Internet Explorer 10 Now Avaliable To Win 7 Users

[ritchie58]

Microsoft has decided to include Windows 7 users the use of their new browser, Internet Explorer 10, which was only avaliable for the Windows 8 Operating System until now.

 

Here's what Seth Rosenblatt, senior editor for CNET, had to say:

The update brings enormous changes to the browser, and mostly for the better. Internet Explorer 10 is not only faster and more stable than the current IE for Windows 7, version 9, it's also far more standards-compliant.

"Gone are the days when developers aspire to build for the lowest common denominator. The way the Web becomes like an application is when you take advantage of the latest hardware. We've stopped the era of trying to maximize for aggregate browser share," Ryan Gavin, general manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, said in a phone conversation with CNET last week.

Basically, what Gavin is saying is that hardware advances have made much of the modern Web possible, but he also acknowledged the role of Web developers. "One of the things that we hear from developers is that the depth and support across IE 10 means less time testing and more time developing," he said.

So, Windows 7 gets the new IE10 Chakra and Javascript engines; the Touch API innovations that help drive the browser on Windows 8; the security measures built into IE10 -- at least, the ones that are not dependent on Windows 8; location bar autocomplete; and an on-by-default Do Not Track header.

The standards that IE 10 adheres to are nothing to sneeze at. Microsoft claims that its labs have found the new version of the browser to be 20 percent faster on Windows 7 than IE 9, and it supports a veritable alphabet soup of HTML5 and CSS3 improvements -- 60 percent more standards-compliant than IE 9, says Microsoft. These include CSS Text Shadow; CSS 3D Transforms; CSS3 Transitions and Animations; CSS3 Gradient; SVG Filter Effects; HTML5 Forms; input controls; validation; Web sockets; HTML5 Sandboxing; Web workers; HTML5 App Cache; File Reader API; and HTML5 Drag-drop, among other backend improvements.

In short, modern HTML5 sites that run smoothly in IE 10 on Windows 8, or the latest browsers from Chrome and Firefox, will now work properly in IE 10 on Windows 7.

 

There were few interface changes from IE 9 to IE 10 on Windows 8 desktop, which is the version that Windows 7 users will see.(Credit: Microsoft)

IE 10 for Windows 7 also comes with support for Pointer Events, which may seem strange to some. Pointer Events allow developers to write Web sites and register elements on the Web page to be responsive to multiple simultaneous interactions -- to respond to touch. Even though there are very few Windows 7 computers that shipped with touch screens, Gavin said that this was an important improvement to ship in the Windows 7 version of IE 10. "It's more about getting the developer to not having to do anything special to support the mouse on Windows 7 devices," he said.

Gavin and Rob Mauceri, Internet Explorer's group program manager who was also on the phone, both agreed that touch interaction would drive browser innovation for some time. "Four or five months ago, nobody was talking about touching the web," said Mauceri. "But now you've got new devices like the Pixel where others are following our lead."

Gavin was optimistic about the workplace adoption of IE 10 on Windows 7. "We're in a really good spot with enterprises, where we've been able to offer the latest version of our browser in a relatively short time frame," he said.

However, that's unlikely to be as cut-and-dried as Microsoft would like, even with Microsoft's best-in-class enterprise management tools. Browser adoption momentum indicates that businesses will continue gravitating away from IE, since IE 10 is only available on Windows 7 and Windows 8. The highest version of Internet Explorer that will work on Windows Vista is IE 9, while Windows XP users won't be able to graduate past IE 8.

One thing businesses won't have to worry about is whether Internet Explorer will adopt the six-week, rapid-release cycle of Chrome and Firefox. "We put less emphasis on release schedule and more emphasis on innovation. [Our] release schedule is a by-product of when that innovation is ready to go to market," said Mauceri.

There's little doubt that Internet Explorer 10 is the first version of IE in some time to ship with a fighting chance of being compared favorably to its competition. Being on Windows 7 is a massive boon to IE 10, but its inability to work on older operating systems that its competitors can comfortably perform on will hamstring it until those systems have significantly lower market share.

Correction, 11:03 a.m. PT: This story originally misspelled Rob Mauceri's last name.

 

You can download the bootstrapper installer from Microsoft at this link: http://windows.micro...rer/download-ie

 

Cheers, Ritchie...

[Zurchiboy]

It was sent through windows updates as well.

[ritchie58]

Yeah, I heard that Microsoft was going to push the update through to all Win 7 users. It appears that they decided to do it sooner rather than later. That's a good thing too since IE10 is more HTML5 standards compliant than IE9. That will make it a more secure browser for online banking and shoping.

[ritchie58]

I read an interesting article the other day by Emsisoft regarding IE10. It turns out that IE10 ranked No. 1 in protection from malware downloads by NSSLabs when they tested the five most popular browsers. Here is an excerpt from the article:

 

NSSLabs recently conducted a test in which the five leading browsing programs Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera had to demonstrate their ability to protect against socially engineered malware downloads. A total of 754 real cyberthreats were used in this comparison. All five browsers were subjected to 550 test runs against these 754 unique malware URLs, resulting in over 18,000 test cases per browser.

Internet Explorer 10 is the safest, Opera ends up with the wooden spoon

 

The results of NSSLabs’ test are astonishing as there is a gap of almost 98% between the safest and the most insecure candidate. While Internet Explorer 10 blocked an impressive 99.96% of malware samples, Opera only scored a poor 1.87%. The second safest browser was Google Chrome with 83.16%. The only two programs that scored closely together were Apple Safari 5 and Mozilla Firefox 19 with 10.15% and 9.92% respectively.

Source: NSSLabs

 

As a die hard Firefox user I'm more than a little dismayed that my favorite browser did so poorly. I hope Mozilla has taken notice of this test. They did test the older 19 version. I'm currently using version 21 and I know some security changes have already been made. Then again I've got ExploitShield Browser Edition installed as an added layer of browser protection.

[Zurchiboy]

I think I saw this graph before. I am surprised that safari beat Mozailla firefox. Internets new smart screen is really effective from what I have seen in youtube tests as well when I played around with it as well. I wonder what signatures it uses.

[ritchie58]

Me too. There was a time when Firefox was considered one of the safest browsers one could use. Besides the added security of ExploitShield I also use some other security/privacy extensions & program for Firefox such as:

 

BetterPrivacy 1.68 - super-cookie safegard (Local Shared Objects [LSO] deletion)

 

BrowserProtect 1.1.5 - browser hijack protection

 

CookieCuller 1.4 - extended cookie manager

 

DoNotTrackMe 2.2.8.307 - stops secret web site tracking

 

Ghostery 2.9.5 - protection against web bugs and tracker plugins (What ever tracker plugins Ghostery doesn't catch DoNotTrackMe will & vise a versa! A little redundancy here maybe, lol, but they seem to work together okay on the most part though.)

 

KeyScrambler Personal 3.1 - Although no longer an extension but a full fledged software package with it's own running process this program will protect you against keylogging attempts (Firefox, IE, Flock compatable).

 

NoScript 2.6.6.2 - Java, Javascript and web site elements management (No Firefox user should go without this extension installed and learn how to use it correctly in my view!)

 

Search Engine Security 1.2.0 - protects against Blackhat Spam Optimization (Search Engine Optimization [sEO] exploits)

 

It would be interesting to see what the results would have been had these security measures been in place during the testing!

[Zurchiboy]

As you said with extensions. I use Bitdefender Trafic light as well as ghostery in Comodo dragon(Chronium based web browser by comodo) Which does block malicious websites would certainly boost firefox's ability to block threats.