Required toolbar 'phones home' some user search data back to Microsoft

Microsoft Corp. today on 1 Oct 2008 launched a rewards program to entice consumers to its Live Search site, but it requires Internet Explorer and bars users of rival browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.
A toolbar required for participation also collects some search behavior data, including the number of searches on rival engines, and transmits the information to Microsoft daily.
One search expert questioned the restriction to IE, as well as Microsoft's decision to gather a wide-ranging amount of data from users, though he wouldn't go so far as to describe the company's newest attempt to get users to try its search site as "desperate."
"Why take this approach?" asked Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the Search Engine Land Web site. "I think that Microsoft would do better if they pretended they didn't own IE. But paying people to try [Live Search] doesn't mean that they're desperate. I think it's an interesting way to get people to break the Google habit."
Google, in fact, paid site owners pennies per search as far back as 1999, Sullivan said, "and no one called Google desperate then."
Dubbed SearchPerks, the program awards users up to 25 "tickets" a day for each completed search at Microsoft's Live Search. Then tickets can be redeemed for prizes after the program ends next April. Among the rewards Microsoft touted on the SeachPerks site: free music downloads, clothing and frequent flyer miles on American Airlines, Delta and US Airways.
The program, which is available to U.S. residents 13 and older who have a Windows Live ID, also requires users to download and install a small toolbar, called Perk Counter, that keeps track of the number of Live Search searches and thus the number of reward tickets.
Perk Counter will install only in Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser. Competitors -- including Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome and Opera Software's Opera -- cannot be used with the SearchPerks rewards program. Attempts to visit the program's Web site with any of those browsers, in fact, are greeted with the message: "To earn value for your searches and join the SearchPerks! promotion you must have Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher to participate."
According to Microsoft, the Perk Counter tallies more than the number of Live Search searches. In the terms and conditions for the program, as well as in a separate FAQ, Microsoft spelled out what the counter records and sends to its servers daily.
"The software records and sends to Microsoft the number of Web searches you do each day on different search engines; the types of searches you complete, such as for news or images; and the number of online ads you click on," states the SearchPerks' terms and conditions।
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Prevent Explorer from Freezing with Large Zip Files on Vista
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Disable Tabbed Browsing in Internet Explorer 7

Prevent Explorer from Freezing with Large Zip Files on Vista

Windows Vista has built-in handling for zip files - you can create, extract, or even browse right down into them as if they were a folder. But if you have very big zip files sitting on your hard drive, bad things can happen unless you disable the zip handler.
Today, Me and friend were trying to restore one of my files from a previous backup. We grabbed the enormous zip file off my network drive and saved it onto the desktop. From there, a little bit of WinZip magic grabbed me the one, 35 MB directory I really wanted out of the whole 11 GB zip file.
When I finally got back to my host desktop later that evening, I found to my utter shock that things weren't working properly. For example, I opened up the file explorer and tried to expand a folder in the tree pane on the left-hand side. Instead of nicely expanding, showing the sub-folders, it just started spinning its wheels. When I came back to it ten minutes later, it was still chugging away.
I killed the explorer.exe process, restarted explorer and went on with my workflow. At least, until WinZip started having issues. I hit the "Extract" button on a reasonable sized archive (150 MB) and the app froze. Just like explorer, it was eating my full cpu and doing absolutely nothing with it.
Recognizing I was out of my league, I fired up a conversation with "The Geek" and we started troubleshooting. An hour and a half later, after pouring through mountains of log files, downloading tools I didn't even know existed, and wading through pages of output from SysInternals "procmon", we finally found the problem.
It seems that Windows Vista file explorer (by default) attempts to recurse into any zip archives in a direct subdirectory, allowing users to view the contents of the zip file directly in the sidebar. Windows XP had the same "feature", but it waited to enter the zip file until you actually expanded the node in the sidebar. In principle, Vista's method is a good idea. XP always suffered from long delays whenever you expanded a zip file, particularly over a network connection. Grabbing a file list in the background seems like a good idea, until you take into account extremely large archives.
By trying to recurse into that 11 GB zip file sitting on my desktop, Vista pretty much started a processor-intensive task that it had no chance of completing in a reasonable timeframe. Thus, killing performance across the board with no tangible return.
Disabling Zip Handling
The obvious solution to this problem is to just turn off Windows's built-in zip file handling, since I'm using WinZip anyway. The quickest way to do this is to use the excellent ShellExView application to disable the explorer shell extension. (you don't have to install it, just in case you're leery about that sort of thing)
Open up ShellEx in Administrator mode by right-clicking the file and choosing "Run as Administrator". Select all of the "Compressed" items, right-click and select "Disable Selected Items".
Now that the extension is taken care of, you can either logout, or you can be a bit smarter about things and just restart the "explorer.exe" process. To do this, open up Task Manager (right-click on the task bar and select "Task Manager", or use that good ol' three fingered Vulcan nerve pinch, Ctrl+Alt+Delete) and find the "explorer.exe" process. There probably will be more than one process in the list named "explorer.exe", so be sure to sort by CPU and select the one farthest toward the top.
Once you've selected the explorer, click the "End Process" and confirm in the ensuing dialog. The taskbar will disappear, along with all of your file explorer windows.
Now select "New Task (Run…)" from the File menu. In the "Open:" text box, enter "explorer" and hit OK. After a moment, the taskbar should reappear and everything should be hunky-dory. After this, you shouldn't have any more problems with large zip files locking up the system.
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Maximize Your IE7 Tab Bar Space by Removing the Command Bar

