Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta programs and tools make it easy for you to deploy Internet Explorer 8 and manage custom browser software packages. Here is a quick overview of the tools included:
- IEAK Toolkit. The IEAK Toolkit contains helpful tools, programs, and sample files, such as bitmaps and a sample sign-up.
- Internet Explorer Customization Wizard. The Internet Explorer Customization Wizard browser guides you through the process of creating custom browser packages. When these packages are installed on your clients' desktops, they'll receive customized versions of Internet Explorer with the settings and options that you selected in the wizard.
- Windows Installer (MSI). IEAK 8 supports creating an MSI wrapper for your custom Internet Explorer 8 packages to make enterprise deployment via Active directory possible.
- IEAK Help. The IEAK Help includes many conceptual and procedural topics that you can view by using the Index, Contents, and Search tabs. You can also print topics from the IEAK Help.
Get it @
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=65033653-2721-4232-84e1-bf863631ba47&DisplayLang=en
Written by Odd-Magne Kristoffersen on August 29th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Add-ons are programs that add features to a web browser or change the way it works. If you’ve ever wished Internet Explorer could do something new or differently, chances are there’s an add-on out there that will fulfill your wish.
I must have tried out hundreds of add-ons over the years. In this column, I’ll talk about five add-ons that I use every day. They have all earned a place in my add-on stable because they really have made my online life easier, and I miss their presence when using somebody else’s computer.
Power users love IE7Pro
IE7Pro is a free add-on for Internet Explorer 7 that is indispensable to me in my day-to-day work. It adds a raft of new abilities to the web browser, including advanced management of tabbed browsing settings, a simple download manager, spelling checks of text you enter in web forms, autoscrolling of webpages, quick searching of page text, ad and Flash blocking, custom keyboard shortcuts, and much more.
One of my favorite features of this add-on is its ability to automatically refresh a tab at a specified interval. In my job as an IT coordinator, I use Internet Explorer to monitor several spam filters in my office. Unfortunately, none of the filters automatically refresh the browser to display the latest captured e-mail, so I was forced to manually refresh the webpages every so often. With IE7Pro, all I need to do is right-click the IE7Pro icon in the status bar, click Refresh Current Tab, and then pick my preferred refresh interval. This feature is also quite useful for seeing the latest messages coming into your web-based e-mail inbox and for keeping track of online auctions and message boards.
Do you want to search the Internet for something you’re reading about on a particular webpage? Instead of copying and pasting the text into a search box, simply select the word or phrase, right-click it, then click Search With to search for the term using Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, or another search engine of your choice. The results appear in a new tab.
Have you ever closed a tab by mistake? No worries click Tab History in the IE7Pro menu, and then click Reopen Last Closed Tab. Did Internet Explorer crash? IE7Pro will offer to restore the tabs that were open when the crash occurred.
Road warriors who frequently switch Internet connections will love IE7Pro’s proxy switcher. Instead of manually changing the proxy configuration each time you switch connections, you can quickly select previously used proxy servers from a menu.
I really haven’t done IE7Pro justice in this column. It offers far more than I have described above. To download it, go to the IE7Pro website.
Simple but effective: Find As You Type
To search for text on a webpage in Internet Explorer, normally you must press CTRL+F, type the search term into the Find window and then click Next. Find As You Type is an add-on that allows you to see all matches to your search term as it is typed. Matches are instantly highlighted on the page. If you type a combination of letters that does not appear on the page, an audio cue sounds and the Find box turns red.
For example, when I type “phish” into the toolbar, as in the screen capture below, all instances of “phish” on the page are immediately highlighted there is no need to click a button. You can step through each instance of matched text sequentially using the Next and Previous buttons on the toolbar. You can even set up Find As You Type to start searching as soon as you start typing on a webpage no CTRL+F required.
To download Find As You Type, go to the ookii.org website. Note that IE7Pro offers a very similar “instant find” feature. Therefore, if you choose to install IE7Pro, you don’t need to install Find As You Type. That being said, if you like the idea of enhanced searching and have no need for everything else IE7Pro offers, then Find As You Type is an excellent choice.
Organize your downloads with LeechGet
An Internet connection can be unreliable, and far too often I have felt the frustration that comes from having a large download interrupted. Restarting the download in Internet Explorer is hit-or-miss; sometimes I lose the partial download, and sometimes I don’t. I wanted a download manager that could take over from Internet Explorer and give me more control over what happens when things go wrong. My personal favorite is a product called LeechGet. It operates as a standalone program that integrates with Internet Explorer by managing downloads you click in the browser.
