Microsoft to offer three-user Windows 7 Family Pack

Microsoft may be introducing a Family Pack for Windows 7 Home Premium, according to a pair of reports citing details in the end-user licensing agreement (EULA) of a recently-leaked build. The still-unconfirmed plan would enable users to install a single copy the operating system on up to three computers in a household, and falls in line with similar licensing Microsoft already has for the Home and Student Edition of Microsoft Office 2007.

There's no word on Family Pack pricing yet. Some suggest it would be somewhere around $189 to undercut Apple’s comparable plan which gives you five OS X licenses for $199, but when you look at the pricing for a standalone one-user copy of Home Premium, it's $120 for an upgrade and $200 for a full version. How the company ends up structuring its Family Pack pricing is anybody's guess, but it seems clear Microsoft still has some surprises up its sleeve to give XP and Vista users a bigger incentive to upgrade their systems.

The company announced a somewhat similar deal with the launch of Windows Vista back in 2007, though it was a limited-time offer for customers who bought retail copies of Vista Ultimate, the most-expensive SKU in the line.

Firefox 3.5 breaks new download records

When Mozilla made the transition from the Firefox 2.x series to the current 3.x series, they broke a record by netting over 8 million downloads in the first day it was available. Much of this was due to a very successful PR campaign. Firefox 3.5 was released without all that fanfare, but still managed to hold its own. Enough people were interested in the update to net Mozilla over 5 million downloads in the first 24 hours of availability.

What's more, this time they did it without any server mishaps, no doubt planning for a surge in server load in advance. Whether or not 3.5 is an exciting release is left up to you, but we can all agree that Mozilla has definitely helped changed the face of the Internet in the past several years. Hopefully they will continue to do such as Firefox becomes a more serious competitor than ever against IE.

Microsoft's Bing eats into Google's Share

Microsoft's new Bing search engine gained U.S. market share in its first month in operation but still trails dominant rival Google Inc, according to data released on Wednesday.

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter. Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent. Bing's share peaked in the first week of June at 9.21 percent, falling away in the middle two weeks before coming back at 8.45 percent in the last week of June. The results may give heart to Microsoft, which is investing heavily in its loss-making online services business and is refusing to cede the market to Google.

"At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive," StatCounter Chief Executive Adohan Cullen said in a statement. The world's largest software company may yet strike an online search partnership with Yahoo to make itself a credible competitor, but talk of such a deal has quietened down. StatCounter, based in Dublin, says its data are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Other data research firms such as comScore are not expected to release figures on Bing's share until mid-July.