Microsoft has finally jumped onto the HTML5 bandwagon, providing feedback on the current draft version.

Up until now, most of the HTML5 draft has been worked on by rivals Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google.

According to reports, Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman has sent a letter to the World Wide Web Consortium, with Microsoft’s thoughts and queries on the current editor’s draft.

“As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor’s draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group. I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress” said a letter from Bateman.

Microsoft hasn’t completely ignored HTML5, with Internet Explorer 8 including support for the DOM Store, Ajax Navigation, Cross Document Messaging and Cross Domain Messaging, all components of  HTML 5.

More developments are sure to continue.

Google is planning on adding cloud-based bookmark and password sync using ‘push’ technology for its Chrome browser.

Users will need a Google Account (such as Gmail), which will be used to store bookmarks and passwords.  This will allow browsers to have their preferences available on any computer when they enter their details in any Chrome browser around the world.

“A bunch of us have been working on a feature to sync user data in Chromium with a Google account. The great news is that we’ll be starting to work directly in the Chromium project this week.” explained Chrome developer Tim Steele.

“We have built a library that implements the client side of our sync protocol, as well as the Google server-side infrastructure to serve Google Chrome users and synchronise data to their Google Account.”

“Rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates, when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync.”

No details on when we will see this in Chrome have been announced.

Third time’s a charm, with tab previews now expected to be included in Firefox 3.6, after the feature was dropped from Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5

Tab preview provides a visual preview when switching between tabs in Firefox (Ctrl + Tab), much like Alt + Tab when switching between programs in Windows Vista and above.

Tab preview is available in the latest Firefox 3.6 nightly releases but is turned off by default. To enable tab preview, set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config.

Firefox 3.6 is expected to be released sometime in 2010.

Mozilla has realesaded updated to both Firefox 3 and 3.5 yesterday, fixing several security and stability issues.

A full list of changes can be found in the Firefox 3.0.13 and Firefox 3.5.2 release notes.

Users of either browser should have the updated pushed out to them, or you can manually get the update by going to the help menu and selecting check for updates.

Web browser market share results for July 2009 have been released thanks to Market Share by Net Applications, and for another month Microsoft Internet Explorer is down again.

Internet Explorer dropped almost half a percent to 67.68%, while Firefox was up 0.04% to 22.47%.

Other winners for the month were were Safari up from 3.79% to 4.07%, and Google Chrome up from 2.40% to 2.59%.

Opera had another bad month falling from 2.03% to 1.97%.

Interesting results for Firefox, with the release of 3.5 seems to have failed at attracting any more market share. Full results for June and July 2009 are available online.

Themes are even closer for browser Google Chrome, with recent developer builds including theme support already.

TechCrunch has been able to confirm that themes will be available in an online gallery from Google themselves.

While some early themes have been around for a while, latest builds allow users to push themes out to the browser, with an easy option to revert to previous themes if the user desires.

No word on when this feature will make it into the public releases, but expect things to start speeding up.

After announcing that Windows 7 would ship in the European Union without Internet Explorer, Microsoft has done a back flip and will once again include the companies web browser.

Microsoft released the following statement:

In the wake of last week’s developments, as well as continuing feedback on Windows 7 E that we have received from computer manufacturers and other business partners, I’m pleased to report that we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world.

One reason we decided not to ship Windows 7 ‘E’ is concerns raised by computer manufacturers and partners. Several worried about the complexity of changing the version of Windows that we ship in Europe if our ballot screen proposal is ultimately accepted by the Commission and we stop selling Windows 7 ‘E’. Computer manufacturers and our partners also warned that introducing Windows 7 ‘E’, only to later replace it with a version of Windows 7 that includes IE, could confuse consumers about what version of Windows to buy with their PCs.

A ballot screen update is still said to be on the cards for all Windows XP, Vista and 7 European Users if the EU accepts Microsoft’s proposal.

It has been 4 and a half years in the making, but Firefox has finally surpassed 1 billion total downloads since Firefox 1.0 was first released.

Here are some other interesting milestone statistics:

• Firefox 1.0 is released on November 9, 2004, 1200 days ago.
• 100 million reached on October 19, 2005, 344 days later.
• 200 million reached on August 2, 2006, 287 days later.
• 300 million reached on February 12, 2007, 193 days later
• 400 million reached on September 7, 2007, 207 days later.
• 500 million reached today February 22, 2008, 168 days later.
• 1 billion reached today July 31, 2009.

Congratulations to the Firefox team and here’s to the next 1 billion!