Tag: IE9

Google Apps Ends Support For Internet Explorer 9

Are you still using Internet Explorer 9? It’s not exactly a dead browser yet as Microsoft still officially supports it, but Google Apps has turned its back on it.

In an announcement today on the Google Apps blog, the company says that it is officially ending support for Internet Explorer 9. It’s nothing personal as Google says it only supports the current and prior major releases of Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.

Despite only launching last year, Internet Explorer 10 is no longer the newest IE on the block as Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 11 with Windows 8.1. Windows users may not be used to such a quick upgrade for Internet Explorer, but it is what it is. As such, Google Apps will no longer be supported on the browser that many Windows 7 users still use.

If you’re using Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, you already have Internet Explorer 10 or 11. If you let updates download and install automatically on your Windows 7 machine, you probably already have Internet Explorer 10 as well. If not, you can grab Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 here.

As for Internet Explorer 11, there’s currently a release preview for Windows 7. It brings with it a number of new enhancements, including official support for WebGL. As Google and Microsoft both increasingly leverage Web technologies like HMTL5 in their Web apps, browsers like Chrome and Internet Explorer 11 will become more important. It’s not required to use Google Apps, but you’ll be in a much better place if you upgrade to Internet Explorer 11 sooner rather than later.

If you don’t use Google Apps, you can keep using Internet Explorer 9. Microsoft still issues security updates for the browser and many Web applications still support it. You’ll be missing out on much of what the modern Web has to offer though.

[Image: internetexplorer/YouTube]

November 5, 2013
Internet Explorer 9.0.6 Now Available, Fixes Security Flaws

I remember just a few years ago when Internet Explorer was the laughing stock of the browser community. It lacked the functionality that other browsers had while lacking even basic security functions. It’s what led to the impression that IE was a virus haven, but Microsoft has made great strides in making IE a more attractive and secure browser. The new update today only reaffirms that.

Microsoft today announced the release of Internet Explorer 9.0.6. It fixes “five privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer.” The worst vulnerability would allow “remote code execution” if a user visited an infected Web site. This would allow somebody to gain control of the PC in question with the same user rights as the local user.

These are the kind of vulnerabilities that can lead to the creation of a botnet. People visit a Web site and get their computer hijacked by a foreign party. Their computer then becomes part of the botnet collective which usually goes unnoticed by the user if the creator of the botnet is good at their job.

Microsoft says that this updated is rated critical for IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9 on Windows clients. It’s rated moderate for the same versions of IE on Windows servers. You can check out the full security bulletin for all the information including which operating systems are affected.

If you have automatic updating turned on, the update should have already been applied. If you’re like me and have automatic updates turned off, you can apply it the usual way through Windows Update. While I don’t use Internet Explorer and many Windows users reading this now probably don’t either, it’s still suggested that you install the update. There’s always that small chance of a friend using your computer and browsing with Internet Explorer. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

April 11, 2012
Internet Explorer 9 Ad Goes Artistic

I think that Microsoft is onto something with this latest ad for Internet Explorer 9.

While some people will still gawk and laugh at Microsoft’s web browser, their latest ad sells it in a way that’s artistic and unique without feeling pretentious. It’s a step back from recent Microsoft ads that focused more on attacking the competition instead of telling consumers the advantages of its platforms.

The recent ad announced on the Windows blog shows a Microsoft that isn’t afraid to try out new things and embrace the evolution of technology. They are carving their own path in the digital landscape with more of a focus on art and play than previous iterations.

A More Beautiful Web is… Internet Explorer TV Commercial from Internet Explorer on Vimeo.

While the ad in question is selling IE9 for Windows 7, it has the aesthetic appeal that Microsoft has been pushing with Windows 8. If this is how all of their ads are going to look from now on, I approve.

Here’s an old ad for Internet Explorer 7, compare it with the new one and see what you think.

Does the new ad make you want to use Internet Explorer? Or are you just going to stick with Firefox, Chrome or any of other variants? Let us know in the comments.

March 5, 2012
Huge Pac-Man Game Chomps at IE 9

It’s becoming quite common nowadays to show off when a discussing Internet browsers, especially when they launch. From Mozilla’s love of infographics and cool-looking maps, to Google’s use of “pop-up” reminders for visitors who show up sporting anything but Chrome, the browser war is every bit a display of who can pimp their browser the best, if nothing else.

