SuperSite Blog : Internet Explorer

Microsoft's proposed browser ballot screen

pthurrott — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:53:05 GMT

I'm embarrassed to say I missed this last week, but when Microsoft announced its proposal to let EU customers choose a browser via a so-called ballot screen, they also provided an image of what that screen could look like. Here it is.

Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web. If this proposal is ultimately accepted, Microsoft will ship Windows in Europe with the full functionality available in the rest of the world. As requested by the Commission, we will be publishing our proposal in full here on our website as soon as possible.

The icons above were no doubt the inspiration for Opera's newest complaint, that icons should not be used because IE's blue "E" logo is, to many people, the Internet. I suppose a more valid argument could be made about the order in which the browsers appear. In the shot above, the browsers are listed by usage/market share, with IE first.

Browser ballot screen isn't just for Windows 7

pthurrott — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 07:48:58 GMT

Mary Jo Foley reports on an interesting tidbit I missed while traipsing around The Netherlands this week: Microsoft's proposal to let EU users choose from competing web browsers isn't relegated to Windows 7. They'll offer this capability on Windows XP and Windows Vista as well.

The “ballot screen” isn’t for Windows 7 users only. Microsoft is proposing that it be allowed to provide the ballot screen to European users running Windows XP, Vista and/or Windows 7.

The ballot screen — which will include a list of browsers including IE, plus a number of choices from competing vendors — will be delivered to current and future XP and Vista users over Windows Update, according to Microsoft’s proposal.

Microsoft is advocating that the ballot screen include 10 or fewer of “the most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows with a usage share of equal to or more than 0.5% in the EEA (European Economic Area).” The choice of browsers should be presented “in a horizontal line and in an unbiased way” a display of icons and “basic identifying information” on the Web browsers. The top five of the browsers listed (by market share) will get additional “prominent display,” Microsoft is advocating.

XP and Vista users will get the ballot screen three to six months after the European Commission’s final ruling in the Opera antitrust case. For XP users, Microsoft plans to designate the ballot screen a “high priority” update when it pushes it out over Windows Update; for Vista and Windows 7 users, the ballot screen will be designated “important,” the proposal says.

Here's to hoping that this condition leaves Opera off the list. I'm not sure if I mentioned this here in the blog yet, but I'd advocate a boycott of Opera if I thought anyone was actually using the damn thing. I'm so tired of these complainers. Here's a new example why. The people have spoken, Opera. Please go away.

Microsoft's statement about Windows 7 in the EU

pthurrott — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:27:44 GMT

Just in...

Statement by Brad Smith, General Counsel

July 24, 2009

As the European Commission has just announced in a statement, Microsoft has made a new proposal in an effort to address competition law issues related to Internet Explorer and interoperability.

Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web. If this proposal is ultimately accepted, Microsoft will ship Windows in Europe with the full functionality available in the rest of the world. As requested by the Commission, we will be publishing our proposal in full here on our web site as soon as possible.

While the Commission solicits public comment and considers this proposal, we are committed to ensuring that we are in full compliance with European law and our obligations under the 2007 Court of First Instance ruling.

As we said June 11th, we currently are providing PC manufacturers in Europe with E versions of Windows 7, which we believe are fully compliant with European law. PCs manufacturers building machines for the European market will continue to be required to ship E versions of Windows 7 until such time that the Commission fully reviews our proposals and determines whether they satisfy our obligations under European law. If the Commission approves this new proposal, Microsoft will begin work at that time to begin implementation of it with PC manufacturers.

As the European Commission announced, Microsoft’s proposal also includes a public undertaking designed to promote interoperability between third party products and a number of Microsoft products, including Windows, Windows Server, Office, Exchange, and SharePoint.

Like the Internet Explorer proposal, the interoperability measures we are offering involve significant change by Microsoft. They build on the Interoperability Principles announced by Microsoft in February 2008, which were also based on extensive discussions with the Commission, and they include new steps including enforceable warranty commitments.

We believe that if ultimately accepted, this proposal will fully address the European competition law issues relating to the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows and interoperability with our high-volume products. This would mark a big step forward in addressing a decade of legal issues and would be good news for European consumers and our partners in the industry.

