IE10 for Windows 7 Globally Available

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/02/26/ie10-for-windows-7-globally-available-for-consumers-and-businesses.aspx

by robin_reala • 13 years ago

187 147 13 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

mgkimsal5• 13 years ago

From http://windows.microsoft.com/ie

“Internet Explorer 10 takes the lead in browser privacy” —Geek.com

"Greatly enhanced and is simply delightful" —Gizmodo

“Flip ahead feature in Internet Explorer 10 is slick” —Tweet

Sources for the first two might actually be findable. "Tweet" as a front-page endorsement? I'm not sure if they're trying to be funny or serious. That looks more like something theonion.com would use.

riffraff• 13 years ago

it's just a data point, but I read that as self-ironic.

nailer• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's filler text used during the design that made it into production.

psbp• 13 years ago

I'd take a random tweet a lot more seriously than Gizmodo.

typicalrunt• 13 years ago

A random tweet possibly made by a person working at Microsoft? Or maybe the tweet doesn't actually exist.

I've seen companies (gaming companies, mostly) that display tweets as endorsements for a game and then, when I try to find the tweet in Twitter, that user mysteriously doesn't exist.

ambiate• 13 years ago

Users can relate to tweets more than a tech website.

DougBTX• 13 years ago

Tweet is probably https://twitter.com/sempf/status/220185961080946689

AUmrysh• 13 years ago

Isn't it odd that his website is styled the same way windows 8 is and all of his blog posts are on windows 8? Not the toughest of critics, I'd wager.

mokash4• 13 years ago

Wow, didn't notice that. Must be a joke.

azakai• 13 years ago

> Sources for the first two might actually be findable. "Tweet" as a front-page endorsement? I'm not sure if they're trying to be funny or serious. That looks more like something theonion.com would use.

Of course it's an ironic joke.

Yes, even people in big companies like Microsoft sometimes have a sense of humor.

vor_• 13 years ago

Citing "Tweet" is something they've previously done on the IE webpage. It didn't come off to me then as an ironic joke but a genuine marketing blurb.

ckarmann2• 13 years ago

Wait a minute. They are demonstrating the performance capabilities of IE with a minesweeper ?

recoiledsnake• 13 years ago

That's just a new HTML5 demo out of a page full of demos and benchmarks.

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/

I am not sure if the cute penguin one was intentionally made as a tongue-in-cheek friendly jab at Linux.

rb12345• 13 years ago

None of the OpenType examples linked from that page work on Firefox 19 in Windows, despite claims that it should work.

nivla2• 13 years ago

I just took that penguin test on my Chrome Browser and then on IE 10. I was blown away by the result http://i.imgur.com/JfTTw7w.png . I knew IE stepped up their game when it came to graphics, but can someone explain why is there such huge disparity in rendering? I always thought Chrome had the best graphics rendering of them all.

whaevr• 13 years ago

Yeah I thought that was interesting as-well...personally I'm waiting for results from the solitaire benchmark

kevingadd• 13 years ago

The benchmark actually has a pretty reasonable workload: rendering, playing sound effects, doing some basic flood-fill searching, etc. And it's much faster in IE10 than Firefox for me, so...

TazeTSchnitzel3• 13 years ago

With graphics-intensive things, I tend to find that IE9 and IE10 always come out on top, followed by Chrome and Safari. Firefox is usually horribly slow.

ckarmann2• 13 years ago

Yes, they added a lot of bells and whistles to make it relevant for a benchmark. I am just surprised that they didn't use something that is more dynamic by design.

I can't tell for FF, but Chrome has no problem with that demo.

barredo• 13 years ago

> the Do Not Track (DNT) signal is turned on in IE10 for Windows 7

Nice. But getting this flag on by default in most browsers will give the advertisers the excuse to keep doing the same old practices even with DNT on.

lucian1900• 13 years ago

That's simply not the point of DNT. It's entirely voluntary server side, so it will never be useful if it's opt-out.

It should be opt-in, as the spec says. Microsoft made DNT useless on IE to get some good PR.

dominic_cocch• 13 years ago

I don't believe the download link for that is working just yet.

degobah• 13 years ago

This works: http://g.msn.com/1me10IE10ENUS/WOL_Win7_64Full

brg10072• 13 years ago

A link to a 32 bit version is possible ?

apaprocki2• 13 years ago

It would be more useful to see Kraken / Octane scores[1] side-by-side with FF and Chrome than touting SunSpider.

