The 50 most visited US sites list (PDF download) is available from their website and it shows the following top websites.

It comes as no surprise that Google and it’s related web properties are the most visited websites in the US. Facebook holds an enviable fourth most visited position, even more than sites like Amazon, Apple and eBay, and far far above Twitter and LinkedIn. MySpace still seems to be holding in the top 50 list (the new MySpace might make it promising), while the surprise new entry is Pinterest, which shows the growing popularity and traffic of this new social media service.

I hope you have already seen the Google’s 1000 most-visited sites on the web. Which website you expected to feature on this list and it’s not there?

Eight years ago, when I first saw Firefox posted on a message board that I frequented, I thought it was so cool that someone was trying to make a new browser. The post was flamed to death with all sorts of negative comments about how Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was the best there was and Mozilla was never going to be able to compete with Microsoft. Fortunately, Mozilla didn’t see comments like that and decide to throw in the towel. Because of that, the Firefox team at Mozilla are able to celebrate 8 years of development today.

If you take a look back, you can absolutely see how Firefox was directly responsible for some of the major changes in how we use the web today. Firefox made a name for itself by being something that was so much better than Internet Explorer at the time that the only reason IE was used was to install Firefox. The team has even gone so far recently as to poke fun back at Internet Explorer 10‘s release. The browser has grown with the intention of delivering a web experience that “put people first” as they put it. Now, 8 years later, Firefox has absolutely become a staple in the web ecosystem.

Firefox now exists on Windows, it’s a default browser in many versions of Linux, OSX, and now Android as well. On each platform they support, Mozilla strives to offer the open web standards and practices that the company has dedicated themselves to from the beginning. With a global browser market share that hovers just behind Internet Explorer by a few percent, it’s not hard to imagine that Firefox will be around for a long time. Happy Birthday Firefox!

Samsung’s going to get its day in court once more, and yet again, more than a billion dollars potentially hang in the balance. Yesterday, Judge Lucy Koh agreed to “consider the questions” posed about Apple vs Samsung jury foreman Velvin Hogan’s alleged misconduct as part of a wider-reaching December 6th hearing.

The South Korean company claims Hogan failed to disclose that Seagate, Hogan’s former employer and a key Samsung business partner, slapped him with a lawsuit following a personal bankruptcy back in 1993. Samsung says the lack of disclosure prevented its lawyers from probing Hogan about potential biases and conflicting interests.

Hogan says that jury candidates were only asked for hard details about litigation that occurred in the past decade, not twenty years gone. He finds Samsung’s supposed ignorance of his past hard to swallow and publicly posed the question as to whether or not the Korean company allowed him on the jury as some sort of contingency plan: a possible way to gain a mistrial if things went badly in court.

CNET notes that Hogan in fact mentioned being embroiled in past litigation as part of the jury screening process, even if he didn’t mention Seagate specifically. The lawyers consulted by that website said that Koh is highly unlikely to overturn the $1 billion verdict because of Hogan’s actions.

Apple’s lawyers will be forced to turn over the information they had about Hogan as part of Koh’s inquiry.

Summary: Microsoft’s Surface tablet is an interesting piece of hardware, but the heavy emphasis on the smart cover keyboard has the potential to steer Microsoft’s tablet aspirations into the tar pits.

Windows 8, I want to love you, but your annoying quirks keep bringing me down.

After spending more than a year conquering the operating system’s overhauled (and nonintuitive) interface in its various prerelease iterations, I’ve now entered a second stage of frustration: I find myself cursing at Windows 8′s major changes less and less, but shaking my fist and swearing like a sailor at its little irritations more and more.

Beyond its polished, tile-based surface, Microsoft’s new operating system plays host to a legion of smaller annoyances—a cornucopia of quirks that will leave you seething long after you get the hang of all the new gesture controls and schizophrenic system options. Some of the problems are whoppers. Others are mere nitpicks that result from a lifetime of traditional Windows use. But many of these problems can be fixed, with one major exception. Read on!

