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In accordance with NetMarketShare’s recent data, Mozilla Firefox’s share of the global web browser market reduced to under 23 per cent in July.

At the same time, Microsoft Internet Explorer won a little rise of market share – 0.42 per cent last month. It is up about one per cent since May, 2010, the stats firm reports.

“This is the second month in a row of global gains for Internet Explorer and the third straight month of gains for Internet Explorer 8 in the United States. The gain comes at the expense of Firefox (-.9%) and Chrome (-.08%),” reports NetMarketShare.

Apple’s Safari browser broke the five per cent record for the first time this year after dangling around the 4.5% mark for most of 2010.

Internet Explorer, down some five per cent on September 2009 figures, topped out the list with a 60.74 per cent worldwide market share for July.

Chrome saw a small dip in global usage last month, and currently stands at 7.16 per cent of browser usage globally.

But Google’s own surfing tool’s popularity has blossomed in little over a year since its launch. The browser jumped ahead of Safari to take the number three spot in December last year.

In effect, the current state of play in the browser wars remains pretty much unchanged, then. Down the line it’s fair to surmise that Chrome will make some gains, perhaps at the expense of Firefox. At the same time, it’s unlikely that IE usage will see any major drops or jumps either.

MVC v2 will be available for Visual Studio 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.Net 3.5, said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in the Microsoft Developer Division. A release candidate for ASP.Net MVC 2 was offered in the previous month.

“ASP.Net MVC 2 is the next important update of ASP.Net MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.Net MVC 1 — so all the knowledge, skills, code, and extensions you already have with ASP.Net MVC continue to work and apply going forward,” Guthrie said. “Like the first release, we are also shipping the source code for ASP.Net MVC under an OSI-compliant open source license.”

MVC 2 includes the following features: improved Visual Studio tooling support, strongly typed HTML helpers, and enhanced model validation support across client and server. Other improvements include auto-scaffold UI helpers with template customization and support for splitting large applications into “areas.”

Support also is included for JavaScript validation in the browser. In addition, developers can use DataAnnotation support in the .Net Framework to declaratively define and add validation rules to business objects and properties. Additional capabilities include asynchronous controllers support for executing long-running tasks in parallel, support for rendering subsections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction, and new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements.

The MVC framework, according to Microsoft, encourages developers to maintain a separation of concerns among the responsibilities of applications, including UI logic via the view, user-input handling using the controller, and domain logic using the model. ASP.Net MVC applications can be tested using techniques such as test-driven development. The framework is built on ASP.Net 3.5 Service Pack 1, enabling developers to leverage features such as authentication and authorization, profile settings, and localization.

Version 2 can be installed side-by-side with ASP.Net MVC 1, so applications built with Version 1 can run on the same computer as applications built with Version 2, Guthrie said.

Apple has finally unveiled its oddly named iPad device. Looking similar to an extra-large version of an iPhone, Apple’s new iPad device features an updated version of the iPhone’s operating system working through an impressive 9.7-inch touchscreen, powered by an Apple-developed 1 GHz CPU. Real cool.

The new MID (mobile Internet device) follows the lead of the iPhone sporting 3G and 4G network capabilities that are compatible with 850/1900/2100 MHz networks using GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSPA technology.

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