Ryan Gavin, the general manager of Internet Explorer Business and Marketing at Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), wrote about how the company is planning to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer on their computers.

AptiQuant is a fake “psychometric consulting company” that reported that Microsoft Internet Explorer generally have lower IQs on average. The story ended up being a hoax. AptiQuant’s website is one month old and the thumbnail photos on their “Our Team” page was pulled from a French psychometric testing company called Central Test. The names were changed. Central Test and AptiQuant have no formal link to each other. Some of the publications that were fooled into running the story include PCWorld, CBS News, CNN, BCC, ZDNet, and TechCrunch. [BBC]

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has announced that IE10 Platform Preview 1 is available today for download. The IE10 Platform Preview has native HTML5 support. Microsoft built IE9 from the ground up to support HTML5. IE10 is like IE9, but it avoids abstractions, layers, and libraries that would otherwise slow down computers.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) Internet Explorer 9 has been downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours of release. That is over 27 downloads per second (240 downloads every 9 seconds). This is over double the 1 million downloads that IE9 Beta saw. [Windows Team Blog]

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has released Internet Explorer 9 from beta phase. It is now in the RC stage and is available for donwload now. You can download the browser from www.beautyoftheweb.com. The browser comes preloaded with the Bing bar and it does not have as much clutter as Internet Explorer 8. IE9 has a feature called Pinned Sites, which can let you seperate a tabbed website and lock it into the Windows Taskbar as if it were a separate program. There is also a new feature called One Box, which allows the address bar to automatically find search results related to entered keywords from Bing.com inline without pulling up the website in the main pane. Press release is below:

Mozilla Firefox has beaten Internet Explorer for European market share in December 2010 according to website analytics company StatCounter. “This is the first time that IE has been dethroned from the number one spot in a major territory,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. “This appears to be happening because Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share.” Google Chrome’s market share is also quickly climbing in Europe. Last month Google Chrome had a 14.58% market share compared to the 5.06% percentage they had a year before. [StatCounter]