Aiming to better compete against a growing list of rivals, Microsoft on Thursday is launching Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of its Web browser.IE 8, as the browser is known, was first shown a year ago and has been in testing for months. The new browser adds security improvements, a private browsing option, as well as the ability to save pre-defined “slices” of a Web page for at-a-glance viewing.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10199582-56.html
Microsoft Announces Availability of Internet Explorer 8
New browser focuses on top customer needs, including security, ease of use and performance.
Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, the new Web browser that offers the best solution for how people use the Web today. It can be downloaded in 25 languages at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 starting at noon EDT on March 19. Internet Explorer 8 is easier to use, faster and offers leading-edge security features in direct response to people’s increasing concerns about online safety. A new study commissioned by Microsoft and the National Cyber Security Alliance and conducted by Harris Interactive Inc. shows that 91 percent of adults in the U.S. are concerned about online threats in the current economic climate, and 78 percent are more likely to choose a Web browser with built-in security than they were two years ago.”Customers have made clear what they want in a Web browser — safety, speed and greater ease of use,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “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.”In response to extensive customer research and input from tens of millions of customer sessions, Microsoft developed Internet Explorer 8 to focus on what matters most to people. The security enhancements offer protection against existing and emerging security threats online. It blocks two to four times more malware attacks than other browsers; cuts down on the time it takes to complete common tasks on the Web such as searching, mapping and sharing, including navigating 15 of the 20 top worldwide sites; and blurs the lines between the services they use daily and the browser used to access the Internet.Helps Protect People From Online ThreatsThe new study released today reinforces the importance of safety in browsing, indicating that 78 percent of people are more likely than they were two years ago to choose a browser that includes built-in protection against security threats without them having to go online to download additional programs or browser add-ons. It also showed that 91 percent of adults in the U.S. are concerned about online fraud and identity theft in today’s economic climate, and 37 percent are less likely to shop online because they would have to give their personal information.Internet Explorer 8 offers the best security protections among leading browsers: a study released today by NSS Labs indicates that Internet Explorer 8 blocks two to four times as many malicious sites as other browsers on the market today.Makes Common Online Tasks Faster and EasierIn addition to offering improved security and privacy protections, Internet Explorer 8 is one of the fastest browsers on the market today, beating other top browsers in page load time on almost 50 percent of the 25 top comScore Inc. Web sites.* It also helps people save time while using the Web with easy-to-use new features, including the following:
- Accelerators. Accelerators make it faster and easier to perform common tasks online by making Web-based services such as ESPN.com, Live Search and Sina available for use directly from the page people are viewing. Users can simply right-click a word or phrase and instantly map, e-mail, or share it.
- Web Slices. Web Slices in Internet Explorer 8 makes favorite information from sites such as Digg, Yahoo! Mail, OneRiot, and eBay instantly available wherever someone goes on the Web.
- Visual search suggestions. The Instant Search Box in Internet Explorer 8 enables rich, real-time search from sites such as The New York Times, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, as well as sites from people’s own Favorites and History, complete with visuals and detailed information that saves time.
“We are excited about Internet Explorer 8 for several reasons, including its ability to provide our customers with updates to eBay products using Web Slices so they can keep track of their buying activity while surfing the web,” said Matt Ackley, vice president of Internet Marketing and Advertising at eBay.”The new ESPN Web Slices on Internet Explorer 8 make it easy for sports fans to check on the latest news and sports videos in a new and exciting way,” said Jason Guenther, vice president of technology and product development at ESPN Digital Media. “We have a heritage of leveraging technology to deliver the best sports content to fans, and this is another example of our dedication to that.”Available for DownloadInternet Explorer 8 will be available for download at noon EDT in 25 languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified and Hong Kong), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. More information and a download of Internet Explorer 8 (as of noon EDT on March 19) can be found at www.microsoft.com/ie8.
www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-18IE8AvailablePR.mspx
Availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8 Brings New Opportunities for Web Developers
ESPN, eBay, OneRiot, many others investing in Internet Explorer 8 to add value to Web sites and deliver richer online experiences.