[1] http://arewefastyet.com/

ferongr• 13 years ago

I did a single Octane run on each for my own amusement. Totally unscientific methodology but the results are good enough for me. Chromium is v. 27.0.1424.0 rev 184630 (probably the latest build) from a zipfile (Google makes it practically impossible to download zips of anything else).

IE still has to do a lot to catch up and the Windows 7 desktop version's GUI is same old IE9 without any changes.

http://ompldr.org/vaGxnZQ/browsers.png

mgkimsal5• 13 years ago

" We will begin auto updating Windows 7 customers to IE10 in the weeks ahead, starting today with customers running the IE10 Release Preview. "

Does this mean they'll try to update everyone on Windows 7 to IE10? I'm hoping so, but don't know enough about the policies around MS updates to grok what the impact will be in the coming weeks.

ygra2• 13 years ago

This has been the case for the previous few IE versions too. There is a tool to block automatic deployment, mostly meant for corporate environments where you probably first need to test all your intranet apps.

It won't reach those who don't update their Windows, though. And that's probably a large part of users who are still on older IE versions.

columbo• 13 years ago

I wish IE would move away from big waterfall-esque versions-numbers and just go to frequent bite sized automatic updates.

I understand the corporate need for browser version locking but that should be the exception (Active Directory overriding) not the norm.

As an aside the latest versions of IE seem just fine. I no longer have any skin in that game like I did in 2006-2010 where every computer I happened across would instantly have FF installed and IE hidden.

SideburnsOfDoom• 13 years ago

Word is that IE11 will be out this year with the first major Win8 update. ( http://www.techspot.com/news/51740-windows-blue-to-feature-i... )

This is great news, as they really need to ramp up the pace with "frequent bite sized updates".

But I have no idea (and it will be interesting to find out) if IE11 will run on Windows 7 ever; or if as usual this is the end of the line and older OS versions will be the enabling factor of older versions of IE still being used. This is important since not everyone likes and wants Win8, so Win7 will be around for a while to come.

CJefferson• 13 years ago

Actually, I'm starting to fall out with frequent automatic updates.

The most recent version of chrome on Mac OS X has broken me watching videos on itv.com. Manual downgrading is really painful, so I've just switched to Firefox for a while. But if this was a website important to my business, I would be livid.

SquareWheel• 13 years ago

I've had Chrome break a few things from automatic updates as well, but overall I still like auto-updates. Knowing me, I'd have updated anyway, and this just does it for me. I do a lot of web work though and I'm mostly just thrilled that I don't have to design websites for "Chrome 6" or any nonsense like that.

Flenser• 13 years ago

Perhaps part of the reason Microsoft hasn't switched to a faster release cycle is a fear that the quicker they iterate IE the quicker it will be replaced by other browsers. They need a certain baseline for their own internet solutions, but until those solutions are mature enough, and the market is ready to pay for them, they don't have a strong enough motivation to improve IE.

geuis• 13 years ago

IE 10 does automatic updates now independent from the OS update cycle.

webXL2• 13 years ago

This is huge and might make IE a real contender again.... if they can actually keep up with the competition.

mokash4• 13 years ago

Wow, that's actually pretty great. One of the biggest reasons why people are still stuck on old versions of IE is because they don't want to run OS upgrades. Making the upgrades independent of everything else is quite sensible.

yuhong2• 13 years ago

I was thinking of a rapid release version of IE where MSHTML, IEFRAME, etc. are in the application directory instead of system32 for a while now.

rrreese• 13 years ago

One of the nicest things about Windows 8 is that each copy shipped is a guaranteed person who is not using I.E 7/8/9.

Hopefully the companies just now upgrading to Windows 7 from XP will also deploy I.E 10, but I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand maybe Windows 7 install media will come with I.E 10 incorporated into it. A man can dream.

apaprocki2• 13 years ago

I was helping out my wife the other day to use some work-related internal site via VPN. I had just finished putting a clean Win7+IE9 install on her PC only to find out that this large-ish enterprisey portal only works in IE8. Everyone always touts these reasons as why old versions stick around forever, but when you see one in practice you realize how crippling it can be for both sides because nobody necessarily even owns the site (e.g., built by outside consultants) and the end users have no real say to get it fixed. If there is no in-house technical owner, the chance of it being updated anytime soon simply because a new browser version is available is next to nil. I feel, in situations like this, it is probably not until the department/whatever head personally encounters the issue on a new computer that a top-down mandate comes to fix the situation.

