According to Reuters Canada, last month's implementation of the European Union browser ballot isn't exactly helping Internet Explorer's overseas market share. Then again, that was the entire purpose of it--to give people other options. The browser ballot was added to Microsoft's European version of Windows 7 as per an antitrust case with the EU.

Statcounter statistics show that, in France, IE's market share has dropped 2.5% since last month. In Britain, it has dropped 1%, and in Italy, 1.3%. While this may not seem like much in comparison to the sixty-something percent piece of the pie that IE holds in the European market, these trends could foreshadow what's to come. If Microsoft continues to lose a percent or two a month, it won't be long before their dominance becomes a thing of the past. The study also notes that Opera and Firefox are seeing significantly more downloads in Europe than they've been accustomed to. Mozilla expects this trend to continue.

Ever since Google was attacked by hackers based out of China, it has been deciding on if the company should pull out of China. As previously reported on Neowin, Google would soon announce that they were pulling out of China and today, Google has finally killed Google.cn.

When you attempt to go to Google.cn you are redirected to Google.com.hk which continues to offer up results for the Chinese market, although they are uncensored results.

Google has said that they are not closing down their entire operations in China and that they will “continue R&D work in China and also to maintain a sales presence there, though the size of the sales team will obviously be partially dependent on the ability of mainland Chinese users to access Google.com.hk.”

Google also mentioned on their blog that all the decisions based on censoring and service operations were made by executives in the United States. This is a clear message that none of the employees in China were making the decisions; this could be a possible ploy to help protect those Google employees still in China.

Google has effectively killed its Chinese search operations, while not directly pulling out of the country, by no longer filtering results, its only a matter of time before the Chinese government blocks Google.com.hk for good.

Apple said Friday that its highly anticipated iPad will be available on April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Today Opera released Opera 10.50, claiming it to be the worlds fastest browser for Windows computers.  Opera 10.50 includes a new sleek, refined design, including private browsing, so users can surf anonymously.

Opera’s new menu button replaces the traditional way users are used to seeing toolbars, by stacking all the contents in a neat and organized drop down menu.  Aero Glass has been enabled for Windows Vista / 7 users, allowing them to take full advantage of the clean, transparent borders.  Opera even allows users to use the Windows 7 jump list, for quick and easy access to recent pages, Speed Dial, and tasks.

If you weren't already aware, Charlie Miller is a rather prominent white hat hacker and security expert, who regularly makes headlines as what he has to say is generally pretty important. He often participates in (and has won twice) the Pwn2Own competition, where groups of hackers compete against each other for rewards, in order to uncover security flaws in major operating systems or browsers.

As the Pwn2Own 2010 competition is a couple of weeks away, interviews with the competitors are beginning to be released, with the aforementioned Charlie Miller giving his thoughts on the currently world of technology security. Miller was asked which of the two operating systems out of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard would be harder to hack, with the answer being the former; Windows 7 has what is known as full ASLR (address space layout randomization), in addition to being harder to attack as Java and Flash aren't installed by default. Upon being asked about the safest operating system plus browser combination, Miller responded with Windows 7 in addition to Internet Explorer 8 or Google's Chrome browser – though, he also stated that not having Flash installed is a big factor. He stated, "There probably isn't enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about. The main thing is not to install Flash!"

Statistics that measure Internet browser and operating market share were released today.  The statistics, as measured by Netmarketshare.com, can help predict trends for the coming year and offer insight into consumer adoption.

The statistics, which compare January 2010 to February 2010, have not been reviewed by Netmarketshares.com Quality Assurance but, in recent past, have proven to be generally reliable.

Microsoft’s Windows platform gained from 92% to 92.12% percent while OS X fell from 5.16% to 5.02%. Windows 7 made a gain from the previous month growing from 7.57% to 8.92%, XP dropped from 66.15% to 65.49%, while Vista also dropped from 17.47% to 16.51%.

Last week we reported how LG could be planning to launch a Windows Phone 7 Series device as early as September this year. Now the first pre-production prototype of this possible device has been shown off by Microsoft during filming of The Engadget Show.

The LG model is the first official branded hardware we've seen of a Windows Phone 7 Series handset and seems to perfectly fit the hardware requirements defined by Microsoft for any devices running their latest mobile operating system, which was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month.

Apple's famous desire for total control over its operations seems to have extended to its manufacturing facilities as we've come across Cupertino's Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report, which details audits the American company has done of its overseas suppliers and the failures identified therein.

The findings are pretty damning on the whole, with more than half (54 percent) of all factories failing to meet Apple's already inflated maximum 60-hour work week, 24 percent paying less than the minimum wage, 37 percent failing to respect anti-discrimination rules, and three facilities holding records of employing a total of eleven 15-year olds (who were over the legal age of 16 or had left by the time of the audit).

Apple is, predictably, not jazzed about the situation, and has taken action through train-the-trainer schemes, threats of business termination with recidivist plants, and -- most notably -- the recovery of $2.2 million in recruitment fees that international contract workers should not have had to pay.

Twitter’s analytics team posted a blog entry about how well they are performing, in terms of how many “tweets” there are at any given time.  The Twitter team said that they are seeing 50 million tweets a day from their users, a staggering 1,400% increase over last year.

Twitter users were posting up to 5,000 times a day back in 2007, a mere number to 2008, where users were tweeting 300,000 times a day.  That number only grew in 2009, where users were tweeting 2.5 million times a day, that’s roughly 29 tweets per second, on average.

Twitter users now post up to 50,000,000 tweets per day, that’s just under 600 tweets per second, on average. That is roughly 18.2 billion tweets per year, just for 2010, which is likely to increase.

Twitter did note that the total number of tweets per day do not include tweets that have their account flagged as spam.

Gartner published its market share reports on Tuesday for worldwide mobile phone sales in 2009. According to the figures, BlackBerry, iPhone and Android devices have all increased their marketshare whilst Windows Mobile and Symbian devices have slipped significantly.

iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android increased their market share the most (up 6.2%, 3.3%, and 3.4% from 2008, respectively). Windows Mobile dropped 3.1% alongside Symbian who dropped 5.5%.

Despite the drop for Symbian it still remained dominate with 46.9% market share compared to number two RIM which has 19.9% and third place iPhone with 14.4%. "Symbian had become uncompetitive in recent years, but its market share, particularly on Nokia devices, is still strong. If Symbian can use this momentum, it could return to positive growth," said Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner.