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It has been talked about for a while but finally Microsoft through its newly released search engine Bing and Yahoo! have struck a deal which will see them have enough market share to begin to tackle the Google dominance.

What does that mean for the average Internet user? According to the official Microsoft Press Release it will mean the following:

For Web users and advertisers, this deal will accelerate the pace and breadth of innovation by combining both companies’ complementary strengths and search platforms into a market competitor with the scale to fuel sustained development in search and search advertising. Users will find what they care about faster and with more personal relevance. Microsoft’s competitive search platforms will lead to more value for advertisers, better results for web publishers, and increased innovation and efficiency across the Internet.

Ultimately it will mean more competition and better search platforms for users. Bing, since its release has turned heads and made small in roads, particularly with its simplicity and usual Microsoft flair. Yahoo! has a big community of users (although not necessarily search) and many great tools to use. So it would seem the deal to join forces should give Google something to worry about and it will be very interesting to see how they respond.

To read more about the deal visit the official Microsoft Press Release or the Mini Site.

The full version of Internet Explorer 8 was released to the public today. At DBG we’ve been trialling and testing the beta versions of IE8 for quite some time so we knew what we’d be up against when the browser was released to the masses!

It appears that there is once again going to be fun times ahead for web developers with yet another browser to test sites on. At least this latest release from Microsoft seems to be more web standards compatible than some previous versions (IE6 anyone?) which should hopefully make testing a much less frustration process for developers.

Some new features include added security against phishing and malware and a tab-crash handler that allows individual website tabs to crash without losing the whole browser. A neat feature of the new IE8 browser is its browser compatibility tool allowing sites that have been optimized for previous version of IE to be viewed by switching to IE6 or IE7 mode creating a more pleasant viewing experience.

Similar to Google Chrome’s “Incognito Mode” feature, IE8 also has private browsing option allowing web surfers to browse without any personal usage information, caching or history being stored on the computer which is great for public or multiple-user computers.

If you are currently using a version of internet explorer you’ll probably want to upgrade to the latest version. If you’re using Firefox, Chrome, Flock or Safari then there’s probably no real benefit. We’ll leave the decision making up to you!