In fact, the desire of the big three — Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome (sorry Opera) — to outdo one another runs so deep, new version releases like Firefox 4 and IE 9 are celebrated for about as long as it takes to create the pages for the upcoming versions. Granted, that’s overstating it some, but to say there isn’t an strong undercurrent of “the next big thing” feeling would be a mistake.

With that in mind, it appears has if Internet Explorer 9 is new enough to continue the celebration of its improvements, such as support for HTML 5. According to Gizmodo.com, in order to help flex some of IE 9’s new muscles, Soap Creative developed what they refer to as The World’s Biggest Pac-Man, a browser-based game based on the famous dot eating ghost chaser.

In order to earn its title, the game features a large number of user-generated maps. These individual maps are linked together to incorporate a much larger map, all of which must be cleared before the master map is considered beaten. So far, it’s not even close to completion; however, the fact these user-generated maps use the same style as the original game is a nice touch.

Some screenshots:

World’s Biggest Pac-Man, primary map. Click for larger image

As you can see with the second image, there’s no mistaking which environment the game is celebrating, but that being said, when these screenshots were taken, the browser of choice was Firefox 3.6.12.

The games worked fine.

As mentioned, each tile in the main map links to an individual user-created map, of which, there are over 5000, provided the statistics are current:

What’s next? User-generated Galaga games for Firefox 5? Actually, that sounds like a winner. Who knows? At the rate these browser games are growing, coupled with the competitive spirit of the developers and companies involved, it wouldn’t be surprising if Internet Explorer 10 has a working version of World of Warcraft embedded in its code.

April 15, 2011
Firefox 4 Off To Strong Start

Mozilla Firefox 4, has already grabbed 1.95 percent of the global Internet browser market since its launch yesterday, according to a new report from StatCounter.

StatCounter said on the first day of its release Firefox 4 scored higher worldwide than Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 9 which launched more than a week ago.

“Firefox 4 has really hit the ground running and has eclipsed the launch of IE 9,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.

“Although IE 9 has undoubtedly been hampered by its lack of compatibility with Windows XP.” By yesterday IE 9 had taken just 0.87% of the worldwide market.

When data for all versions of each browser are calculated, Internet Explorer still leads the global market with 45 percent followed by Firefox with 30 percent and Chrome with 17 percent. In the U.S., IE (all versions combined) leads the market with 48 percent followed by Firefox 26 percent and Chrome 14 percent.

On a monthly basis, StatCounter figures show a steady decline in the IE global market share from 55% in February last year to 45% this year. In the same time frame Google’s Chrome has risen steadily from 7% worldwide to 17%.

StatCounter recently reported that Firefox overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) to become the number one browser in Europe for the first time in December 2010.

March 23, 2011
Internet Explorer 9 Reaches 2.3 Million Downloads In 24 Hours

Microsoft announced today their latest version of Internet Explorer reached 2.3 million downloads in 24 hours. Will IE9 be the catalyst to allow Microsoft to gain some ground back in market share?

The past few years, IE has steadily lost ground to the likes of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome. In 2007, IE controlled 80% of the market. The latest reports have them sitting at 57%.

Simplistic interfaces, faster load times, better security, have all been reasons behind IE losing ground. It appears Microsoft has remedied many of these problems, and reviews have pointed out these improvements.

PCMagazine gave IE9 a 4/5 rating, saying this of the browser, “Microsoft’s new browser is faster, trimmer, more compliant with HTML5—a major improvement over its predecessor. It also brings some unique capabilities like tab-pinning and hardware acceleration, but only Windows 7 and Vista users need apply.”

Unfortunately I’m unable to provide my own thoughts as I’m on a Mac computer at this time. If you have a Windows computer and use XP, you’ll be left out in the cold as well.

While it has a small window of platforms for which it’s available, IE9 has these improvements listed on their product page: pinned sites (for Windows 7 users), tracking protection, InPrivate browsing, HTML5 compatibility, and more.

One feature I’m excited to see in motion is how IE9 will share the burden of graphics rendering with the GPU on more graphic intensive websites. HTML5 is supposed to push the capabilities of graphics integration, and being the go-to browser for this integration could be a strong investment for the browser’s future.

Firefox 4 will release next Tuesday; this version has been in beta since July 2010. The release certainly will provide IE9 with some staunch competition out of the gate. In a couple of weeks it will be interesting to see how the pieces of market share will be divided up. Many have switched to Google Chrome as well, providing a third option in the market.

