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Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 10 For Windows 7

Posted by timothy on from the double-digits-on-the-prime dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 is out. Windows 8 may suck but now you can at least enjoy (most of) that version's Internet Explorer. IE10 for Win7, originally not planned, has seen the light of day after all — four months after it debuted in Windows 8. It is available via Windows Update as an optional update; however, if you've already installed a pre-release version, it will be updated automatically as an 'important' update. IE10 on Win7 requires a platform update to bring some Windows 8 APIs to the more mature Windows, and it will not feature embedded Adobe Flash as the Windows 8 version does (use the plug-in version from Adobe, as usual, instead)."

16 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Actually... I'm glad. by Kenja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have to do compatibility testing and dont want to have to install Windows 8, even on a VMWare image.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    1. Re:Actually... I'm glad. by geminidomino · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sad to say, but you probably still will.

      If you expect the same versions of the same software to behave identically on different OSes, then the shining glory days of your web development career are still ahead of you.

      Incidentally, does IE still have a complete mental meltdown when talking to no-cache servers over SSL?

    2. Re:Actually... I'm glad. by t4ng* · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I never understood why Microsoft, with all its code signing, frameworks, and what-not, never opened up an API for Windows Update so there could be a single update system instead of every OEM and software company piling on their own update systems. Seems simple...

      1. Register application and its update url with Windows Update API.
      2. Windows API checks code signing, rejects invalid and unsigned code.
      3. Windows Update updates all code-signed software on system.
      4. ...
      5. Profit?

      Ah! Now I see why it hasn't been done!

    3. Re:Actually... I'm glad. by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Thank you for not giving a single example of a piece of legitimate software being replaced by a piece of malware from the same company via Google Play.

      I'm impressed by your inclusion of the first one actually: not only is it not an example of the type of thing we're talking about, but it's not even installable via Google Play. One might almost think that you simply googled for "Google Play malware" and pasted the first four stories, without actually checking to see if they're relevent.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  2. Can we have the story with the additude? by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Ok you guys dislike Windows 8, we know. You guys hated Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 when it came out too. When windows 9 comes out you guys are going to go why change Windows 8 windows 9 add whatever features that makes my life so much harder. This will be the version people will finally shift to Linux in droves.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:Can we have the story with the additude? by Opportunist · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not so much hate, it's simply "why bother?" At the very least, very, very few of the Windows versions that came out were a "must have" the day they hit the street. Most matured first, and after much maturing they became useful.

      Win3.1: It was something new, and it was something very useful to people who couldn't memorize CLI commands, but face it, it gobbled away a lot of the very precious 640k most programs NEEDED to run. It wasn't even useful as a launch platform, but programs written for it went ... well, they went. I almost said went fine. Still, for its time it was serving the purpose, but it was of little use to me.

      95: 95 sure WAS a step ahead, but again, in the beginning, it was mostly a "what for?" thing. Few programs were "for 95", but it sure did run Windows programs much smoother than 3.11 did. Since I had few 3.11 programs, my use for it was pretty limited, considering that I had to boot into the DOS-Mode it (luckily) had more often than not. Still, over time, it became very useful, but only after programs appeared that made use of it.

      98: 98 was the working version of 95. Especially in the networking area it sure was a huge leap ahead. 98 was actually one of the few versions that I didn't ask "what for?" but got it instead. Funny enough, its big advantage over 95 was mostly "invisible", because what set them apart was not the surface but actually the inner workings.

      ME: ME was a solution desperately looking for a problem, and in their infinite wisdom MS made ME the problem so people could start looking for a solution instead. This was the true "what for?" moment in the development of Windows, because not even after it was out a while it became more useful than its predecessors.

      2k: 2k was groundbreaking. It was, as far as I'm concerned, the ONLY OS MS ever made where there was simply no reason to ask "what for". It had its right to exist right from its inception. It combined the stability of the NT line with the compatibility of the 9x line. Seeing how this was also the time when security actually started to become an issue, there was no reason to tardy.