Osiris2• 13 years ago

IE9 has a way to put it into IE8 compatibility mode. Do these kinds of sites not work in Compatibility Mode? Press F12 to switch the mode. It's a good option for using a better version of IE while still supporting older sites.

steveridout• 13 years ago

Doesn't putting the browser in IE8 compatibility mode work? I guess it sucks for an end user to need to use a developer feature like this but could be the best option.

All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML and it throws IE9 and later into IE8 compatibility mode:

I was surprised to notice that the BBC website does this. I noticed because a bookmarklet I wrote which requires IE9 won't work on the BBC site, which was quite disappointing.

kris121• 13 years ago

For me.

I can only view my Broadband & Mobile both site in IE7,8 Mode. Other browse gave me exception "Unsupported browser".

vellum• 13 years ago

Have web developers stopped supporting IE 7 yet? I remember a bunch of stories about Apple/Google/etc. dropping IE 6 support a while ago.

Osiris2• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, where I am at our corporate standard says that we "fully support" IE 7. We've decided instead to make sure that the site functions in IE 7, but it doesn't have to render exactly the same. Our customer support group is still stuck on IE 7 for unknown reasons and since they use our product internally also, we can't break it completely. It's stupid that we have to stupport a 6+ year old browser.

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

Google doesn't support officially support IE8 anymore, much less 7 (http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=3...).

For my company that's just not practical. We sell to schools and many of them are still running XP.

EnderMB4• 13 years ago

The answers to this question will be skewed as a lot of people on here work at startups, with no interest or need to support legacy browsers.

I work at a digital agency, a lot of our larger clients still desire legacy browser support (sometimes as far as IE6). Since a lot of these clients earn some serious money, we could charge a ton and it'd still make business sense for the client to support these users. Also, some of the sectors we've worked in have had some very high IE6/7 numbers, especially in the legal sector.

To answer your question, it depends on who you ask. On here and on places like Reddit you'll find a lot of people don't offer full legacy browser support, but many of us still do because we are bound by our clients. Once Windows 8 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.

smackfu• 13 years ago

I'm still seeing around 25% IE7 across corporate desktops. At least IE6 is nearly dead though.

brunnsbe• 13 years ago

My company is going stop supporting IE7 this spring, now when three newer version of IE are available it's time to move on.

meaty7• 13 years ago

Not strictly true. Our QA team are using Windows 8 and they typically decided to fire up a VM using built in Hyper-V containing one of the above each :(

So we now have one extra IE7 and IE9...

TazeTSchnitzel3• 13 years ago

No, Windows 8 has IE10 by default. They presumably have that VM to test IE9 and IE7 which are used on previous versions of Windows, but god knows why they put them on Windows 8.

znowi• 13 years ago

As long as sites keep working on those ancient browsers while devs waste precious time spoon-feeding them - they will linger. I myself stopped caring about anything below IE8 a long ago (lately below IE9) and I ask everyone to do the same.

JQuery 2.0 is a great weapon against the legacy (support only for IE9+). I hope for its swift and rapid adoption in place of 1.x version.

mokash4• 13 years ago

Many companies are still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7. It's absolutely ridiculous, why not upgrade or just switch browsers? Can't be that difficult, surely?

My previous school uses Internet Explorer 8, I asked the tech why he doesn't upgrade the computers to IE9, he just said he doesn't have the time.

acdha3• 13 years ago

If they're running Windows XP, he probably doesn't - a lot of places have skimped for years and are now faced with replacing hardware and upgrading software to run Windows 7. The results will be good but it's a capital-P project.

marijn2• 13 years ago

As an aside, does anyone know of a way to install this alongside IE9 on a testing machine? I should have started testing in IE10 months ago, but I'm loath to set up a separate VM for every IE version.

oneplusone• 13 years ago

IE dev tools allows you to switch the browser renderer to any version you want that is higher than 6.

acdha3• 13 years ago

Note, however, that this is not the same as the real browser engine - there are key areas which still perform like the native version. As an example, IE8 in IE7 compatibility mode will throw JavaScript exceptions if you try to set invalid styles on a DOM element but real IE7 silently ignores the error.

ataylor32• 13 years ago

I don't recommend this approach since it is quite unreliable, as shown here:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/11418046/237244

olemartinorg• 13 years ago

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms#installation

ck22• 13 years ago

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

Use "default" for IE10 (the IE10 button stays greyed-out which is confusing)

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Sorry, separate VM's are the only way.

But I use VirtualBox and take advantage of "snapshots" -- this way I have a virtual hard drive with "XP" and separate snapshots with IE6, 7, and 8 installed. And I have a separate virtual hard drive with Windows 8 installed, with separate snapshots for IE8, 9, and now 10.

