To refocus on core businesses and bolster itself to take on rival Symantec

Software security vendor McAfee laid off about 250 workers, roughly 3% of its workforce, to refocus on core businesses and bolster itself to take on rival Symantec.

The affected workers were not part of the core focus in the coming year, according to McAfee.

McAfee spokesman Ian Bain was quoted by Reuters as saying that in order to better prepare the company for growth in 2012, they have made the difficult decision to reduce a small percentage of their global workforce.

Since its acquisition by Intel over a year ago, the security company has been initiating quite a few changes. But, it has seen its CEO Dave DeWalt quit this year and its worldwide CTO George Kurtz more recently.

According to Intel, the integration and assimilation of McAfee has been smooth and it had posted positive sales in the third quarter.

According to an IDC report released early this year, the top five security vendors, including McAfee and Symantec, have collectively lost 16% of their market share over the last five years.

It’s Oprah’s last show. A nation mourns.

A software company in Norway, however, probably breathes a sigh of relief.

Turns out the team at Opera Software, who make a neat little web browser of the same name, have for years been fielding incorrectly addressed emails intended for Oprah Winfrey.

Opera. Oprah. Easy mistake to make.

Mid-way through dealing with customer support requests, bug reports and the daily business of running a software company, Opera would also be asked for things as varied and bizarre as tickets to Hannah Montana shows, mathematical conundrums, and whether people with a story to tell could be on Oprah’s show.

Opera’s Communications Manager Pål Unanue-Zahl told TechLand:

“There are tons of Oprah emails in our support database, sent to the automatic system. They all got an auto reply, stating that the email had been received by Opera Software but only a few were answered in person.”

Rumors saying Oprah Winfrey was planning to open her own software support consultancy after leaving showbusiness remain unconfirmed at this time.

The latest Android smartphone loaded Web pages 52% faster than iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3, according to thousands of independent field tests released today by Blaze Software.

The Web page load times were about a second apart for the two devices in a study that amassed 45,000 load tests in all. For Android 2.3 on the Google Nexus S smartphone using a version of Chrome, the median load time was 2.144 seconds, compared to 3.254 seconds for iPhone 4 on iOS 4.3 running a version of Safari, according to the study.

Blaze used Fortune 1,000 Web sites for the tests, running the Web page loading tests repeatedly over Wi-Fi and 3G wireless connections with nothing else running on the phones at the time. The Android phone was faster than the iPhone in loading 84% of the tested Web sites. “Android wasn’t just faster overall, but rather provided a faster browsing experience four times out of five,” the study said.

Blaze sought to describe its tests as objective, adding it has no association with Google or Apple “in any form,” David Horne, marketing programs manager for Ottawa, Ont.-based Blaze, said in an e-mail. Blaze writes software to automatically accelerate Web site speeds and created a mobile testing tool used in the Android-iPhone study to be able to analyze mobile Web performance and to “discover new optimization to add to our core product,” Horne explained.

While Android came out ahead in the load time comparison, the study noted that both are “generally fast.” However, the study also noted that “browser speed is a big deal” and had been a prominent point when both Apple and Google recently noted their improved JavaScript engines.

“Browser performance is all the rage, and everybody says theirs is faster,” the study added.

The study’s authors said they were surprised by the results.

One surprise came because both iPhone and Android had optimized JavaScript engines in their latest versions, but were not much faster than previous versions also tested, Blaze said. “Both Apple and Google tout great performance improvements [with optimized JavaScript] but those seem to be reserved to JavaScript benchmarks and high-complexity apps,” the study said. “If you expect pages to show up faster after an upgrade, you’ll be sorely disappointed.”

Blaze said part of the problem is that the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, a kind of custom test used by Apple and Google, and other benchmark tests “are very different than real-world sites and don’t reflect the actual user experience.” Blaze said it measured the load time of Web pages, “mimicking the experience users would get when browsing on their smartphones.”

Other testing groups have only compared a small set of sites manually, Blaze said.

Additionally, of the 1,000 sites tested, 175 were customized for mobile access. The iPhone improved the time to load a mobile Web site by 39% over other standard Web sites, while Android improved the difference in the two types of sites by 8%. Still, Android loaded both types faster than the iPhone 4.

Most of the testing Blaze conducted was over Wi-Fi in a home using a high-speed router connected to a fast DSL line, but it also conducted some 3G testing (with nearly 6 Mbit/sec download speed over the Bell Mobility HSPA network) with iPhone 4 running iOS 4.2 this time. In that comparison, it found Wi-Fi was faster in 82% of the cases, but only by half a second.

When it comes to safety from hackers and viruses, the iPhone is streets ahead of Android

Android-based smartphones are more vulnerable to attacks by hackers and electronic viruses than the iPhone, according to the chairman of the world’s largest provider of security software for corporate servers.

The remarks were made less than a week after the company, Trend Micro, released its Mobile Security software for Android devices.

“Android is open source, which means the hacker can also understand the underlying architecture and source code,”" Chairman Steve Chang told Bloomberg Businessweek.

“We have to give credit to Apple, because they are very careful about it,” he added. “It’s impossible for certain types of viruses”to operate on the iPhone.”

Google didn’t exactly refute Chang’s claim in its response to Bloomberg. “On all computing devices, users necessarily entrust at least some of their information to the developer of the application they’re using,” it said in an email. “Android has taken steps to inform users of this trust relationship and to limit the amount of trust a user must grant to any given application developer.”

In the iPhone universe, the amount of trust a user must cede to a developer is less than in the Android realm because Apple reviews all apps before it allows them to be sold through its App Store. Although that kind of quality review doesn’t exist in the Android world yet, some vetting of apps will occur when Amazon launches its Android apps store later this year.

As smartphone usage grows in corporations, they’ll become more tempting targets for hackers. “Smartphones are the next PC, and once they’re adopted by enterprises, data loss will be a very key problem,” Chang said.

Trend Micro’s Mobile Security app for Android, which it is selling for $3.99, will block viruses and malicious viruses, as well as unwanted calls, on smartphones running the operating system. It also installs parental controls on a phone’s web browser. According to the company, the app is the only mobile tool that uses cloud-based security intelligence to protect Android devices from the latest cyber threats