ELLEN M. BANNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Mike Calcagno, general manager with the Natural Language Group for Office at Microsoft, and members of his team identify and vet new words to add to the spell checkers that ship with Office in many different languages.

A friend who works in the sciences said it's difficult to trust the spell-checker in her field. "You think Bromodichloromethane or 4-Methyl-2-Pentanone are in there? Or whenever we use borehole the suggested correction is brothel..."

Read my story about Microsoft releasing a second test version of its next Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, here. Get it and try it yourself here.

For some added perspective, I talked with Mike Shaver, a founding member of Mozilla, maker of Firefox. He's currently interim vice president of engineering. Rather than gloating about the success of the browser and the 15-plus points of market share Firefox has taken from IE in the last four years, he was glad to see Microsoft speeding up improvements to its own browser:

Add civic engagement to the ever-growing list of video, gaming and communication offerings on Microsoft's Xbox Live network. As the Democratic National Convention continues this week, the company is ramping up a partnership with Rock the Vote that gives Xbox Live members information about the presidential candidates and help registering to vote.

Video-game news site Joystiq reported yesterday that the October issue of the Official Xbox Magazine (which is "official" in the sense that it has a licensing agreement with the company, not in that it speaks for the company) will carry an item suggesting a game studio other than Kirkland-based Bungie is at work on a fourth installment in the blockbuster "Halo" series for the next-generation Xbox, i.e., whatever follows the 360.

Microsoft was pushing its Live Search service, including its cashback program, in June, propelling the company to the top of the list of most active online advertisers, according to comScore.

ELLEN M. BANNER/THE SEATTLE TIMES

Composting at Microsoft.

In addition to the compostable utensils, expanded recycling and composting outlined in today's story, Microsoft is pushing ahead with more changes to its food-service practices in 2009.

The Microsoft Photosynth team recapped its hectic first-day in the wild, marked by a huge wave of interest that overwhelmed the service and temporarily knocked it down. They were back up and running by late Thursday.

Here are some usage stats from the first 24 hours, posted early this morning:

After seeing its U.S. Internet search market share increase slightly in June -- for the first time in 2008 -- Microsoft gave back some of the gains in July, according to figures from market research comScore.