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Today, Ars Technica makes known that Microsoft has finally begun rolling it out to users. The roll out will gradually make its way to 100 million US customers over the next few weeks. Microsoft is calling it the “most significant homepage redesign in over a decade.” The redesign features a new butterfly logo as well as 30 updates based on loads of customer feedback.

Among the new features are:

• TrendWatch - highlights of the day’s top Twitter trends
• Hyper-local Tweets – shows you tweets based on your location
• My Cities - lets you save up to three cities to keep up with
• MSN Local - enables the display of relevant local information
• Hotmail - see your inbox on the MSN homepage

As a whole, the new site boasts tighter social networking integration. Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live “What’s New” are all part of the new experience. Microsoft says that testers of the new site were very happy with the social network additions and they have received very positive feedback.

If you aren’t seeing the new design yet, you can still preview it here. The site explains the changes and shows off the new visual experience. There’s even a video of The Office’s Brian Baumgartner showing off the new site. As you’d expect, he’s awesome.

Valve has been playing various games with the Internet community over the last couple of weeks. The ending to their popular puzzle game Portal was changed, hinting at a sequel, and the company began sending out teasers based on famous Apple ads that have appeared over the years. A couple of days ago, Valve did indeed announce that Portal 2 would be coming later in the year, but there were still puzzles to be solved. The latest issue of GameInformer has revealed a ton of info about the successor to Portal, including the fact that it’ll be coming to the Mac.

The aforementioned teaser images, included below, gave strong hints that Valve’s game distribution platform, Steam, would be coming to the Mac. This tied in with several discoveries within the platform’s files, showing various Mac-themed images, leading a large amount of people to believe that it was all but certain that we’d see Steam for OS X soon. As one of the teaser images showed a turret from the game Portal, it seemed obvious that the puzzle game would be included – but what about a sequel? Valve had been issuing clues to a Portal sequel and that it would be coming to Mac along with the other usual platforms, so it seemed very much within the realm of possibility. GameInformer managed to grab the first information on Portal 2 directly from Valve, and within the copy of the issue was a list of the release platforms for the game, confirming the rumors: PC, Xbox 360, and Mac.

Indeed, if Steam really does become a native application, it would give Apple’s OS X operating system a fairly hefty boost in the gaming region; currently, those who wish to game on OS X create a Boot Camp partition and run Windows from there, though this may soon be coming to an end. Valve is a large company which develops many high-profile titles, so if this takes off, it might signal a change in the way people perceive the Mac when it comes to gaming.

Images thanks to Neowin

“You know about the four basic tastes: sweetness, sourness, bitterness and saltiness. Even if that list doesn’t roll off of your tongue, you can certainly imagine how each of these tastes flavors your mouth.

Well, it turns out there is fifth taste, called Umami. Umami was first isolated by Japanese chemists Kikunae Ikeda in 1908, yet only recently has the concept of umami made it out of Asia.

The chances are that you are already a big fan of umami but just don’t know it yet. That’s what happened to Carolyn Cope, who now runs a blog called Umami Girl.

‘I’d always known that I liked foods that were a little funky — certain aged cheeses, cured meats, mushrooms, anchovies,’ Cope told Asylum. ‘Shortly after college I got really into sushi. Like, really into it. Just when I was starting to seriously wonder whether my favorite sushi rolls were laced with some illicit, addictive substance, I learned about umami, the taste that literally stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers.’”

Read more at Asylum

After two rounds of voting and nearly 3,000 votes, you have decided and bestowed the People’s Choice Award in the Home Tab Design Challenge to Yatrik Solanki.

Yatrik describes his concept as “Identities, a website launcher, browsing sessions, and a task-oriented ultrasmart search box define my concept. And it’s cool!”:

Honorable mentions go to Chad Pommiss, the NorCal Design Council (M. Hanratty, A. Abut, D. Goldstein, J. Kaufman), Alecsandru Grigoriu and Amine Zafri.

Congratulations to all participants, our First Round Top 10 concepts and the winner of the People’s Choice Award in this Design Challenge!

Our jury, consisting of the Firefox UX team (Alex Faaborg, Alexander Limi, Jennifer Boriss and Stephen Horlander) are now going through all submissions and will bestow a series of honors around March 15th. Stay tuned!

If your concept was part of the top 10 finalists, we will follow up via email and let you know what your score was and forward you the feedback which the wider community left for your concept. We also randomly selected 5 people from the pool of confirmed voters who submitted at least one vote and contact them via email regarding our swag bag.

Opera 10.50 includes speed boost, numerous enhancements

Opera Software today released Opera 10.50, the fastest Web browser thus-far produced for Windows computers. Opera 10.50 also includes a sleek and refined new design, as well as private browsing, where Opera hides all traces of sites you visit. Opera 10.50 is available completely free from www.opera.com.

Browsing, refined

Sometimes a browser should just get out of your way. The improvements to Opera’s look and feel are many, but the result is a leaner browsing experience, so you have more room on screen for content. The new Opera menu button replaces the traditional menu bar, so you have a single-point to access all of Opera’s groundbreaking features.

Catching lightning in a bottle … er, browser

Opera 10.50 is the fastest browser we have ever produced. Under the hood, we introduced a new JavaScript engine, Carakan, and a new graphics library, Vega. What that means to you: no more waiting around for a site to load.

Private browsing

What you do on the Web is up to you, no one else. Make sure it stays that way by using private browsing to remove specific sites from your browsing history. Unlike other browsers, Opera 10.50 allows you to browse privately in a tab or in an entirely separate window.

Platform integration

On Windows 7/Vista, we let Opera enjoy Aero Glass, as well as supporting Aero Peek and Jump Lists. Now, you can easily access your Speed Dials, tabs and more from the Taskbar.

The old favorites

Opera has pioneered or introduced many of the features commonplace in Web browsers today, such as tabs and Speed Dial. But, a few just cannot be found anywhere else:

• Opera Turbo – Whenever your bandwidth slows to a crawl, just turn on Opera Turbo, and let your worries eat your dust. Opera Turbo compresses Web pages on our powerful servers. Because you transfer less data, Web content gets to you faster.
• Opera Unite – Share content immediately, without uploading files or posting to a social network. Opera Unite combines the flexibility of a Web application with the capability of a Web server, easily accessible from your browser.
• Opera Link – Take your data with you. Synchronize your Speed Dial, notes, search-engine preferences and more; then, just log into any other Opera Web browser or even Opera Mini, the world’s most popular mobile Web browser.

What we say

“Opera 10.50 is the fastest browser in almost all speed tests,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera. “But, more important than any speed test is the real-world speed during use. We designed Opera 10.50 to be easy to use, while making our unique features stand out, so you can get more out of the Web.”

Rewriting the Web with HTML5 and CSS3

Opera 10.50 includes improved standards support for HTML5 and CSS3, giving Web designers the tools they need to make eye-catching Web applications that work on completely open technologies. Read more for complete information on standards support in Opera 10.50.

Availability

Opera is available completely free from www.opera.com or via Microsoft’s browser choice screen. Opera 10.50 is currently available for Windows and comes in 42 different languages. Mac and Linux versions are coming soon.

In the past year or so, Google has seen some major competition, mainly in the form of Microsoft’s Bing. Bing offers what is referred to as a “decision engine,” boasting a lot of features that the current market share king, Google, does not. Of course, this works both ways, though one thing a lot of people noticed is that Bing looks far more up to date than its main competitor, which has used the same homepage design for years (with a few tweaks as time has gone by). The company appears to be fighting back, and has started rolling out a redesign of its homepage, featuring a new search page and other additions.

Google’s new design, originally discovered in November 2009, has brought their famous logo up to present day standards, with it looking much sleeker than it did previously. The search page allows users to change their location in order to get country-relevant results, and has altered the menu of the various options found on the search page before. It’s certainly a welcome redesign, though it’s unclear when everybody will have access to it; it was first found near the end of February, and since then, the situation hasn’t changed much. Nevertheless, Google is notorious for making as few changes as possible to its website (in order to keep the brand image alive, as everybody knows Google for its simple white search page), so it’s always interesting when they do make some modifications. In December 2009, the search giant created a fade-in effect for its home page.

Testers of the new design for Google News voiced their opinions against it last month. One tester said “Horrible, if it doesn’t revert to something similar as before will leave to another news source.” There’s no official word from Google on the new design.

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