One of the many annoyances I have with Internet Explorer is the fairly small default width of the tab bar… as somebody who opens a lot of tabs all the time, it becomes difficult to manage. With a simple tweak, we can remove the command bar that usually sits on the right of the tabs.

We can remove those buttons, giving us more space.

Add or Remove Buttons

Instead of removing the entire bar, you can simply add or remove the buttons from the bar by right-clicking on it, choosing Customize Command Bar and then Add or Remove Commands.

From here you can limit the buttons to only the ones you want… do you ever really use the Help button?

Or you can just make the toolbar's width small enough that it only shows a single button, with the others still being accessible through clicking on the chevron (make sure to un-check the "Lock the Toolbars" option)

If you still insist on removing the toolbar entirely, keep reading.

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\CommandBar

  Find the key named "Enabled" in the right-hand side, and set the value to 0. You'll have to restart IE for the change to take place. Obviously you would set it back to 1 to put the command bar back in place.

Disable the Command Bar the Easy Way

Instead of messing with the registry, you can simply download the IntelliAdmin IE 7 Tweak Utility, which will perform the registry edits for you, and also let you hide the search bar, or force the menu bar to the top, both topics we've covered the registry hack method for in the past.

You can really minimize the amount of browser UI space by removing both the search and command bars.

You can always use the Alt key to temporarily show the menu, or get to things via keyboard shortcuts.

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2: Can It Outfox Firefox?

Microsoft's updated browser, Internet Explorer 8, promises an assortment of new features, with the goals of making Web browsing with IE safer, easier, and more compatible with Net standards. We looked at Beta 2. On the surface, IE 8 seems to be a lot like IE 7, but Microsoft has made a good number of changes. However, you may have seen some of the new features in its no-longer-upstart competitor, Mozilla Firefox 3.
Tabbed Browsing
If you accidentally close a browser window in IE 8, you can opt to restore it when you reopen the program (just as you can in Firefox). But IE 8 will group related tabs together using color coding. If you open a link from efix in a new tab, for example, it will open adjacent to the original tab, and the tabs themselves will have a matching color. You can move tabs from one group to another, but if you have three unrelated pages open, you cannot create a group out of them.
Perhaps the most novel addition in IE 8 is what Microsoft refers to as tab isolation. The feature is designed to prevent a buggy Web site from causing the entire program to crash. Instead, only the tab displaying the problematic page will close, allowing you to continue browsing.
Of course, IE 8 Beta 2 retains some of the features introduced in the first beta, including WebSlices and accelerators; see "Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best?" for more details.
Improved Security
If you enable IE 8's InPrivate feature, the browser will not save any sensitive data--passwords, log-in info, history, and so forth. It would be as if your browsing session had never happened. This feature is very similar to Private Browsing in Apple's Safari browser, except that an icon in IE's address bar makes InPrivate's active status more obvious.
The browser's phishing filter--called SmartScreen--improves upon its predecessor's filter with such features as more thorough scrutiny of a Web page's address (to protect you from sites named something like paypal.iamascammer.com) and a full-window warning when you stumble upon a suspected phishing site. SmartScreen relies largely on a database of known phishing sites, so a new, unknown phishing site may be able to slip through the cracks.
IE 8 displays sites' domains in a darker text color, so you can more easily see whether you're actually visiting an ebay.com page, say, or in reality a page on some site you've never heard of. Microsoft could still put a little more emphasis on the domain name (using a different color background, for example), but the highlighting is a welcome addition.
Web Compatibility
Creating a site that looks identical in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari can be a challenge. IE 8 Beta 2 offers better support for W3 Web standards--a set of guidelines developed to ensure that a Web page appears the same in all browsers. The downside is that IE 8 will break some pages designed for earlier Internet Explorer versions.
To counteract this, Microsoft has added a compatibility mode: Click a button in the toolbar, and IE 8 will display a page the same way that IE 7 does. In my testing, I found that most pages worked fine with the standard (new) mode, and that most errors were minor cosmetic ones. Unfortunately, the Compatibility Mode toggle button may not be obvious to most users, because it's pretty small; a text label would have helped.
While it likely won't convince many Firefox users to jump ship, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 may be worth considering for people who have not yet solidified their browser loyalties.
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Web browser to get 'privacy mode'

