.

The suit is against large manufacturers Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba, Seiko Epson and HannStar Display and was filed in San Francisco.

The complaint notes that Dell is taking action "on behalf of itself and its affiliates to recover for antitrust and other harms arising from billions of dollars of purchases at artificially inflated prices, over several years, of thin film transistor-liquid crystal display panels, or products containing TFT-LCD panels."

Dell goes as far as to say that the LCD price fixing has been in effect since 1996.

In the past, Sharp was accused and pleaded guilty to price fixing, agreeing to pay a $120 million fine.

VGChartz has posted an interesting and speculative report this week, implying that Microsoft may be creating an Xbox 360 "Slim," a redesign that will shrink the size of the original console and mark the first major complete redesign since the console's launch in 2005.

Microsoft is hiring a new motherboard engineer, one for the 360 development team, with the job ad going up last week.

CEO Steve Ballmer, known for letting speculative comments fly almost every time he speaks, started the rumor mill last week as well, saying new console models would be available in the future with different "form factors."

Here is the full job ad (and let the speculation begin):

Job Category: Hardware Engineering
Location: United States, CA, Mountain View
Job ID: 714897
Product: Xbox Home
Division: Entertainment & Devices Division

Motherboard Design Engineer
Job Description
The Xbox 360 Console development team is seeking qualified candidates for an Electrical Engineer. The responsibilities of this position are focused on specifying, designing (schematic capture, PCB layout, BOM, cost analysis), implementing and verifying the mother-board and other various sub-system boards that make up the XBOX 360 product line. This work includes development of requirements and evaluating different solution for functionality, cost, and risk. The subsystems on the XBOX 360 mother board include (but are not limited to): High speed busses (front side bus, memory bus, PCIe bus, SATA bus, USB bus, I2S, etc.), memory, Ethernet, audio/video, system clocking, power and thermal management, and misc. analog/digital circuitry.
The XBOX 360 Console Development team is responsible for aggressive cost reduction of the console throughout the life of the product as well as expanding the market for the console in derivative products. The position involves working closely with industrial designers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, software engineers, test engineers, component engineers, and program managers.

Sony has introduced a new 'Skinny' SDK this past week, one that will give developers a way to create non-game applications and add them to the PlayStation Store, quickly and easily.

The company has described the lightweight 'Skinny' tool as "a simple yet effective means for content holders to put their intellectual property on the PlayStation platforms without software development."

On average, the apps will take one day to create. The software will be mainly used (Sony hopes) to create "strategy guides, game maps, cheats, training manuals, episodic videos, eBooks and eMagazines," and will include a web-based authoring tool and a software client.

It will be available for the PS3 and the PSP.

Hitwise has posted a very interesting chart today, one that shows that Facebook has become the most popular site (by traffic) in the United States, at least for the week ended March 13th, the first time in years that Google has been unseated for a full week.

Visits to Facebook increased 185 percent for the week year-on-year, while Google only saw 9 percent YoY growth. Combined, FB and Google accounted for a giant 14 percent of all US internet traffic last week.

Facebook was the most visited site on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Day and the weekend of March 7th, but never for a full week.

Arstechnica has put together an interesting article this week that shows the loyalty (or lack thereof) of current BlackBerry owners.

Citing a Crowd Science survey, Ars says that 2 out of every 5 current BlackBerry owners would switch to an Apple iPhone when their contract was up.

Additionally, 33 percent of current iPhone owners, as well as 16 percent of BlackBerry owners use their devices for "exclusively personal use", not for work. Only 1 percent of iPhone owners use their devices exclusively for business/work and 7 percent of BlackBerry users do the same.

Higher percentages, 66 percent for iPhone owners and 77 percent for BlackBerry users, used their devices for both work and personal reasons.

Finally, the survey showed that 90 percent of both Android and iPhone owners would stick with their current OS/devices when their contracts were up, showing much better loyalty than current RIM users.

After almost a year's worth of development, we're happy to reveal the new version of our site, dubbed as "v4". Many things have changed since the previous version - most notably the layout itself, but also the code behind the site has went through some major changes.

From now on, all of our various language versions will use the same codebase and same site structure, making further development much, much easier than in the past. Furthermore, launching new language editions of the site will become a breeze compared to the old system where each site was basically a clone of its siblings, but maintained independently.