      XP: Another initial "what for" that gradually earned its right to exist. In its early stage, it was pretty much 2k with little useful add onto it. Its useful features only became more prominent as they became more widespread.

      Vista: Vista is IMO still waiting for its reason d'etre, as is 7 (and considering how I deem 7 the final version of Vista, I will lump them together). So far I couldn't identify any features in Vista or 7 that XP didn't provide sufficiently, aside of arbitrary compatibility issues that could easily be backported if MS so pleased.

      And finally Win8 may be useful on a tablet, but so far I didn't see any features that would convince me that I'd want it on my desktop. It's not "worse" than 7, mind you, but the eternal MS question applies to this one as much as to nearly every version before:

      "What for?"

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Can we have the story with the additude? by recoiledsnake · · Score: 4, Insightful

      GP is talking about summaries and +5 insightful Slashdot posts.

      7? No. Widespread rejoicing as almost everything that was wrong about XP was fixed. There were even die-hard GNU/Linux users who were willing to run it. Even I like 7.

      Perhaps you missed the FUD campaign with faked benchmarks that Slashdot lapped up against Windows 7?
      Or the stories about how it was horrible?

      A refresher, go read the summaries and comments:

      http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/draconian-drm-revealed-in-windows-7
      http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/11/1735210/anti-piracy-windows-7-update-phones-home-quarterly
      http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/01/30/1437233/if-windows-7-fails-citrix-not-linux-wins
      http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/09/08/1345247/windows-7-reintroduces-remote-bsod

      One of the faked benchmark articles http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=10/02/18/0429258

      The big reveal http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/2329249/windows-7-memory-usage-critic-outed-as-fraud

      It's funny to see the modded up posts on Slashdot on given stories. Comparing Windows to Linux or OS X? Windows absolutely sucks and everyone has or is moving away from it. Windows N vs. Windows N-1 ? N-1 is suddenly the best OS ever and version N sucks horribly.

      --
      This space for rent.
    3. Re:Can we have the story with the additude? by Miamicanes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > Windows 95 and 98 both got a lot of negative press at the time,

      Are you kidding? When Windows 95 came out, it was like god himself opened up the skies while everyone yelled, "it is good". Stores had launch parties at midnight, and there were lines out the door of people buying it like twinkies & toilet paper after a nuclear attack, along with pretty much ANYTHING that had the number "95" printed on the box.

      People bitched about 98 because ActiveDesktop made your shiny new 60-100MHz Pentium crawl like a 33MHz 486SX. For years, Win95 OSR2 was the gold standard against which everything was judged, especially if your USB needs began and ended with "mouse" (95OSR2 could deal with USB mice, though I don't remember whether it was 'out of the box', or 'by hand-copying a few DLLs ripped from a 98 system').

      Win2k Pro was either the best or worst OS Microsoft has ever made, and your opinion depends almost entirely upon whether you cared about using software and hardware that was supported by NT Workstation 4. If you (like me) came from NT4W, it was a gift from ${deity}. If you cared about running "Pooh's Alphabet Adventure" from 1993 on your old PC, it sucked.

      People's opinions of XP were pretty much their opposite opinion of Win2k. People who loved Win2k's compromise-free perfection hated XP's compromises made in the name of legacy compatibility (especially its endless reboots for everything). People who loved Win95OSR2 and hated Win2k loved XP's compatibility and prettyness. Most of the Win2k camp grudgingly ended up with XP 2-3 years later, when XP's superior SMP won them over, and Win2kSP3 or SP4 made Win2k need reboots as often as XP, anyway.

      Everyone hated Vista, or at least had a grudging love-hate relationship that left them feeling like a battered spouse. I loved the real symlinks, but hated its video driver dysfunction. It was my All in Wonder 128 Pro's deathblow.

      Then came Windows 7. Ahhh. Flawless perfection, especially once I discovered that Win7/64 requires signed drivers, but I can sign OTHER people's binary drivers MYSELF with my own self-signed certificate & Windows will quit nagging and leave me alone to install them as I please (this is a big, huge deal for anyone who does embedded development, especially anything that involves a legacy parallel port).