How to download a web browser in Windows 7 E (which doesn't come with its own browser)

pthurrott — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:57:36 GMT

Rafael offers up an interesting step-by-step guide to finding a web browser in the supposedly browser-less Windows 7 E Editions, which will be afflicting folks in Europe in about 3 months:

Mom and Dad will likely get a pre-built machine, by either a popular manufacturer or their kids, so this isn’t a problem for them. Us, on the other hand, are incredibly lazy. We won’t want to bend down and grab one of a million USB fobs. Or put yet another executable on our NAS. Or heaven forbid, waste a CD. We need something clever.

Step 1 – Launch (and configure) Windows Media Player

Step 2 – Search for your browser, using the Windows Media Guide

Step 3 – Click an ad, download your browser

Read the original post for the full details, of course. Good stuff.

My advice, however, is to just avoid this silliness and download a browser before installing Windows 7 E, copy it to a USB thumb drive or whatever, and just plug it in after the OS is up and running.

BTW: Anyone who mentions the word "Trident" like that's news just doesn't get it. Windows Media Player has long been documented to use the IE rendering engine. And Microsoft has been very upfront that the Windows 7 E Editions do not have IE, the application, but do have the underlying rendering technologies required by other applications.

Microsoft documents how Windows 7 E customers can get a browser

pthurrott — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:26:10 GMT

Oddly enough, it requires something I think of as the "sneakernet".

Installing E editions of Windows 7

Windows 7 launches in the UK on the 22nd October and the main version sold within the UK will be the “E version”. This includes Windows 7 E Home Premium, Windows 7 E Professional, Windows 7 E Ultimate and Windows 7 E Starter editions. This version of Windows 7 (along with the N version) will not include a browser (for example: it will not come with Internet Explorer 8). We recommend therefore you have an Internet browser from Microsoft or from another software manufacturer saved onto a CD/DVD or another medium before you install Windows 7.

Step One: Back up your files and personal data

Step Two: Save your preferred browser (e.g Internet Explorer 8 or a browser from another software manufacturer)

Step Three: Install Windows 7

Step Four: Re-install your browser

Step Five: Re-install all your personal data

In step two, there is a link to the Internet Explorer 8 page on Microsoft.com (UK). This suggests strongly, then, that the normally downloadable version of IE 8 will install fine on Windows 7 E. I will have to test this.

There is one other bit of news here too:

N version will be available in some retailers and this is a version of Windows 7 which includes the same functionality as Windows 7 E, except that it does not include Windows Media Player and related technologies. Like Windows 7 E it does not include a browser (e.g Internet Explorer 8).

So the N editions don't include IE 8 either. Interesting. Good thing my book isn't done yet. Time to fix that. :)

Thanks to Mark S. for the link.

Newsflash: Europe to get Windows 7 'E' versions sans IE

pthurrott — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:37:34 GMT

So, I can confirm that this is true: there will be an E edition for every Windows 7 SKU that removes IE and will be made available in Europe only. Apparently, CNET got ahold of a leaked memo somehow:

Microsoft plans to remove Internet Explorer from the versions of Windows 7 that it ships in Europe, CNET News has learned.

"To ensure that Microsoft is in compliance with European law, Microsoft will be releasing a separate version of Windows 7 for distribution in Europe that will not include Windows Internet Explorer," the software maker said in the memo. "Microsoft will offer IE8 separately and free of charge and will make it easy and convenient for PC manufacturers to preinstall IE 8 on Windows 7 machines in Europe if they so choose. PC manufacturers may choose to install an alternative browser instead of IE 8, and has always been the case, they may install multiple browsers if they wish."

The browser-less versions, dubbed Windows 7 "E", will be distributed in all members of the European Economic Area as well as Croatia and Switzerland. In addition, Microsoft will strip the browser from the Europe-only "N" versions of Windows 7, which also removes the Windows Media Player from the operating system and is the result of another move by Europe's antitrust authorities.

In contrast with the "N" version, though, Microsoft will not also sell a full-featured version of Windows that includes the browser.

"Microsoft will not offer for distribution in the European territory the Windows 7 product versions that contain IE, which are intended for distribution in the rest of the world," Microsoft said in the memo. "This will apply to both OEM and Retail versions of Windows 7 products."