LeechGet allows you to manage multiple downloads, pause and resume, schedule downloads to occur at a particular time, and split your downloads into smaller “tasks.” You can also impose a “speed limit” on downloads that restricts how much bandwidth they can use, thus leaving you some bandwidth to browse the web. The program includes a download history and speed monitor.
LeechGet has two versions: a free version that limits you to one download at a time and does not include updates, and a paid version that removes those restrictions and includes technical support. To download it, go to the LeechGet website.
Make RSS shine with RikReader
Since the release of Internet Explorer 7 and its integrated RSS feed reader, I’ve become a very heavy user of RSS, and have subscribed to hundreds of different feeds (For more information about RSS feeds, see The wonderful world of RSS feeds).
As much as I enjoy the convenience of being able to detect, subscribe to, and read RSS feeds from within Internet Explorer, its feed reader has a couple of glaring deficiencies. First, there is no way to mark all feeds as read, which I like to do when I am very busy or behind on my reading. Second, there is no way to view all of my feeds at the same time. So I decided to find a feed reader that would take full advantage of the Windows RSS Platform. RikReader is my feed reader of choice. (Technically, RikReader is a program, rather than an add-on, but it integrates with the feed-subscription capabilities of Internet Explorer.)
RikReader displays the feeds you have subscribed to in Internet Explorer. It offers both a conventional two-pane view, with headlines on one side and article text on the other, and an impressive “newspaper” view that displays the full text of each article or blog post in a multicolumn layout. In either view, the text size can be easily reduced or enlarged via a slider. By typing a term in the search box, you can instantly filter a feed so that only articles containing that term are displayed.
If you have many feeds (in the hundreds), RikReader can be a bit slow to start up while it loads all of them. Things may also slow down when loading the newspaper view or when loading a feed with many hundreds of articles. In such circumstances, you can improve RikReader’s performance by setting it to display only unread articles.
RikReader is free and can be downloaded at the RikReader website. In lieu of charging a fee, the author promotes his Amazon.com wishlist, which makes for interesting reading.
Me.dium: An interaction revolution
Humans are inherently social creatures, and we love to interact with others online—hence the popularity of instant messaging, social networking sites, and online forums. In the end, though, web surfing has basically remained a solitary experience. We’ve always known that lots of other people are likely to be looking at the same page as we are, at the same time, but we couldn’t see or interact with them until now.
Me.dium is an add-on that allows you to peek behind the curtain of the web. After you install it, a Me.dium “map” appears in the left pane of the browser. The map displays an icon representing you and the website you are viewing, along with icons of other Me.dium users who are visiting the same site. Users you’ve added to your Me.dium friends list show up as yellow, and others show up as blue. Surrounding your icon are icons representing related sites that you or other Me.dium users have visited. For example, if you’re at a news site, Me.dium will show you other news sites; if you are at a bank’s website it will suggest other banking and financial sites. You can click an icon to go directly to that site.
It’s great fun to watch all of the activity revealed by Me.dium. Not only can you watch other Me.dium users as you and they move from site to site, you can also start a chat that every Me.dium user at the site can view and participate in. If a Me.dium user is on your friends list, you can begin instant messaging privately. Every message that you send includes a link to the site that you are currently viewing.
Be warned, though: Me.dium can be a real productivity sapper. As you interact with people and websites you might not have encountered otherwise, many hours may pass unnoticed. Also, while logged in to Me.dium, you may want to avoid visiting a site that may cause you embarrassment if revealed to your contacts. You may adore crocheting fluorescent-pink-and-yellow pillowcases, but some of your contacts might find your hobbies highly amusing. Fortunately, it only takes one click to turn off Me.dium, and sharing information with Me.dium is automatically disabled when you enter a secure site or a local intranet site.
To download this add-on, visit the Me.dium website.
Where do we go from here?
And there you have it; I’ve shown you how to add some very useful abilities to Internet Explorer. But the add-ons I’ve described here are only the tip of the iceberg. To browse hundreds more add-ons that can enhance your browser, visit the official Add-ons for Internet Explorer site.
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Written by Jason on August 28th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Browser and Explorer and IE7 and Internet and Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer 7 and LeechGet and Performance and Web Browser and add-ons and config and free and google and how to and ie and ie7pro.
While most of the reviews of
IE 8 Beta 2, which Microsoft made available to testers this week, are focusing on the more consumer-focused features of Microsoft’s forthcoming browser, Microsoft also is touting IE 8 as a solid platform for business administrators/users.
In fact, in the IE 8 Beta 2 Reviewers’ Guide, Microsoft provides a list of what it considers the most alluring features for business users of
IE 8, the final version of which is expected this November.
