Internet Explorer
What’s Coming in Internet Explorer 8 for IT Professionals?
Yesterday at Tech Ed IT Pro 2008 in Orlando we announced some of the enhancements we’re making in Internet Explorer 8 to help IT Professionals deploy and manage IE8 within their organization. We wanted to share those with the IT Pros on our blog.
Over the last year we’ve surveyed over 2000 IT Professionals to understand their concerns and priorities for deploying and managing desktops and software within their organization. We learned that IT Pros have a lot of things to worry about - more than 30 different concerns came up. However, some topics arose considerably more frequently than others. Here are the top ones:
- Deployment and implementation of new technology
- Managing updates and upgrades
- Application compatibility
- Security of data, network and systems
Internet Explorer 7 already has a pretty strong deployment and management story. For IE7 IT Pros are able to:
- Generate customized builds that include company’s settings and branding by using Internet Explorer Administration Kit(IEAK)
- Centrally manage browser settings through group policy
- Use common deployment infrastructures like Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services, Systems Management Server and Active Directory
In addition to deployment and management support, IE 7 introduced a number of features intended to help your users browse more safely and hence protect your corporate data, network and systems:
- Phishing Filter
- ActiveX Opt-in
- Extended Validation Certificates
IE7 did a lot to address the concerns of the IT Professionals but we felt there were some places we could improve. Yesterday, we announced some of our new features:
Slipstream Support in Internet Explorer 8
We got consistent feedback from customers that deploying Internet Explorer 7 as part of Windows XP is hard. Many IT Pros want to update their Windows XP images to contain IE7 by default, so IE7 gets installed as part of the OS install. To do that the IT Pros need to boot their existing images of Windows XP, install IE7 and then recapture the image. This process roughly takes 2 hours per image.
With Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Vista you’ll be able to “Slipstream” Internet Explorer 8 into a Vista image so that when you deploy Vista it already contains Internet Explorer 8. To slipstream IE8 only takes 10-15 minute per image. You’ll also be able to slipstream IE8 cumulative updates so that you are shipping the most up to date and secure image.
Look out for a forthcoming post to learn more about Slipstreaming IE8.
Application Compatibility and Internet Explorer 8
You have seen a lot of discussion on this blog about our decision to ship Internet Explorer 8 with standards mode switched on by default. Today, not all sites are built to conform to web standards so we’ve given end users and developers control over how sites display in IE8.
How about IT Professionals? For one, we’re adding new events to the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) that help you detect and resolve potential issues between IE8 and your internal applications and web sites. For another, we’re providing Group Policy settings that help you control, with great granularity, those settings that most impact compatibility. Lastly, we’re looking at how to intelligently solve this problem for intranets - providing the greatest application and web site compatibility while still maintaining our core tenets of security, performance, and reliability.
Security in Internet Explorer 8
The Internet has changed the way that people live and work. People are spending more and more time on the web but this growth in web usage also attracted people who have malicious intent. From phishing scams to sites which install malware, the web can be a dangerous place to be. Who hasn’t had to jump across the keyboard/mouse to stop a friend or loved one visiting a phishing site or installing a piece of suspicious software? What happens when that person doesn’t have their tech-savvy friend watching over their shoulder?
Did you know that more than $3 billion has been lost in Phishing scams? The browser – and particularly in IE8 - plays an important role in helping protect users against a range of attacks, from social attacks like phishing to browser based exploits.
Rather than cover those features here, we’ve already posted information about some of the ways we’re helping your users browse more safely:
There’s more to come around security in later blog postings.
Updates to the IEAK
The internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) enables IT Pros to customize IE for their company’s needs. You might be familiar with this tool since it was available for IE6 and IE7. In IE8, IEAK is getting a facelift. We have fixed a number of bugs and added some enhancements to improve the performance of IEAK. IEAK8 will support custom IE8 builds for new platforms: Vista and Windows Server 2008 and new IE8 features like Activities and Web Slices.
Stay tuned for a follow-up blog post that will contain more detail about IEAK8.
Wrap Up
We plan to include all of the above mentioned features in our Beta 2 release which is planned for August 2008. As always when developing software, features can get cut or postponed if we find bugs that affect ship quality but right now we’re on track to have these features for Beta 2.
IE7 was a great browser to deploy and manage in an enterprise or business environment. With IE8, we’re doubling down on that investment to make sure that we have the best browser to deploy and manage in an enterprise environment.
Source- IEBlog
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IE8 Beta 2 Coming in August
In addition to the features for developers we showed in IE8 Beta 1, we’ve been working on great new features for consumers and IT professionals (as well as doing even more cool stuff for developers). I’m happy to announce that we’re on track to deliver IE8 Beta 2 this August when you’ll get a chance to see what we’ve been up to in these areas. Furthermore, in order to help us get even more feedback for this global product, we’ll be releasing Beta 2 in over twenty languages within a month of the initial release. This is a big step up from the three languages we released for beta 1 and much more than we ever did during IE7.