For computer makers that want it, Microsoft will offer a free "IE 8 pack" that allows them to add the browser back in. It's a little more complicated for consumers who buy a retail copy of Windows 7. Because the operating system lacks a browser, there's not a direct way to go to Microsoft's Web site to download one. Microsoft aims to make it as easy as possible for folks in Europe to get the browser, though, and plans to offer it via CD, FTP and retail channels, according to a person a familiar with the situation.

"Microsoft is focused on ensuring that Windows 7 is a successful worldwide release available to the broadest number of consumers, including those in Europe," The software maker said in the memo. "We believe that we need to release these E versions to address the preliminary legal views communicated to us in the EU. We are informing OEMs of these plans now so that we can work together to meet our shared goal to have Windows 7 broadly available for a holiday launch."

The software maker says in the memo that it is only stripping the browser from Windows 7 and won't do the same with older operating systems, or with the virtualized version of Windows XP that is part of the free "XP mode" download.

Make Bing your default search provider in IE

pthurrott — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:56:00 GMT

Thanks to Alan B. for this tip: You can make Bing your default search provider in Internet Explorer 7 or 8 by visiting Microsoft's Create Your Own Search Provider page and entering the following information:

URL: http://www.bing.com/search?q=TEST

Name: Bing

Then, click Install Search Provider. (And be sure to check the box to make it your default provider.) You'll even get the Bing logo in the search box. Nice!

Microsoft begins work on Internet Explorer 9

pthurrott — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:30:38 GMT

Microsoft posted the following note on its Connect web site today:

Hi Everyone!

We have added a new feedback form on Connect designed specifically to handle improvements for the next version of Internet Explorer. This includes not just feature requests, but all types of feedback including issues that currently exist in IE. Please continue to rate the submissions since we will look at the top rated reports first.

Please be patient with the resolution of the reports you submit as we are in the research phase for the next version of IE. To shed some light on the status of your submissions, we’ll use a new field, Review Status, which will indicate whether we have reviewed the issue or not.

Please see the Connect site for more information.

The IE Team.

IE8: Ad blocking with the InPrivate Filter

pthurrott — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:51:40 GMT

You know, I almost wrote a scathing overview of some recent comments made by the author of the Firefox add-in Ad Block Plus. He came off like a real jerk, which is bad enough, but he also seemed utterly clueless about the benefits of doing an IE version of his add-on. (I believe the rationale boiled down to "It's just too hard.") But whatever. I kind of let it pass.

Flash forward to today, and there's an interesting article up on Neowin about how one can implement an effective ad blocker in IE 8 using the browser's InPrivate Filtering. Turns out it's not hard at all. Because it's built-in.

IE8 actually contains a great Ad blocking feature built-in, it's called "InPrivate Filtering". The InPrivate Filter (enabled by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+F) is intended to block content that may potentially share your information; thankfully advertisements are one such example of said content.

the InPrivate Filter is 'smart' in the sense that it can and will (if enabled) automatically detect content which appears with a high frequency on websites that you visit. In this regard, the Filter learns as you use the web and can detect what is an advertisement or of similar content, and take action accordingly. By entering the 'Manage Addons' window, you can select how many websites a piece of content must show up on before it is flagged, at which point you can then determine whether you want to block or allow such content.

Given the functionality of the InPrivate Filter, it seems that all that is required is a "Subscription List" containing the locations of advertisements for the filter to function as other Adblock applications. This is similar to a "Block List" in Adblock Pro and equivalent software. With such a list, it should be possible to simply block certain locations outright without relying on IE to learn from your browsing habits.

With regards to a subscription list that will block advertisements outright without having to 'learn' your browsing habits, I am in the process of searching for such. I have stumbled across this link where someone has compiled an XML file of the blocked URL's from Adblock Plus.

In order to Import these URL's into the InPrivate Filter, you must enter your "Manage Addons" window, accessible via Tools > Manage Addons. Click the InPrivate Filtering button, followed by Import and then locate the XML file. The result should be IE8 blocking content from said providers outright, without the need to learn via your browsing habits. Doing so has blocked about 99% of the advertisements I see while browsing with IE8.

Nice! And it appears to work just fine.

Thanks to Manos P. and Mitchel T. for the tip.