At MIX09, Microsoft Corp.’s Web designer and developer conference, Microsoft announced the global availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, providing better performance, easier Web development tools for enhanced browser experiences and improved security and reliability. In Thursday’s keynote address, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft, showcased solutions from industry partners such as ESPN, eBay Inc., Digg Inc., Facebook and OneRiot that create new value for their customers.”With the Internet Explorer 8 platform, Microsoft creates opportunities for Web sites to engage customers in new ways and drive not only more traffic, but also more value in the online experience,” Hachamovitch said.New Opportunities for DevelopersDevelopers will benefit from performance features that enable Web sites to allow customers to engage more deeply with their site content. Accelerators and Web Slices make it easier for developers to reach beyond the page and provide new ways for people to stay connected to the content and services of their choice. Internet Explorer 8 has enhanced search features and capabilities to provide more interesting and relevant content, increased speed, and enhanced security, and offers greater performance and reliability.”Internet Explorer 8 is the perfect platform to consume search results from the real-time social Web,” said Tobias Peggs, general manager, OneRiot. “We have developed new search services and Web Slices for Internet Explorer 8 that enable our users to easily find the news, stories and videos that people are buzzing about right now. We have found that Web Slices help bring users to our site 18 percent more per day than average.””The new features in Internet Explorer 8 allow fans convenient one-click access to the latest ESPN video and sports headlines,” said Jason Guenther, vice president, technology and product development, ESPN Digital Media. “With Web Slices available on many pages of our site, including team Clubhouse pages and select sport pages, we can add to the easy ways fans can connect with sports news and their favorite games and teams.”Commitment to Standards and Integrated Developer ToolsInternet Explorer 8 is Microsoft’s most standards-compliant browser to date, and benefits from work the company is doing with standards bodies to bring increased measurement and consistency. As part of Microsoft’s commitment to supporting standards, the company has submitted more than 7,000 cascading style sheet (CSS) 2.1 test cases to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the last year to help drive easier and more measurable standards adoption for all developers. Moreover, Internet Explorer 8 now passes more of the W3C CSS 2.1 test cases than any other shipping browser and has invested significantly in support for HTML 5. Defaulting to standards-mode for Web sites and featuring a Compatibility View list to ease the transition enables developers to be sure their code runs across multiple browsers and platforms, freeing developers to innovate, not re-create.Finally, by incorporating the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar directly into Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft enables developers to quickly debug HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These enhanced capabilities empower developers to deliver a better Web experience through creating applications for consumers and enterprises.More information and a download of Internet Explorer 8 can be found at www.microsoft.com/ie8. More information for developers can be found at www.msdn.microsoft.com/ie, and information for members of the Microsoft Partner Program can be found at partners.microsoft.com.Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/mar09/03-19IEDevelopersPR.mspxMicrosoft Drives Greater Openness to Fuel Innovation, Efficiency and Growth
Businesses everywhere are dealing with the challenges of economic uncertainty and financial pressures, alongside higher customer expectations. In a world of change, businesses must adapt, be able to innovate, and find new ways of doing business. Technology creates opportunities for businesses to innovate. As such, many companies have assembled a diverse mix of applications and technologies from a variety of vendors. Because mixed IT environments are so pervasive, customers are demanding – now more than ever – that software vendors do a better job of making their products work together.Helping lead Microsoft’s interoperability work are general managers Craig Shank and Jean Paoli. Shank manages the Interoperability Group, spearheading public policy and legal affairs relating to interoperability and standards, including implementation of Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles. Paoli is one of the creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and manages the Interoperability Strategy Group, coordinating with product teams across Microsoft on interoperability customer scenarios and product strategy. Together, they help drive Microsoft’s holistic approach to interoperability.PressPass spoke with Shank and Paoli to learn more about the interoperability work that is taking place at Microsoft and across the technology industry.PressPass: It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the interoperability team at Microsoft. Why are you speaking out now?Shank: This is a time of change. Increasing globalization, rising Internet use, and higher consumer and business expectations are driving increased demand for technology choice and flexibility. Governments and businesses alike have assembled a diverse mix of applications and technologies from a variety of vendors. In this environment, technology can present new opportunities and deliver new solutions. Key to that is helping organizations make the most of their mixed IT environments.As our company has evolved and more people have started using our products and enjoying the benefits that come with their universality, we have seen how customers can benefit from greater interoperability and choice in the market. To ensure that the universal nature of Microsoft’s products helps our customers rather than stands in their way, we’re working to increase openness through greater access to our products and more collaboration with others. This is more important today than ever.Paoli: We would like to communicate and demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability. Craig and I help lead a broad, cross-company interoperability effort, with the goal of meeting our customers’ needs for operating mixed IT environments. This includes a number of elements: how we build and license our high-volume products, the technology bridges we create to connect our products with others, our perspectives on critical issues to foster greater interoperability across the IT ecosystem, and our participation in the IT standards system.PressPass: What are the business and economic benefits of increased interoperability?Shank: Promoting interoperability helps reduce costs and increase efficiency. As an example, calculations by researchers at Harvard University suggest that standardizing healthcare information exchange and interoperability could save the U.S. healthcare industry approximately $78 billion per year. We also believe that interoperability fosters innovation, giving more companies access to widely used platforms and providing them with a way to build solutions and services on top of them. So, between efficiency and innovation, interoperability can have a significant economic impact.PressPass: What is Microsoft doing, exactly, to promote interoperability?Shank: Microsoft’s interoperability efforts are driven through the lens of customer needs and encompass four key elements: collaboration, access, standards and products. Since interoperability is an industrywide challenge, collaboration is critical.One forum where this takes place is in the Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, which consists of more than 35 CIOs and CTOs from governments