MICROSOFT TO UNVEIL NEXT MAJOR RELEASE OF WINDOWS PHONE MAY 24TH

Microsoft has scheduled a Windows Phone event in New York City on May 24th, 2011, during which the company will “lift the curtain on the next major release of Windows Phone.” We know Mango will offer Internet Explorer 9 with an integrated Twitter experience, better multitasking, and new apps such as Angry Birds, Skype, and Spotify. We’ve also heard that Microsoft will add Bing Audio for identifying music, Bing Vision for scanning bar codes, and voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation with Bing Maps, although none of these features have been confirmed by Microsoft just yet.

FIREFOX 4 DOWNLOADED OVER 6 MILLION TIMES IN 24 HOURS

Mozilla announced on Tuesday that the final release version of its Firefox 4 Web browser was available for download. Within its first 24 hours of availability, the browser was downloaded over 6 million times. Microsoft’s latest browser release, Internet Explorer 9, was downloaded 2.35 million times in its first 24 hours of availability.

Version 4 of the popular Firefox Web browser features a variety of enhancements including a redesigned UI, improved tab management and faster performance. Mozilla’s Firefox browser is the second most popular browser in the world according to market share tracker Net Applications. Firefox held a 21.74% global browser share in February, behind Internet Explorer’s 56.77% and ahead of No. 3 browser Chrome, which has grown to 10.93% in a very short period of time. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox have seen their shares decrease over the past year, while Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s Safari browser have gained popularity.

INTERNET EXPLORER OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED LAST NIGHT

Microsoft officially brought Internet Explorer out of beta and RC last night. You can download the browser at Microsoft's website. IE9 will only run on any flavor of Vista or Win7, so you XP'ers are out of luck and stuck with IE8.

Microsoft has put a lot of work into their latest browser. Gone is the cluttered toolbars of IE8 and replaced with a simple layout. Some of the nicest features include Pinned Sites, which allows users to drag the tab out of IE9 and pin it directly to the Windows taskbar. When pinned it pulls the favicon so it looks like it's actually a separate program. Some sites will also support jump lists, which is the list of shortcuts that appears when you right click the icons (pictured above). For instance, when Twitter is pinned, you can could jump straight to Direct Mentions, Mentions, etc.

The address bar has also been improved and is more like the Google address bar. Now called the One Box, it doubles as a search engine, but you can actually view results in line. The default search engine is still Bing, but you can install Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook and lots of others through the Add-On page.

Beyond those cool tricks and nice UI tweaks, the big change with IE9 is speed. The browser feels faster than IE8 and is very close to Chrome.