      Windows 8? Endless suck. I suspect that, like 98(SE) with 98Lite to make it tolerable (98Lite removed Active Desktop & basically let you have 98's guts with 95OSR2's much faster Explorer), I'll probably end up with 8 eventually... but I have zero desire to put myself through Win8's misery just to make it tolerable. Plus, I'm still hoping that Microsoft will see the light, and quickly release Windows 9... giving us back Aero Glass, and allowing us to apply the translucent-titlebar effect to the ENTIRE WINDOW when it's being dragged. Assuming, of course, that Microsoft is willing to compromise and let us HAVE multiple windows again, instead of turning "Windows 8" into "Window 9" (no "s").

      Truth be told, Vista briefly pushed me over the edge to Ubuntu. Ubuntu's then-dysfunctional handling of dynamic multiple monitor configurations on a laptop killed it for me, but apparently Linux/Xfree86 *finally* fixed that problem sometime around 2009 or 2010. Early in the Vista era, I used Ubuntu 6... right around the time Compiz became official, and booting a laptop configured to use monitor #2 as the primary desktop meant having to boot into single-user mode and hand-edit xinetd.conf (I think... it was a few years ago) to put it back to single-monitor with laptop = main display. Oh, and circa 2007 or so, Linux's handling of multiple cores with non-SMP-aware apps basically sucked. The prevailing attitude was, "If the application's author wanted to make use of multiple cores, he should have made it properly multithreaded", as opposed to "application authors are lazy, so make the OS itself as aggressively multithreaded as possible so that even single-threaded apps kind of benefit from multiple cores by virtue of their implicit library calls". From what I've read, it was kind of a kernel-level holy war between the purists and pragmatists, but the pragmatists won, and Linux is now about as good at faking SMP support in single-threaded apps as Windows is.

  3. Re:This is why people hate MS by vux984 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Artificially limiting what versions of the OS can run their other software is a huge annoyance of windows.

    And OS X.

  4. Re:This is why people hate MS by avandesande · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They are ending support for XP in one year. Does it make sense to port software to XP?

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  5. Re:So? by kwerle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Holy crap! County yourself lucky.

    I had to wrangle with websites that used activex controls even though they could/should have been javascript. What a freakin' nightmare. Thank goodness it seems to have come to an end.

  6. Re:This is why people hate MS by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The funny thing is that everyone else manages to produce a modern browser without altering the underlying OS to do so. That's why the latest and greatest Firefox, Chrome, and Opera run on anything XP and later but IE versions are segmented.

    Yet MS claims that they do not leverage their unique level of control over the Windows OS to benefit their non-OS products. Things like using secret un-published APIs or hacking on the APIs to benefit their other software exclusively...

  7. Re:mistake in article by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's when they do that announcement that has you running halfway across the station because your train isn't coming in where you thought it was.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  8. Re:Summary is FUD. Windows 8 does not suck. by Nocturnal+Deviant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not sure which world you are in, but in the age where humans dont have elephant arms for holding their hands up all day every day messing with a touch screen on a desktop, it sure isnt this world where windows 8 Does suck. This is primarily a website for IT and Developers, people who make things/work for others, if you want a site that is about the average joe with his laptop, go ahead praise it all you want, but this is news for nerds, and according to nerd usage, yes, it does suck.

    --
    -Noc
  9. Re:This is why people hate MS by alen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    that's hot fixes and patches, just like MS

    who is writing new software for 10 year old Linux kernels or distros?

  10. Re:This is why people hate MS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    NO ONE! Which is exactly why I got off of the Linux upgrade treadmill and switched back to Windows 7. I can still run the latest versions of the same programs (firefox, Libreoffice, Pidgin, calibre, etc) but I don't have to swap out my entire OS every year or two. I should be able to stick with Win7 for another five years or so before I have to evaluate the OS landscape again and make another upgrade.