Facebook formally sliced up its stock in a 5-for-1 division on Friday, a move designed to keep the price of individual shares lower as demand for the privately owned Facebook on secondary markets has been driving it upward.

“The reason is that the stock has risen significantly since our last split, and this allows us to bring it into a similar price range as other private companies,” Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw told CNET. “It also allows us to give everyone larger stock unit grants without increasing dilution for shareholders.”

It’s the third time in Facebook’s six-year history that the company has undergone a split of its shares, following a 4-for-1 division in July 2006 and another in October 2007. Splitting stock is not an uncommon practice, considering that when individual share prices grow very high it can limit their growth. A lower share price can make the stock more accessible to small-time investors.

The sale of Facebook stock on the secondary market has been of great interest to Valley gossips hoping to get a read on what exactly the company’s valuation may be, and when it may finally take the plunge and file for an IPO. Rumors that Facebook employees would be permitted to cash out some of their stock options began to surface about two years ago, and the company formally launched an employee stock buyback program with a major investor, Digital Sky Technologies (which has since changed its name to Mail.ru Group) last year.

The company modified its stock structure to a more powerful dual-class system last year, in a move that some pegged as a preparation for going public soon. A report this summer said that there likely would not be an IPO until next year, and another report from Reuters on Friday tacked on yet another year–suggesting that Facebook would not go public before late 2012.

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A screenshot of Internet Explorer 9 briefly posted on Microsoft’s Russian Web site.

Thanks to Microsoft’s Russian subsidiary, the world now has a pretty good idea of what Internet Explorer 9 will look like.

The Russian folks were kind enough to briefly post an image and some details that had yet to be shared about the browser. And although they pulled it down, ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley captured the information and screenshot.

More than anything else, the screenshot shows a browser that attempts to offer a minimalistic user interface and leave as much room as possible for the Web sites. When combined with the browser’s hardware acceleration, the hope is to pave the way for Web sites that are as application-like as possible.

Microsoft declined to confirm the details Wednesday of what had been posted to its Russian site.

However, the look is consistent with what IE team member Ryan Gavin told CNET earlier this month about the planned appearance of IE9.

“The browser is the theater,” Gavin said in the interview. “We’re not the play.”

The browser appears to go as far as to allow people to pin certain sites to the desktop and open them in their own windows without any clear indication that they are using IE at all. According to Foley’s Bing translation of the Russian site, there will be certain sites that are “recognized” or “protected” and can be pinned to the taskbar and launched with their own icons.

Microsoft plans to release a beta of the browser at a September 15 event in San Francisco, although this latest leak clearly steals some of the thunder. Up to now, Microsoft had offered several technical previews of the underlying engine, but had yet to show or talk in detail about how the browser would look.

The invitations for the event do mention “the beauty of the Web” and “unlocking the native Web.”

Until now, though, the focus had been on several key features of the browser’s engine, including the hardware acceleration capabilities, improved JavaScript engine, and broader support for HTML5 and other standards. Microsoft first showed those features at the Mix10 event in March in Las Vegas, though it had talked about hardware acceleration as far back as last November’s Professional Developer Conference.

The details on the Russian site reveal a browser that borrows much from Windows 7, including the ability to tear off browser tabs and have them “snap” to a particular part of the screen, similar to the way documents and applications already do in the latest version of Windows.

There is also a unified search and address bar, something already seen in Google’s Chrome. However, having learned from criticism of Google–as well as its own considerable issues with regulators–I’m hearing that Microsoft will make the choice of whether to let the bar suggest sites as you type a completely opt-in affair.

Courtesy : Cnet News