This way you can save a LOT of disk space. And as a side benefit, once you set your snapshot point, every time you switch between snapshots, you lose the VM history since the snapshot, so you can start testing sites with a "clean" version of IE everytime, uncluttered with cache, history, etc.

meaty7• 13 years ago

+1 for this. We just set up 20 of our people with this set up. With Hyper-V built into Windows 8, it's actually quite pleasant (compared to dealing with VMware).

marijn2• 13 years ago

That's a great approach. Thanks.

27182818284• 13 years ago

I like Browserstack. I used it before modern.ie endorsed it and I've been fairly happy with the results. In the beginning it locked up a bunch, but it has gotten better and better

ck22• 13 years ago

Is there an easy way to run IE9 and IE10 without IEtester?

IEtester has started to crash on me lately.

mokash4• 13 years ago

I used BrowserStack on a trial basis and I absolutely loved it. Would pay for access but my usage doesn't justify the cost.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

What for?)

Mahn• 13 years ago

Now if only we could get every single IE user to upgrade, including IE7/8 users, that'd be perfect.

melling2• 13 years ago

How long before IE10 hits the update channel for Windows 7 users? This should be enough to send IE9 to low single digit and IE10 to double-digit market share.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201201...

mbrubeck• 13 years ago

IE9 auto-updates have been enabled for over a year, and IE8 has yet to fall to a single-digit percentage of page views... (Of course, IE8 share is kept high by the large number of users still on Windows XP, which won't be the case for IE9.)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Internet-Explorer-Windows-U...

melling2• 13 years ago

As you stated, it's because XP has almost 40% Windows market share so IE8 will persist for quite some time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

It doesn't mean that most consumers won't take the IE10 upgrade. IE10 will be double-digit by this time next year.

Drakim• 13 years ago

The newest versions of Chrome and Firefox has been working on Windows 7 for quite some time already.

This is my major objection when people insist that "Internet Explorer has caught up". It's true that the latest IE isn't light-years behind it's rivals anymore, but it doesn't matter if people are forced to use older versions of the browser because they don't constantly change their OS.

My family's laptop runs Windows 7. What's the point of talking about all the advantages IE10 offers if they couldn't even use it?

anoopmadhavn• 13 years ago

The original link doesn't work. This does http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/downloa...

barelon2• 13 years ago

In the meantime, IE6 is still used by 6% of users :-(

mscrivo• 13 years ago

Only because of China, and to a lesser extent, India. Everywhere else, the numbers are negligible.

barelon2• 13 years ago

Didn´t know that! You made me a happier person :-)

EnderMB4• 13 years ago

It depends on your site. One of my clients in the legal sector in the UK and Europe still gets 4-5% of its visitors visiting from IE6.

You are largely correct in the bigger picture, but it's still surprising how popular it is in some areas.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

From their site:

“Incredibly fast” —Tweet

OK, who sent that tweet ;) ?

It sneakily wanted me to make Bing and MSN defaults so I'll wait.

daninfpj• 13 years ago

One day they'll realize it wasn't worth it, like Opera did recently.

They should focus on perfect support of web standards already, instead of trying to invent the next big thing.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

It took Microsoft 6 months to port one version of IE to another version of Windows, while Chrome and Firefox are available not only on all versions of Windows (XP included, which is 40% of the market), but also on Linux and Mac OS. I thought Microsoft wanted to be taken seriously in the browser market?

0x0• 13 years ago

I guess it's easier to ship an updated rendering engine if you are also the one shipping the single embedding application of said rendering engine, unfortunately.

yuhong2• 13 years ago

They are quick to take advantage of new Win8 features, and it took a while before their backport of some of them (Platform Update) to Win7 can be finally released.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

That may make some sense if they were already ahead of the others with IE10, but they are about 2 years behind in HTML5 support. Spending another 6 months just to port it to a pretty similar OS of their own doesn't make me very optimistic about IE's future.

ineedtosleep• 13 years ago

Honestly, how is this a fair argument at all?

And also, to make it more complete let's add in Safari. Released (as a beta) in 2003, with its first Windows version in 2007. The Windows version's last (read: no more releases after this) release was Safari 5.[1]

Are we to take Apple seriously since they only support iOS and OSX?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)

Kerrick• 13 years ago

This is more in line with Safari 6 only being available for Mountain Lion upon launch, and taking 6 months to be available for Lion.

white_devil• 13 years ago

Chrome, Firefox and Opera provide more than enough credibility to the argument, even if Safari no longer works on Windows.