Sorry, Virginia, but there is no IE performance 'fix'

pthurrott — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:55:17 GMT

Ed Bott has written up a hopeful but ultimately misguided post about a supposed Internet Explorer 8 performance fix. There's just one problem. It doesn't work. So please don't write me about it--surprisingly, no one has, so far--as it just doesn't work.

Fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it, as there are far more technical people out there than I, one of whom, my Windows 7 Secrets co-author Rafael Rivera, has the chops needed to tell the difference between wishful thinking and empirical fact.

So what is actxprxy.dll? Well, as Ed pointed out, the library is pretty obscure and has almost zero documentation. The fact it came from back in Internet Explorer 3/Office 97 days doesn’t help either. From what I’ve been able to gather via method of poking, actxproxy.dll is a proxy for software to communicate with out-of-process ActiveX/COM objects.

… and regsvr32? Regsvr32 is a very simple tool that simply loads a binary and calls its DllRegisterServer, DllUnregisterServer, or DllInstall function, depending on the switch you pass it.

I sat down and spent some time disassembling actxprxy.dll… and to no surprise the DllRegisterServer function simply calls NdrDllRegisterProxy with a bunch of interfaces to register. I also conducted a few experiments. First, I exported portions of my registry to file and tried re-registering the DLL. After re-registration, I used WinMerge to compare the two files and noticed zero (relevant) changes. Second, I tried unregistering the DLL. Internet Explorer immediately malfunctioned and ultimately ceased to work at all, indicating the library had to have already been registered.

As a result of some pretty simple testing, I’ve come to the conclusion that reports of success with this wanna-be tweak are no more reliable than the average Bigfoot sighting. That is, people see what they want to see.

End of story. Unless of course you believe there was a second shooter in Dealey Plaza.

Is IE8 really fat and slow?

pthurrott — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:52:57 GMT

In sharp contrast to certain dimwitted bloggers out there, no one can ever accuse Ed Bott of "false misunderstanding." The guy grabs on to a topic and shakes it until it squeaks, and for this reason, he'll always be the voice of reason in our industry. The topic du jour: Reports that IE 8 is slow and a memory hog. Take it away, Ed:

Two criticisms have come up repeatedly that can be measured empirically, so I thought I would do that here. One is the burning question of whether IE8 is faster or slower than its competitors; the other is whether it makes reasonable use of system resources.

A series of independent tests performed by PC World, which concluded that IE8 really is faster than Firefox ... On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg reached the opposite conclusion in his review ... I was baffled by Mossberg’s results. [As was I, sort of. I mean, it's Mossberg. --Paul] When I tried the same tests on several PCs here with IE8, Firefox 3.0.7, and Google Chrome, I got the same results as PC World. In general, all pages loaded so quickly in all three browsers that detecting any difference with a stopwatch was nearly impossible.

Ed highlights an amazing potential fix for people who are experiencing trouble with IE performance. Check out his post for that fix. As for RAM usage...

Microsoft’s browser using more RAM than its rivals. Are those reports true? The answer, it turns out, is a qualified yes.

Firefox and IE7 use a single process that hosts as many tabs as the system can stand. That means the browser and its supporting files only have to be loaded once, and each tab can share those resources. That explains why Firefox and IE7 are so sparing with memory usage.

Unfortunately, the side effect of that single-process model is that one crashed tab can bring down the entire browser. To work around this major annoyance, IE8 and Chrome use multiple processes.

Tab isolation requires more memory, whether you use IE8 or Chrome. If you’re bound and determined to use less RAM, use Firefox – and pray that you don’t have a crash.

I would just add one point here. Application memory consumption is not an issue on modern Windows versions unless that app slowly eats up RAM over time for no reason (Firefox, cough) or doesn't give up the memory when you close the application. Folks, memory is cheap. And let's be honest: Tab isolation/recovery is more than a fair tradeoff for some RAM consumption. And how much RAM are we talking, exactly? In Ed's test, he loaded up 12 tabs. That takes up just 256 MB of RAM on a 4 GB system. Come on.

As always, the truth is so much less sensational then the headlines (and reports) that Ed is skewering here.

