Although Microsoft is recommending that computers be pretty modern to fully run the next version of Windows, Longhorn will probably also run on a good number of older machines.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Longhorn is going to look and run quite differently on those older systems. Computers with a 3GHz processor and 512MB of memory, for example, will get all of the bells and whistles including fancy graphics and the ability to handle multiple video streams. According to its early testing, Microsoft says that older PCs–probably those with as little as 128MB of memory–will be able to run Longhorn, but the OS may not look like it does on a newer, more powerful machine.

Many of these older machines that run Longhorn will have experiences that are “quite XP-like,” said Richard Russell, a developer in Microsoft’s Windows core operating system division.

Source: News.com

As Microsoft unveiled details of a “more secure” desktop operating system this week, news emerged that the company’s browser is losing business users because of - among other things - security.

A survey of 168,000 surfers hitting business web sites has found Internet Explorer has lost nearly two percentage points of market share. IE’s open source nemesis Firefox, meanwhile, doubled its presence.

Janco Associates found IE had 83.7 per cent of the market for this month, down from 84.85 per cent, while Firefox grew from 4.23 per cent to 10.28 per cent. Janco believes Firefox could take 25 per cent market share in the next quarter.

Source: The Register