Has anyone had the opportunity to use IE9 yet? If so, are the improvements as great as many reviewers have been letting on? Or are you still waiting for Firefox 4?

March 18, 2011
IE9 Launch Scheduled For March 14th

Monday, March 14th (and Tuesday, March 15th, depending on time zones and when everyone goes to bed) may come to mark a significant turning point in the browser wars. Microsoft’s announced that it will make the final version of Internet Explorer 9 available for download on Monday, starting at 9 PM Redmond time.

This is an important moment for the company. From a business perspective, Chrome has been gaining market share at a rapid pace, and Firefox also represents a threat of sorts, so the success of IE9 will determine whether or not Microsoft remains dominant in this space.

From a point of view related more to PR and geek cred, IE9 – which is supposed to introduce all sorts of advanced features – will help shape many people’s opinions of Microsoft, since it and Windows probably act as the two biggest points of contact.

Finally, in the event anyone’s just interested in the sheer fun factor of the launch, Ryan Gavin, Senior Director of Internet Explorer Business and Marketing, wrote on The Windows Blog, “We also have a heck of party planned celebrating the amazing developers and designers who are creating a more beautiful web. We’ll feature live music from Yeasayer, the Head and the Heart, and Fences at Austin City Limits Live the night of the 14th.”

Announcing: Internet Explorer 9 officially launches March 14 at SXSW. http://bit.ly/hnJj5D #IE9 #IE #SXSWless than a minute ago via CoTweetInternet Explorer
IE

So the release of IE9 should be worth monitoring from just about any perspective.

Keep your fingers crossed that everything goes well. After all, a better browser will benefit everyone in the end.

March 9, 2011
MWC11: IE9 Coming to Windows Phones This Year

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced several new features for Windows Phone today in a keynote at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One feature is a "dramatically enhanced" version of Internet Explorer 9, which will become available for the mobile operating system in the second half of this year.

We don’t know exactly when we’ll see the fruits of the company’s partnership with Nokia, but that could be an indication right there. While nothing has been officially announced in terms of dates, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop did suggest that Nokia Windows Phones would come out this year.

Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President of Internet Explorer said, "We’ve worked closely across the Windows Phone and IE teams over the last few months to deliver the same IE9 browsing engine—the same code, the same standards support, the same hardware acceleration, the same security and privacy protections—for Windows Phone as we’ve delivered on the desktop."

"As a result, when you compare different browsers side by side using official W3C standards tests, for example here, you can expect very similar results for IE9 on Windows Phone and the Windows desktop," he added. "When you compare side by side browser performance, for example here or here, or running the FishIE Tank demo, you can still expect very similar results. You can also expect similar results comparing the security and privacy protections, for example here and here."

MicrosoftComing to Windows Phone in 2011: Twitter in the People Hub, additional SkyDrive support, Internet Explorer 9, and expanded multi-tasking. Visit Microsoft News Center for the full details, then come back here and share your thoughts.1 hour ago 207 likes 44 comments

Other things announced by Ballmer:

First Major Update
A free customer update will be made available for all Windows Phones in the first two weeks of March, which includes new capabilities such as copy & paste and faster application performance.

Availability on CDMA Networks
With added support for CDMA networks, Windows Phone will be available to even more customers on mobile operators such as Verizon and Sprint in the first half of 2011.

Twitter Integration in the People Hub
The popular social networking service Twitter will be integrated into the People Hub in the second half of 2011.

Office Document Storage in the Cloud
Document sharing and storage in the cloud via Windows Live SkyDrive will be added to Windows Phone in the second half of 2011.

Additional Multi-tasking Capabilities
We will add the ability to switch quickly between applications, run applications in the background (such as listening to music), along with a number of other capabilities in the second half of 2011. Developers will learn much more about this during April’s MIXconference.

According to a recent report, Microsoft outbid Google for the Nokia deal, and is paying billions for it.

February 14, 2011
WordPress Reveals IE9 Pinning Features

Internet Explorer 9 (beta) was launched to the public this week, and it’s gotten a lot of buzz and high marks. It’s also gotten a lot of web properties doing things to utilize its features. Microsoft’s own Bing features are certainly interesting.

WordPress is utilizing the browser’s functionality for both bloggers and blog readers, so its new features should have pretty far reaching impact, within the space of IE9 users.