Why Internet Explorer 8 disappoints web developers

pthurrott — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:05:38 GMT

Jake Goldman has written up a lengthy post using three examples of how Microsoft continues to disappoint web developers with IE 8. I think this is an important part of the overall discussion around this browser, and about browsers in general, and of course the wider uber-topic under which it all sits, our inevitable migration to cloud computing. I've given IE 8 a very positive review, something I was pretty sure wouldn't happen as recently as two or three months ago, but in using the browser over a long period of time, I've come around to the notion that IE 8's security/privacy and "beyond the page" (Microsoft's phrase) features will make a much bigger difference to users (real users with real concerns, that is, not people concerned with niche side topics like the Acid3 test or whatever) than various technical failings (or its performance, though I think that's an important concern as well).

None of that should take away from the message of this post, however, which seeks to develop "a deeper understanding of the strategic, cost, and technical significance" of IE 8. Again, it's a topic worthy of debate.

When it comes to the modern browsers (IE7+, Fx2+, Safari 3+), web developers mostly cater to the lowest common denominator. For example, Safari supports on the fly rendering of font shadows, but IE7 and Firefox 3 do not ... The most infamous example of design / browser trade off is font type, which we’ll discuss in our examples.

Alternatively, developers can write alternative code based on the user’s browser. With the “modern” browsers, there are only a few reasons to do this (at least for capable developers) ... In the case of one IE6, however, there are so many inconsistencies and glitches that almost every site we develop has a special stylesheet only for IE6 users. It goes without saying that this adds time (=cost).

The “half way” is not so much a way of addressing the differences as it is a way of accepting the differences. That is, the notion of “failing gracefully.” The idea here is that if a browser like IE6 simply can’t support a non-critical feature (a “nicety”) without significant additional cost and effort, we may elect to leave a feature out.

Goldman then supplies three very specific examples of where IE 8 falls short.

One is CSS-based rounded corners, "a feature that can be added very quickly and easily in current versions of all major web browsers except IE8 and earlier." I note that this feature requires "browser specific versions of the border radius property" for Mozilla, KHTML, and WebKit, but whatever. IE renders the graphical box corners as non-rounded.

The second involves fonts. He notes that there is "a new style property, @font-face, that will allow developers to support almost any font type in the future." It's not fully supported in any shipping browser, however. It works somewhat with Safari 3 and will apparently work fully in Safari 4 (now out in very early beta) and in Firefox 3.5 (now in Beta 3).

The third issue involves opacity, or "support for translucent / semi-transparent / opaque / whatever-you-want-to-call-it elements, particularly backgrounds." Today, "the latest stable version of Safari [Safari 3? Or is Safari 4 the latest 'stable' version? --Paul], and the forthcoming release of Firefox 3.5 would make semi-transparent backgrounds even easier with support for a 'RGBA' (or 'Red/Green/Blue/Alpha') value for the background property." It's not supported in IE 8.

OK. Obviously, there are many more examples, presumably some of which relate to every other browser on the market aside from IE. (Which, by the way, still controls about 70 percent usage share.) The main argument seems to boil down to this:

With serious competition from Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and now even Google with Chrome, there was hope that Microsoft would be far more aggressive with IE8. The hope was that this aggressiveness would push the browser makers to standards oneupmanship (which we are getting from Apple and Mozilla), resulting in platforms and market share that, 2 years from now, would erase many of the obstacles web developers face in pushing design and development value to their limits.

So, what he's not taking into account here is the unbelievably aggressive change Microsoft actually is making, and asking its one billion customers to make, with moving to an on-by-default, standards-rendering mode with IE 8. This is going to be a huge issue for millions of people, far more people than will ever be affected by the picayune little web development issues he raises here. While I wish on some vague level that Microsoft would "adopt web standards fully," the truth is that life is more complicated than what he's presenting here.

And let's face it. Who really cares how hard life is for a small group of people (web developers)? Do your job, for crying out loud.

(In interests of fairness, just raising this issue is of course part of doing the job. But there is a "blame Microsoft" mentality that's so easy to fall into. Where is the praise for moving so aggressively towards web standards?)

I do agree that Microsoft needs to push out IE updates more quickly than with the next major browser release (IE 9?). And maybe now that Microsoft has finally made the first tortuous step, it can gauge reactions and then start delivering those updates (to CSS, HTML, whatever) once the dust settles.

