The most popular stories on BetaNews this past week: June 22 -- 28

june-22-28The battle for dominance between Microsoft and Google continued, with Microsoft offering a huge storage boost for Office 365 and OneDrive users. This was quickly trumped by Google later in the week at 1/0 2014, when the company announced unlimited storage for Google Drive for Work users. Microsoft is basking in the glory of being heralded as cooler than Apple by Joe -- and stunts like offering cashback deals to sway MacBook Air owners into switching into Surface Pro 3 certainly helps. Microsoft opened a new store on Long Island, while Google branched out into new territory with a trial run of a new domain registration service. Microsoft also ventured into new waters with its first Android smartphone, the Nokia X2.

In something of an interesting twist, Microsoft opted to use Opera Mobile as the default web browser. Opera is also returning to Linux after the surprise release of Opera 24 Developer. Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" KDE was also released. Linux also managed to hit the headlines for facilitating the hacking of Google's Nest thermstats. If this hasn’t put you off, Logitech added support to its Harmony remotes.

Security news, you say? How about the revelation that there are still a terrifying number of servers lying vulnerable to the Heartbleed exploit. Need a little more? It turns out that the  CryptoLocker ransomware is still out there, and mobile malware in general is on the increase. New Trojans have been uncovered by Kaspersky Lab that affect iOS and Android devices. Windows Phone doesn’t tend to get mentioned when security problems crop up, but that may change -- the ease with which the handset can be made means that more vendors are interested in the devices.

Smartphones may be more popular than ever, but this is not something that website designers seem to be taking into account. More than a quarter of websites are not mobile-friendly, leaving tablet and smartphone users with a sub par experience. Returning to I/O briefly, Google revealed Android Auto as well and merging the worlds of Android and Chrome OS. Of course, there was also Android L which HTC promised to bring to its flagship handsets -- if you want to get it installed on your Nexus 5 or 7, we had a guide to doing just that.

Amazon's Prime Music service fared well in its first week of existence… well some form of entertainment was needed after Facebook died for a full 30 minutes -- imagine! We took a look at what can be learnt from the outage.

Good weekends, all.

Image Credit: vinz89 / Shutterstock

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