WordPress is taking advantage of the pinning feature of the browser, specifically, with different feature sets for readers and bloggers. Joy Victory explains on the WordPress Blog:

When you sign in to your blog, you can pin your own site and get extra tasks that make blogging easier and faster. A logged-in user can quickly access links to their dashboard to write a new post, moderate comments, upload a new file, or view blog statistics. (Each task only appears if the user has that task’s capability, such as site administrator’s.) A custom list also displays up to 5 latest posts for the current blog context.

You can pin someone else’s blog, too. When you do, an icon appears that lets you subscribe to the blog feed, signup for a free blog, read Freshly Pressed, and access WordPress.com Support and forums.

To take advantage of the WordPress pinning capabilities, users simply need to drag the tab onto the taskbar. It will either display as a large WordPress logo or if you’re a blogger, your "Blavatar" if you’ve uploaded one.

September 17, 2010
IE9 Now Available for Download

Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 is now available for download. It’s already getting some pretty positive buzz, particularly for an Internet Explorer release.

Ed Bott at ZDNet calls it "the most ambitious browser release Microsoft has ever undertaken". Pretty strong words.

The download even has its own special domain at BeautyoftheWeb.com.

So what does IE9 do that is so great?

It’s faster than IE8 and Firefox, but slower than Safari, Opera, and Chrome by some reports. It has a new system of warning about malicious downloads, and it give you warnings about when your add-ons are slowing down your performance. I could see this feature being either helpful or annoying.

Microsoft’s whole angle for the browser is that its "putting sites at the center of the browsing experience", and it uses more of the computer to try and accomplish this. "Before IE9, browsers used perhaps 10% of the PC’s capability," says Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch. "IE9 has shown the clear performance benefits with full hardware-acceleration of webpages. Our approach in designing a site-centric web browsing experience also involves using everything available around the browser. We see all the pixels and code that people need for a significantly better browsing experience already there on the screen."

Users can pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar, like they would do with applications, creating a shortcut. What’s interesting about this is that sites can actually program "jump lists" for pinned sites, to make common tasks easier for users. They can program notifications when the user pins them in the task bar. How many sites actually take advantage of this remains to be seen.

The thinking appears to be along the lines of replacing the browser with OS, almost the opposite of Google’s Chrome OS, which is more about replacing the OS with the browser. Interestingly enough, they both represent the continued merging of the two interfaces.

IE9 also uses Aero snap functionality, which will be familiar to regular users of Windows 7. Users can snap to browser windows side by side for convenient double browsing. Tabs are draggable, in or outside of the current window (much like Chrome), and can be snapped. The address bar, called "the one box" is also fairly Chrome-like in that it also serves as a search feature.

"The browser supports HTML5 and ‘other modern standards’," says Hachamovitch. "The people who build the web have better ideas for their customers than browsers have been able to deliver to date. With IE9 this situation starts to change. Websites can offer richer experiences because of fully hardware accelerated HTML5. Those richer experiences now blend comfortably and consistently into the consumer’s desktop experiences. The focus should be on the site, not on browsing and browsers."

You must have Windows 7 or Vista with SP2. It is not compatible with XP.

September 16, 2010
Bing Takes Advantage of IE9’s Capabilities

As you probably know, Microsoft launched the Internet Explorer 9 (beta) publicly today. It can be downloaded here.

The company also took the opportunity to show off some new enhancements to Bing, to accompany its new browser. Taking advantage of the HTML5 capabilities of IE9, they’ve added some nice new features that are exclusive to Bing use in that particular browser (at least initially).

The coolest of the new features, while having little to do with search, is what Bing has done with its homepage. It uses HTML5 to replace the homepage image with a homepage video or an image that you can zoom in and out of. You can see this in action (along with the other new feature) in the following video.

Other features are more related to search. These include:

– Smooth transitions from one screen to the next, as you search

– Previews of images, videos and text are bigger and bolder

– Bing has an IE9 "jump list", which lets users search various Bing categories like travel or shopping right from the Windows 7 taskbar.

– New smooth scrolling that keeps a search box in place and related searches at the side, in case you need to refine as you scroll.

– Quick Tabs and Visual Search transitions in a new app-like experience

The new Bing features for IE9 will be available in preview format for users of IE9 soon. No exact time table was given, but there will be a preview site that users will be able to play around with later this month.

Are the new Internet Explorer features enough to get you to use Bing? Are the new Bing features enough to get you to use the new Internet Explorer? Are you using both? Neither? Share your thoughts.

September 15, 2010