On behalf of the team, I’d like to thank you all for your help with beta 1. Since we released Beta 1 in March we’ve had over two million downloads so far with lots of good, useful feedback. We’ve been listening to that feedback and making improvements to our work on an interoperable platform that has full CSS 2.1 support, faster script performance, and significantly more capable developer tools as well as our cool new features like Activities and Web Slices. We’ve learned a lot from this first beta – keep the comments coming please!
Between now and August, there are a few ways you can prepare your sites for Beta 2. First, take advantage of Activities and Web Slices on your site. Second, make sure your site looks great in IE8; as you may recall, IE8 will use our new, more standards-compliant layout and rendering engine for strict doctype pages by default. This may cause IE8 to layout pages differently than IE7 did. If you haven’t had a chance to test your pages yet or don’t want to make changes yet, remember that you can have your site tell IE to use our IE7 layout engine for your strict doctype pages by adding the X-UA-Compatible http header to your HTTP headers or on a per document basis. You can learn more about how to ensure site compat with IE8 on our new IE Compat pages.
Source- IEBlog
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 now scheduled for Q3
The next builds for Microsoft’s forthcoming Web browser generation may already be ready, but the company wants to give publishers some time to prepare, in case their Web sites end up looking somehow storm-damaged.
The next public preview of Microsoft’s upcoming Web browser will be available in the third quarter of this year, according to a public blog post from a senior account manager in New Zealand named Nick Mackechnie yesterday morning.
Source- Betanews
IE-only marketing campaign skewed Firefox, Safari numbers
A Web measurement firm today blamed a massive online marketing campaign aimed only at Internet Explorer (IE) users for skewing its April data, which said Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari had lost significant amounts of market share.
The company, Net Applications of Aliso Viejo, Calif., has posted revised data on its Web site that shows Firefox and Safari still dropping in share, but by much smaller increments.
An "extremely large" marketing campaign among a small number of sites that targeted only users of IE was responsible for the aberrant numbers, said Vince Vizzaccaro, the executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications.
View Full Article: Computerworld
Internet Explorer 7 updated for Windows XP
Security issues have been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise a computer running Microsoft Internet Explorer and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.
To download the update just visit here
IE 8 and Windows XP Service Pack 3
Internet Explorer team blog has posted and article relating to the upgradation of Windows XP SP2 to SP3
Installing IE8 Beta1 on Windows XP SP3 is fully supported, so go ahead and upgrade your computers to XPSP3 and then install IE8 Beta 1 to try out our new features. You will be able to uninstall IE8 Beta 1 at any point to revert back to either IE7 or IE6 depending on what you were using before.
However, if you already have IE8 Beta 1 installed on XPSP2, Windows XP SP3 will not be offered to you via Windows Update. This is because after you update your system to XPSP3, you will no longer be able to uninstall IE8 Beta 1 and the Remove option will be grayed out under the Add/Remove programs in Control Panel. The reason is the same as in IE7 case described above. Since people are more likely to uninstall beta software, we strongly recommend uninstalling IE8 Beta 1 prior to upgrading to Windows XP SP3 to eliminate any deployment issues and install IE8 Beta 1 after XPSP3 is on your machine.
So for all those who are planning to install Windows XP SP3 and are using IE 8 then first of all U have to uninstall IE 8 otherwise you may face some problems during upgrading Windows XP
HTML and DOM Standards Compliance in IE8 Beta 1
With the release of IE8 Beta 1, I’m pleased to be able to talk about the first round of improved standards compliance and bug fixes in IE’s HTML and DOM support for the new IE8 standards mode. Doug hinted at some of these improvements, and I wrote a little bit about them in the IE8 Beta 1 whitepapers here and here. In this post, I’d like to enumerate the ‘change list’ (of sorts) here on the blog in response to requests for such a list that I received at MIX08. Personally, I’ve been long-awaiting this release because of what I know it means to web developers (like myself) that have had to code around a lot of IE’s DOM quirks for many years.
For IE8, I have really focused on the HTML and DOM Core standards and concentrated on building a solid cross-browser compatible foundation for many of the APIs that are already supported by Trident. This effort to fix some of the cracks in IE’s foundation has been a long time in coming, and I believe it’s a critical and necessary first step before adding on additional standards support.
IE Automatic Component Activation Now Available
The IE Automatic Component Activation (IE ACA) update is now available as part of the April 2008 Internet Explorer Cumulative Update. The "click to activate" behavior, formerly required for ActiveX controls embedded in some webpages, is now permanently removed from Internet Explorer. For detailed information on IE ACA, see our blog post from last November announcing this update. This update replaces the IE ACA previews released in December 2007 and February 2008.
source: IE Blog