There's a lot to think about here, and I don't want anyone to believe I'm dispensing with this as an issue. I'm not. This is worthy of thought and debate. But let's not forget that to the average user, and that's most of them, IE 8 is a huge step forward. It's not as big of as step as it could be if Microsoft didn't have all those existing customers to worry about. That, as in many things Microsoft, is always the central issue when it comes to forward-looking innovation attempts.

Internet Explorer 8 is now available

pthurrott — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:07:01 GMT

Just a heads-up: As promised, the final version of IE 8 just went live.

It's good for virtually all modern Windows versions (XP and up) but not for Windows 7 Beta, of course.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility View List

pthurrott — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:28:55 GMT

Or, to use a more controversial headline which I'm sure you'll see elsewhere:

Internet Explorer 8 natively incompatible with over 3,000 web sites

Microsoft has provided a list of web sites (in super-convenient Excel format) that haven't taken as little as 10 minutes of time to make sure they work properly with IE 8, shipping today:

This download consists of a list of sites that are most likely to be displayed better in Compatibility View in Windows Internet Explorer 8.

Windows Internet Explorer 8 is Microsoft’s latest web browser. Unlike previous versions, Internet Explorer 8 renders content in the most standards-compliant way possible. This means that web pages will be displayed in Internet Explorer 8’s standards mode by default. Through product feedback channels, our users have indicated that, during the beta period, some websites may not have been compatible with Internet Explorer 8 in its default, standards-based mode. As a result, these domains have been added to a list of sites that, for the short-term, are most likely to be displayed better in Compatibility View. All Internet Explorer 8 users are given the choice to use this list, and the subset that chooses to do so will see each listed domain automatically displayed in Compatibility View, without additional user interaction or notice. The sites on this list have high traffic volume (in their regions), and having a compatible website ensures a significant number of Internet Explorer 8 users will have a great experience. This list will be periodically updated and automatically downloaded to Internet Explorer 8 users who have opted-in to use Compatibility View updates from Microsoft. For more information on Compatibility View list updates, please see - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960321.

This is a public prod, of sorts, for those sites to get off their duffs and get to work.

Or it would be. You know, if microsoft.com, msn.com and live.com (among other Microsoft properties) weren't on the list too.

*Sigh*

Microsoft Delivers Internet Explorer 8

pthurrott — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:13:29 GMT

This was supposed to be announced today, but someone (Walt Mossberg, based on my RSS feeds, but I could be wrong) broke the NDA, so Microsoft allowed reviewers to start posting earlier. Here's my take on the news from WinInfo:

Microsoft will release its newest web browser, Internet Explorer 8, today at noon EST, for users of Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008. The application will also be included with Windows 7, the next version of Microsoft's client OS, which is due in Q3 2009. Microsoft describes IE 8 as faster, more secure, more reliable, and more functional than its predecessor and these claims have been borne out in my own testing. The question about IE 8, however, is whether it can best competing browsers from Mozilla and Google.

"Customers have made clear what they want in a web browser--safety, speed and greater ease of use," says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "With Internet Explorer 8, we are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match."

IE 8 includes a pervasive set of security controls, and Microsoft claims that the browser is 2 to 4 times as effective at preventing malware attacks as are other browsers. The company told me that one in 40 users of pre-release IE 8 versions since Beta 2 were saved from potential malware attacks because of this functionality.

While most web browser users expect certain levels of security, reliability, and performance, where IE 8 really shines is with its in-application functionality. The browsers offers visual search capabilities where you can see images in the search box drop-down, new features like Web Slices and Accelerators that allow users to interact with web sites and services in new and interesting ways, and an evolution of tabbed browsing that colorizes related tabs and provides a way to get back to previously visited sites that are closed inadvertently.

IE 8 is also far more compliant with existing web standards than were previous IE versions, though it arguably falls short of the competition in this area. The browser can also render web sites like IE 7 if required, and do so automatically providing users with seamless web compatibility. As sites are updated to work with IE 8's standards-based rendering mode, the browser will switch over silently, with no user intervention required.

IE 8 will be made available in 25 languages at noon today. For more information--and for the free download--please visit the Microsoft web site.

My review of IE 8 will appear over the course of the day on the SuperSite for Windows. The first two parts are already available.