3.0 Netscape began the world-wide rollout of Navigator 3.0 at 10.30pm last night, Australian time. The Australian Newsdesk , which opened today, provides one-stop access to the major Australian daily newspapers, Australian Internet media, Australian computing media, Australian Internet classifieds services, Telstra White Pages, Telstra Yellow Pages, the Sofcom Australian TV Guide and Australian Weather. The site is currently in beta test, and will be expanded to include more Australian and international news sources in the next few weeks. The biannual survey, the 32nd the company has conducted since 1981, shows that in the 6 months between January and July 1996 the number of Internet hosts increased from 9.4 million to approximately 12.8 million, and the number of domains doubled from 240,000 to 488,000. After several months of development and several public beta trials, Microsoft began the official global roll-out of their new Internet Explorer 3.0 browser yesterday, Australian time.
Critics claim the new browser represents a significant improvement over prior versions of Explorer.
Microsoft will be holding a prize draw for the first 10,000 people to download Internet Explorer from their site. Mr Pfeiffer also predicted that the Internet would soon subsume large parts of the telephone and video industries as bandwidths improved. Further, the Court ruled that attempts to exclude or limit software liability would be judged under the terms of the Unfair Contract Terms Act of 1977. At present, software is the only commodity sold on Earth which comes with a warranty which effectively rates the product as good for nothing at all. Standard software warranties produced by all major software manufacturers effectively leave consumers with no redress if the software fails to perform or results in losses to the user due to errors in the software.