As always with major upgrades, we are expecting to see weird problems to pop up -- and hope that you'll let us know if you encounter a bug or weird behaviour while browsing through the site. You can contact us by either posting a comment to this news article or by using our feedback form.

Now, let us know your comments about the new design.

-Team AfterDawn

Showing off the app at the MIX event, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices will have a Netflix streaming app (currently in prototype stage) that will allow for movie playback over 3G or Wi-Fi.

The popular Netflix "Watch Instantly" streaming service has over 12,000 movies, TV episodes and documentaries.

There is not much other info on it, but Engadget has a shaky video of the app in action, and it looks pretty good so far:

The popular PlayStation Home virtual world has reached 12 million users, says PS Home director jack Buser.

Noting the figures at the Game Developers Conference, Buser says Home users have doubled since June 2009, and jumped 20 percent since December.

85 percent of users that created an avatar on their first visit returned for a second visit and Buser says average users spend "hours" at a time in the virtual world.

"You're going to see us really embrace this idea of total game integration," adds Buser of future plans for Home. "It's an incredibly important part of [Sony's] strategy."

Titles will be given dedicated Home space, as well as bonus mini-games.

As of today, the first ever "dotcom" has celebrated its 25th birthday, an Internet landmark.

On March 15th, 1985 Symbolics computers purchased the first domain with a dotcom ending, becoming one of just 6 companies/individuals to do so in 1985. In 1997, the one millionth dotcom was registered, a number that has since exploded.

"This birthday is really significant because what we are celebrating here is the internet and dotcom is a good, well known placeholder for the rest of the internet," adds Mark Mclaughlin, Verisign CEO. Verisign is in charge of the entire dotcom domain. "Who would have guessed 25 years ago where the internet would be today. This really was a groundbreaking event."

In 2010, 668,000 dotcom sites are registered every month, and 57 million domain names were registered between the year 2000 and 2010. For the 15 years preceding it, only 21 million domain names were registered.

McLaughlin of Verisign also adds that it currently logs 53 billion requests for websites every day, and "we expect that to grow in 2020 to somewhere between three and four quadrillion."

A new proposal in Britain, taken up by the House of Commons today, wants to make it law that ISPs are forced to block access to all sites that offer unauthorized movies, music and other pirated content like games and books.

Content holders say the amendment will finally give them "the tools to tackle the piracy problem at the supply and demand levels," says the NYTimes, but critics see censorship of the Internet and general undermining of the development of England's digital economy.

The Open Rights Group, which has been fighting against Internet censorship, says the new law will certainly be abused, allowing individuals or companies to "suppress any Web content they find objectionable, under the pretext of protecting their copyright."

The British government says curbing piracy will bring hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue to the entertainment industry, which accounts for 6 percent of economic output, but critics say the policies will be expensive for the ISPs, and taxpayers will be forced to help pay for the enforcement of policies they couldn't care less about.

BrokeMyController has reported this week on a newly discovered Microsoft patent, one that will bring about automated DLC purchasing system to the Xbox 360.

The patent would work as follows: You and friends are on Xbox Live and one of your buddies asks you to join a game for multiplayer. Unfortunately you don't have the latest map pack DLC. The new system would send up a prompt screen, asking that you purchase the DLC to accept your friend's invite. Hit "yes" and the DLC will download and install, without the need to head over to the Marketplace, and you can get back to playing the game with your buddies.

Currently, if you are invited to a game for which you are missing DLC, you are "required to back out of the commenced multiplayer session, manually locate the desired content, purchase the content, install the content, relocate the inviting players, prepare his own request to join their game," says the source, which is clearly a hassle.

MOG, the subscription-based music service that offers 7 million tracks for just $5 USD a month has announced today the release of a mobile app of their service.

The company has deals with Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI as well as independent labels and the service offers on-demand music, allowing for users to pick and choose what songs they want to hear, either in their browser, or now on their mobile devices.

"You can see the queue, you can jump to anywhere in the queue, when a song comes on the library, you can save it," adds David Hyman, CEO of MOG. "When you listen to Bob Marley radio, it's not Bob Marley inspired radio. You get Bob Marley 24/7."

The mobile app will be available on the iPhone and Android devices in the Q2 2010, and users will get MOG radio, 64 AAC+ quality, and ability to download in higher quality, for just $10 a month, by far the best subscription package available to date.