and leading corporations around the world. The IEC Council helps Microsoft identify and solve the top challenges facing customers today. Working with them, we’re actively resolving issues in the areas of systems management, security and identity management, as well as office productivity and collaboration tools.A real-world example of our collaboration with customers to enable interoperability is our work with the Portuguese government’s Agency for the Modernization of the Public Administration. This organization used Microsoft technologies to create an interoperability framework to connect and provide a single sign-on to diverse legacy systems running Linux, AIX, HP/UX and Windows. The new Citizen Card, cartão de cidadão, replaces five existing cards for identity, taxpayer, social security, healthcare and voter verification, and will reduce information processing time, lower the cost of government services and enhance citizen data security.Paoli: We also collaborate with our competitors — EMC, Novell, SAP and Sun, for example — to help solve the interoperability challenges of our mutual customers. Take Novell, for example. Microsoft worked with Novell to enable Moonlight, an open source implementation of Silverlight for the Linux operating system. Moonlight gives Linux-based users access to Web experiences that incorporate video, animation, interactivity and stunning user interfaces. It will be provided as an open source plug-in for the Firefox Web browser. In fact, an early version of Moonlight was used in January to stream President Obama’s inauguration ceremony.A third area of collaboration is with all types of developers and partners, such as the work we do within the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) to bring new tools and solutions to market that make it easier to use and exchange documents in different formats. One such solution is the OpenXML Document Viewer. With this, you can download a plug-in and view OpenXML documents within the Firefox browser on either Windows or Linux platforms, without installing Microsoft Office or other productivity products.Our collaboration with developers also includes working with those in open source communities, such as leading engineers from open source projects Samba, Apache and Mozilla. During the past year Microsoft has sponsored the Apache Software Foundation, made contributions to the PHPCommunity and participated in several Apache projects, including Hadoop and Qpid. In addition, Microsoft engineers have contributed to more than 300 open source projects, including WiX, Stonehenge and Web Sandbox. We have also invested in systems to support open source development, such as CodePlex and Snakebite.PressPass: You mentioned access as one of the four key elements of Microsoft’s interoperability efforts. Can you describe your work there?Shank: About one year ago, Microsoft announced a set of broad-ranging changes to our technology and business practices: the Microsoft Interoperability Principles. The purpose of our Interoperability Principles is to increase the openness of our high-volume products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice. The aim of these principles – and the actions we’ve taken in support of them – is to give all software developers – including ISVs, open source developers and developers in customer IT departments – access to technical documentation and other resources that help them build products that work with ours.Since then, we’ve made more than 50,000 pages of technical documentation publicly available for free on our MSDN Web site. This provides consistent, open access for all developers, which enhances the ease and opportunities for working with Microsoft’s high-volume products. We believe this has been helpful to many in the industry. In the past year, there have been nearly one million downloads of technical documentation for protocols built into Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Business Division products. Based on this information and other market data, we estimate that more than 100 companies and open source projects are using these protocols thus far.PressPass: It seems like Microsoft is increasingly interested in the standards system. Can you tell me more about that?Shank: Standards are a useful tool in addressing technical interoperability. When we see an unmet need in the market, we work jointly with other industry players to specify new standards that can help resolve the big interoperability issues facing enterprise customers. Accordingly, we have a long-term commitment to participating and contributing to standards bodies – currently more than 150 – and implementing and supporting standards in our products.Paoli: This includes supporting relevant standards in our high-volume products, and documenting how we do so, to promote even greater levels of interoperability. Consistent with that principle, we recently published Implementers Notes describing how we implement the ODF file format standard in Office 2007. This was followed by our publication of Implementers Notes for Ecma 376 (Open XML). Together, these notes offer a comprehensive guide for how Microsoft is implementing these two international document format standards in its Microsoft Office suite, helping developers build products that interoperate with Office 2007 through the use of standardized file formats.PressPass: We’ve talked about standards and openness. How does Microsoft deliver interoperability through its products?Shank: We continue to enhance our products with new capabilities that can help reduce the cost of running a mixed IT environment, such as cross-platform management and virtualization. For example, interoperability is an important element of the work we’re doing with the Azure Services Platform, our new operating system and development platform for cloud computing. When a community technology preview (CTP) of the Azure Services Platform was made available, we provided software development kits (SDKs) for developers working in Java and Ruby.Another way we’re doing this is through virtualization, which provides greater flexibility, enhanced interoperability, simplified management and a more efficient use of resources – especially for complex IT systems. In June 2008, Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. A few months later, Microsoft and Novell jointly announced the availability of a virtualization solution that includes Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V as an optimized guest operating system. And recently Microsoft and Red Hat entered into reciprocal agreements to provide testing, validation and joint technical support to shared customers using both Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a virtualized environment.Paoli: Another recent product-related development is our work with Soyatec, a French IT solutions provider and Eclipse Foundation member, on a community technology preview of Eclipse4SL support for Macintosh. This enables Macintosh developers using Eclipse to develop rich internet applications using Silverlight. It’s the delivery of a project first announced last October with the launch of Silverlight 2, and it is funded by Microsoft as part of our continued commitment to openness and interoperability.PressPass: So, what’s next for Microsoft’s interoperability work?Shank: Interoperability will continue to guide how we build and license our top-selling products. Expect to see more technology bridges that will connect our products with others.Paoli: We’re going to continue working closely with others in the IT industry – customers, partners, competitors and developers, including those in open source communities. They will help identify and solve interoperability challenges. As we mentioned earlier, this is a time of change. We’ve made some progress and we’re going to continue taking steps toward fostering greater interoperability.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/mar09/03-19InteroperabilityQA.mspx
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