Under the deal, CareerBuilder will continue to be the exclusive job search engine on Microsoft's MSN site through 2013, and will pay Microsoft up to $443 million.

And Microsoft has been revamping its MSN site to make Internet purchasing more appealing to consumers.

Even Hotmail, which has demonstrable momentum on its own, now gets about one-third of its new-member referrals from other MSN sites.

Microsoft has also taken notice of Google and is improving the Web search engine that powers its MSN site.

Jong Zuid: MSN site of the first Dutch mobile soap opera (in Dutch)

Repeat visitors registering with the MSN site can collect special badge icons for achieving high scores or enduring long game sessions.

Many MSN sites can be directly accessed from mobile devices.

The early reports of the browser blocking by the MSN site surfaced on Thursday on online technology sites like CNet's News.com and Slashdot.

But most versions of the Netscape browser were not blocked by the MSN site, though some called up the site quite slowly.

Loudeye, which has relationships with all five major record labels as well as more than 800 independent labels, will offer 100,000 song samples to MSN sites.