Besides, OS X has moved towards multi-touch gestures, for example, which Safari supports. It makes sense that they'd have to give up on Windows.

webXL2• 13 years ago

At least I can run a recent version of Safari on a windows machine today. I don't think it's possible to run a recent version of IE on Mac OS.

jpd750• 13 years ago

Its about time MS woke up and smelled the web standards coffee. You're now about 2 years behind - good job

nasir• 13 years ago

Lets employ new experts to fix the new layout problems.

meaty7• 13 years ago

Still can't place an order with pizzahut.co.uk with IE10.

I raised this with them 4 months ago: both Pizza Hut and Microsoft and neither give a shit about their customers.

nivla2• 13 years ago

Just tried after your seeing your comment. It throws out a useless generic error "We are experiencing problems with our site...". I think it has something to do with Cookie/ViewState validation to prevent automated attacks.

Fix: Clicked on the "Compatibility View" icon at the top on the browser and the order went through fine.

meaty7• 13 years ago

Good call. For some reason I didn't get the compatibility view button for this site. I noticed I don't get it for any sites. After some digging, it appears something has turned it off on this box. I've turned it back on and it works in compat view.

Xtranger3• 13 years ago

If you don't give a shit about yourself and eat garbage like Pizza Hut, why would they...?;)

meaty7• 13 years ago

If you're going to sign up again to troll, you are the lowest form of coward. If you're new here, back to reddit please.

Fletch137• 13 years ago

Best thing about IE10? "Automatically install updates" is an option, checked by default.

Ingaz• 13 years ago

I'm looking now side by side Chrome, IE10, Firefox.

IE10 is doing something weird with fonts: everything is bolded and blurred.

When I switch to Compatibility view - it looks better less blurred but strange anyway.

mimiflynn• 13 years ago

ClearType?

KaoruAoiShiho• 13 years ago

Man, what's up with Microsoft. Their button text isn't even vertically centered, looks horrid.

http://cl.ly/image/2F1k2E1F0e47

ecaron2• 13 years ago

I'm anxious to know if http://www.crashie.com/ brings it down, it doesn't in Win8 but I suspect Win7 is still vulnerable...

robododo• 13 years ago

Doh! That site is blocked by the msft corp firewall. And here I was going to test it for you.

ecaron2• 13 years ago

You can try my original version of the site - crashie8.com

raylu• 13 years ago

What is the point of the "Better Browsers" section on that page?

balakk• 13 years ago

Still crashes. IE10 on W764.

jclos• 13 years ago

IE10 just asked me to reboot my computer in order to complete my install. Did we just go back in time and nobody told me?

SchizoDuckie• 13 years ago

Hah, last time I tried to install IE10 it asked me to install a new operating system. This is the future man!

cseelus• 13 years ago

Does anyone here know if and if yes, when the 'Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images' (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...) will be updated?

btgeekboy• 13 years ago

They've been newly posted on modern.ie: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools - one for each version of IE from 6 to 10.

fuzzythinker• 13 years ago

No love for the poor Vista people?

AshleysBrain• 13 years ago

Uhh... has anyone else been through that Minesweeper demo source code? There's some weird stuff in there. See http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/Minesweeper/De... - in solve():

     //run some webkit sunspider code before solving a square
    webkitPartialBaseBenchmark();

In solvenextsquare():

    // run some webkit sunspider code a few times before continuing
    ...
     //not done solving, run more webkit sunspider, we hear that's what users want

It looks like the "benchmark" is to run bits of sunspider while running a minesweeper game. I think this is kind of misleading, since it makes IE10 look good at graphics and game rendering, when really it's running unrelated code.

Narkov• 13 years ago

Are you sure this isn't just to introduce some artificial delay to make it seem like it is "processing"? Imagine a slot machine that gave you a result in 10ms as opposed to rolling around for effect.

ChrisDDavis• 13 years ago

Looks like they're just causing computation and JIT'ing in Chakra and V8 before moving to the next square. SunSpider is a terrible metric and they're just poking fun. Pretty funny when you think about it.

yesimahuman• 13 years ago

From the help popup: "Let's see how fast your browser is at running a computationally, mathematically, and graphically intense app! Thank you WebKit SunSpider :-)"

medikoo• 13 years ago

Still with no support of __proto__ which means it's unusable for sophisticated stuff.

chris_wot• 13 years ago

Interesting... IE compatibility error occurs when logging into gmail.

IE10 for Windows 7 Globally Available

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