Lock down the lock screen

Let’s start at the very beginning of the Windows 8 experience. Lock screens make sense on a tablet, but on a PC the lock screen becomes just another superfluous click in a sea of nonstreamlined Windows 8 controls. Fortunately, banishing the Windows 8 lock screen from your life is easy.

Open the Run command box by searching for “Run,” pressing Windows-R, or moving your mouse pointer to the lower-left corner of the Desktop screen, right-clicking, and selecting Run in the Quick Access menu.

Now type gpedit.msc and press Enter to open the Local Group Policy Editor. Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel >Personalization in the left menu. Double-click the Do Not Display the Lock Screen option in the main pane to open a new window. Select the Enabled radio button, click OK, and you’re done. Buh-bye, lock screen!

Press Start to continue

Enough words have been written about Windows 8′s missing Start button to fill the Library of Congress twice over, so I won’t spend much time on it. But if you’re looking to bring back the Start button and possibly even banish the live-tiled Start screen for good, check out the free (and awesome) Classic Shell program. We cover it in-depth in our roundup of free tools designed to bend Windows 8 to your will.

No POP for you!

One of my biggest Windows 8 irritations is its lack of POP email support in the native Mail app. I get it, Microsoft: IMAP’s syncing functionality fits better into the cloud-connected, work-everywhere vision you have for Windows 8. But tell that to all the nontechie people who lean on me for computer support, and who rely on the POP email addresses that their ISPs handed out.

If you’re running Windows 8 and need to keep tabs on a POP email account, I first recommend downloading Mozilla’s free Thunderbird email application and using it in Desktop mode. But if you don’t want to do that (or if you’re running Windows RT), you have a workaround for Microsoft’s POP reluctance, though it’s somewhat clunky.

The key lies in the Mail app’s support for popular webmail clients, including Gmail and Outlook.com—two free favorites that just happen to be able to connect and link with outside POP email accounts. See where I’m going here? Just create a free email account with either service, and then link your POP mail account to it using the tutorials supplied by Outlook.com or Gmail.

After persuading your POP account to play nice with your Outlook.com or Gmail account, add your chosen webmail service to the Windows 8 Mail app through the normal means. Voilà! Your POP mail will work its way into the Mail app inbox by way of its webmail proxy.

Here’s the kicker: When you send email, the Mail app will let you use only your webmail email address, not your POP mail address. There isn’t any way around the limitation, but at least your messages will land in your inbox.

No DVD playback? No problem!

Windows 8 still includes Windows Media Player, but the new version of the program lacks DVD playback support. If you’ve yet to take the plunge into a digital-only lifestyle, you could spring for Windows 8 Pro and the optional $10 Media Center Pack (which Microsoft is giving away free to upgraders until January 31, 2013). This is one solution, but I recommend downloading the free and flexible VLC instead.

VLC isn’t as polished as Microsoft’s Media Center software, but it’s jam-packed with utility, offering full DVD playback and ripping support, robust file-transcoding options, the ability to tune in to Internet videos and podcasts alike, and even spotty Blu-ray support if you enlist the help of add-ons with questionable legality. Our guide to mastering VLC will get you up and watching in no time—and for no money.

Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?

Unlike HAL (and Windows 7), Windows 8 isn’t pleading or pushy when you want to get rid of a file. Deleting something sends the item straight to the Recycle Bin, no confirmations necessary. Ironically, this may be the one case when you can perform a task in fewer clicks than you could in previous iterations of Windows. That said, the old-style confirmation prompt has saved me from errantly deleting something important on more than one occasion.

If you want to bring back the warning, right-click the Recycle Bin and select Properties. Simply check the Display delete confirmation dialog box in the new window, click OK, and you’re good to go. Getting rid of the option is as easy as removing the checkmark once again.

Forget the Bing app

I’m a Google fanatic, but when I’m tooling around in Windows 8′s Start screen on a touchscreen device, I find that the Bing search app’s picture-heavy aesthetic fits very nicely with Windows 8′s Modern design. Like many Modern-style apps, however, the Bing app includes an irritating quirk: Selecting a search result pops you out of the Bing app and opens the page in Internet Explorer. It’s a mild annoyance in the grand scheme of things, but it still drives me nuts.