Microsoft is planning a "privacy mode" for the next release of its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.
By clicking a button, users of IE8 will be able to limit how much information is recorded about where they go online and what they do.
Microsoft watchers have spotted two patent applications covering ways to manage the amount of information a browser logs.
When introduced the privacy mode will match features found on other browsers.
Medical test
Australian blogger Long Zheng has found two patent applications made by Microsoft on 30 July for ideas it calls "Cleartracks" and "Inprivate".
The applications deal with methods of erasing data that browsing programs log, turning off features that record sites visited or notifying users of what sites are doing to log a visit.
While many browsers already have menu options that let people alter security settings and clear history files it typically has to be done on a use-by-use basis.
Users may wish to turn on the privacy mode if they are planning a surprise party, buying presents or researching a medical condition and do not want others users of the same computer to find out.
Internet Explorer 8 is due to go on general release late in 2008 though early trial versions are already available.
By comparison Apple's Safari browser already has a privacy mode and developers working for Mozilla, creators of Firefox, are reportedly working on a similar feature for future versions.
Other browsers, such as Xerobank, take a more thorough approach to privacy and try to anonymise all web use.
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Disable Tabbed Browsing in Internet Explorer 7

Why you'd want to disable tabbed browsing is a mystery to me, but I received a request for a registry hack to force IE7 to not use tabs. I can only assume that it has to do with keeping users from too much confusion when upgrading from IE6.
There's two ways that you can disable tabbed browsing. The easiest way is to just follow these steps:
• Click the Tools button, and choose Internet Options
• Click the Settings button in the Tabs section:
Uncheck Tabbed Browsing as shown here:

This method is probably the simplest, and should usually be used.
If you are a system administrator, here are some registry hacks to Enable/Disable Tabbed Browsing. Just unzip, and double-click. Note that the disable registry hack will force the setting on the users, so they can't enable it without the enable registry hack.
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Blocking Spam from International Senders in Windows Vista Mail

I personally use the Windows Mail client that comes with Windows Vista, but while I was researching how to use it to access my Gmail locally, I discovered a nice option in the Junk Email Options pane.
A large amount of the spam that I get consists of mail coming from all sorts of international domains. Since I don't have many close friends that live in other countries, I really don't need to see any email from most of those domains, at least not on my personal accounts.
To block all of that spam mail from hitting your inbox, open Windows Mail and go to the Tools \ Junk Mail Options item. Click the International tab, and you should see this screen:
There are two seperate ways that you can block international spam: First, you can block the domains themselves by selecting them here. If you do the Select All option, you should be warned that .US is also in that list.
You can also choose to block message encodings. I blocked all of the asian message encodings, because I definitely can't read those languages, and about 1/10th of the spam I get these days is encoded in one of those types. Again, be careful about doing the Select All option or you will end up blocking all email from everybody.
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