Today we are sharing our plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC. This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward. We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. Similar to our release of IE9 earlier this year, we will take a measured approach, scaling up over time.

The first big blow to Flash was Apple’s iOS. Now Adobe Systems’ browser plug-in faces another major threat to its relevance: Microsoft has banned it and all other plug-ins from the “Metro” version of Internet Explorer 10.

Metro is the modern “touch-first” interface that plays a starring role in the radically new look of Windows 8, which Microsoft plans to release in 2012. Microsoft will ship the new OS with two versions of IE10, one for Metro and one a brushed-up version of the current Windows 7 interface. While the legacy version of IE10 will accommodate plug-ins, the Metro won’t…

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. But when it comes to circumventing Apple’s new in-app subscription rules, it may be best served as an HTML5 Web app.

This morning Amazon launched its Kindle Cloud Reader, a Web-based app that allows you to read your Kindle e-books from any browser on your PC or tablet, including the iPad.

I’m hoping moves like this will make more people realize that the most powerful app on the iPhone/iPad is Safari. Because, well, Henry Blodget put it best.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

IE7′s usage has already dipped below IE6′s in some reports, so this isn’t as huge a deal as it might have been even a year ago. Still, I wish they’d extended this policy out to YouTube as well; that would really drive people to upgrade.

Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML to deliver new kinds of experiences. These new Windows 8 apps are full-screen and touch-optimized, and they easily integrate with the capabilities of the new Windows user interface.

I’m going to take this as a sign that, in the intra-Microsoft struggle between HTML5 and Silverlight camps, that the former won. Good.

In a Webkit browser, it’s breathtaking.
In a browser less capable with animation (like Firefox 4), it downgrades gracefully into a series of storyboards.
In crappy browsers, it degrades to just text describing the scene.

More details here.