You can have your attractive cake and eat it too by pinning the Bing.com website to the Start screen. Head to Bing.com, click the Pin This Site icon in the toolbar, and then select Pin to Start. Annoyance averted.

Higher resolution, lower readability

Windows 8 has spurred a whole new hardware type: the laptop-tablet hybrid. Many of these devices sport 1080p IPS displays that are breathtaking to behold. I’ve had the opportunity to test a few hybrids extensively, and I’ve found that the blessing of a high-resolution display comes with an accompanying curse.

Many convertibles stick to an Ultrabook-type form factor, squeezing that 1080p resolution into a 10- to 12-inch screen. The ultrapacked pixel density makes for a razor-sharp picture, but text appears a bit too small for my taste in desktop mode. Fortunately, a trick that helped farsighted folks browse with ease in Windows 7 still applies in Windows 8.

Right-click anywhere on the desktop, select Screen Resolution, and then click Make text and other items larger and smaller. The Change the size of all items option works great if you plan on sticking to a touchscreen interface, boosting the size of icons and text alike to make them finger-friendly. I prefer using the Change only the text size option on hybrid-type devices that include a touchpad or mouse, however. The drop-down menu includes a bevy of text types, each of which you can individually alter to suit your particular needs.

The one that got away

Unfortunately, Windows 8′s single-most oppressive annoyance can’t be fixed by minor tweaks, or—as I was told after spending hours on the phone with multiple support representatives—by Microsoft itself.

I’m a huge proponent of the system’s ability to transfer basic settings and files between multiple computers with the help of a cloud-connected Microsoft Account. I’ve accumulated several Microsoft Accounts over the years, however. One exists solely to maintain my Xbox Live gamertag, with more than six years’ worth of achievements, Microsoft points, and associated purchases tied to it. Another Microsoft Account plays host to my grandfathered 25GB SkyDrive account, and all the files inside. I rely on a third as my primary Microsoft Account login.

There is no way to merge the multiple accounts into a single, comprehensive Microsoft Account.

The aforementioned support calls proved unhelpful in clearing up the issue. Taking to the Internet, I found this July 2012 forum post by a Microsoft representative stating that the company has no plans to introduce an account-merging option. “I think it would be a nice feature, but it was repeatedly assessed as too costly compared to other needs,” he said.

That sucks for a long-term Microsoft fan like myself, especially since I jump from computer to computer frequently. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I need to juggle three separate Microsoft Accounts in order to keep full functionality. Signing out of my main account and back in with my secondary accounts on the SkyDrive and Games apps doesn’t take long, but it’s frustrating, all the more so because I won’t have any way to fix this particular irritation at any time in the foreseeable future.

Ah, well. You can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

Intel’s Itanium processor launches are few and far between given that only so many need its specialized grunt, but that just makes any refresh so much larger — and its new Itanium 9500 certainly exemplifies that kind of jump. The chip centers around much more up-to-date, 32-nanometer Poulson architecture that doubles the cores to eight, hikes the interconnect speeds and supports as much as 2TB of RAM for very (very, very) large tasks. With the help of an error-resistant buffer, Intel sees the 9500 being as much as 2.4 times faster as the Tukwila-era design it’s replacing. The new Itanium also ramps the clock speeds to a relatively brisk 1.73GHz to 2.53GHz, although there will be definite costs for server builders wanting to move up: the shipping roster starts at $1,350 per chip in bulk and climbs to an eye-watering $4,650 for the fastest example.

Anyone worried that Poulson might be the end of the road for Intel’s EPIC-based platform will also be glad to get a brief reminder that Itanium will soldier on. The next iteration, nicknamed Kittson, will be framed around a modular design that shares traces of silicon and the processor socket with the more familiar Xeon E7. Intel casts it as a pragmatic step that narrows its server-oriented processors down to a common motherboard and should be cheaper to make. It’s likely that we’ll have to be very patient for more details on Kittson knowing the long intervals between Itanium revamps, but fence-sitting IT pros may just be glad that they won’t have to consider jumping ship for awhile yet.