Pulled from the guide, here is the list of what the Softies are touting as IE 8 improvements for enterprise customers. Note: The “*” designates a new or enhanced feature, as of Beta 2.
Standalone installation: Provides several ways to deploy Internet Explorer 8 plus customizations, or just the customizations.
Slipstream installation*: Enables the deployment of Internet Explorer 8 as part of an operating system image.
Managing user settings post-deployment: System administrators can easily update security settings, apply custom branding, and change other user and browser settings.
Group Policy enhancements*: New Group Policy settings ease deployment, configuration and customization.
Administrator Kit enhancements*: Enables system administrators to more easily configure desktop deployment settings for Internet Explorer.
Application compatibility tools*: An enhanced Application Compatibility Toolkit and granular Group Policy settings help IT professionals detect and resolve potential compatibility issues.
More granular management of ActiveX Controls: Provides increased control over how ActiveX Controls are installed and when they can be accessed.
Richer enterprise Web applications: Companies can take advantage of new features such as Accelerators and Web Slices to make users more productive.
Extended support life cycle: Internet Explorer 8 is supported for the life of the operating systems on which it runs, including dedicated enterprise-level updates and security response.
Enterprise-class support: Internet Explorer 8 is supported by the Microsoft Support organization as part of the Windows operating system, enabling most enterprise customers to take advantage of existing support contracts.
Scheduled software updates: Software updates for Internet Explorer 8 are released on a predictable schedule so that IT professionals can plan accordingly.
Business administrators/users: Do any of these IE 8 features catch your fancy? As IE 8 is pretty much done at this point, any other enterprise-specific features you’d like to see make it into IE 9?
News Source:
Mary-Jo Foley
Written by Odd-Magne Kristoffersen on August 28th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Internet Explorer 8 comes packed with new features designed to make browsing the web much easier and finding what you want much quicker. Matter of fact, based on my own experiences with IE8 these past few weeks, finding your "stuff" quicker is a very strong theme in IE8. I've discovered with IE8 that browsing the web is much more efficient. There are some brand new features in IE8 I'd like to call out, based on my own experiences that I think users will find very useful in browsing the web. I've found these features in IE8 so useful in fact that I am using IE8 Beta 2 on all my PCs. Keep in mind there are far too many new features and changes in IE8 for me to highlight in a single post. I'm only going to cover some of IE8's biggest new features and features I use the most.
Continue @
Source
News Source:
Windows Vista Blog
Written by Odd-Magne Kristoffersen on August 27th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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IE8 Beta 2 was released for public download today. You can find it at
http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!
You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.
While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.
We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time),
safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).
Everyday Browsing
We looked very hard at how people really browse the web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists. As tempting as it is to list here all the changes both big and small in IE8, we’ll take a more holistic approach. That’s how we built the product and how we’d like to talk about it.
From our customer research, we saw that the bulk of user activity outside of web pages involved tabs and “navigation” – the act of getting to the site the user wants to get to. We also knew that adding features has an impact only if they’re “in the flow” of how people actually use the product. Another menu item might matter in a checklist on a blog somewhere, but won’t matter to real people browsing. That’s why IE8’s New Tab experience is so remarkable: it’s obvious – after you see it.
Download
here
News Source:
Bink.nu
Written by Odd-Magne Kristoffersen on August 27th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Christian Stockwell: In the past few months, each of the browser makers has made very similar claims around their performance: “Superior speed and performance”, “The fastest and most powerful Web browser available”, and “The fastest web browser on any platform.” In some fundamental way, I think the likeness of these statements is a by-product of the complexity inherent in performance measurement and analysis.
Rather than join the chorus and trumpet IE as the fastest browser in the universe, this post is my attempt to demystify the performance work that is being delivered as part of IE8 so that you can understand how we are making you more productive.
Best of all, you don’t need to take my word for it. As
Dean mentioned back at MIX08, Google has commented on our IE8 Beta 1 improvements (emphasis mine), and we’ve made IE8 even faster since then:
“Some of the tests we have done show pure JScript performance improvements up to
2.5 times. We also measured the performance gains on common Gmail operations, like
loading the inbox (34%), opening a conversation (45%) and
opening a thread (27%) compared to IE7.”
Before I delve too far into the body of this post I am going to first take a step back to explain how the IE team thinks about performance. I will then discuss some of the performance work that has gone into IE8 and how it will make IE8 a better browser for user and developers. Lastly, I will touch on some of the great IE8 features that give web developers the right tools they need to be more productive and to build the next generation of great sites.
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IEBlog
Written by Odd-Magne Kristoffersen on August 27th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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As others have written here before, users should be in control of their information. That’s at the core of privacy. Privacy has two aspects: disclosure and choice. Disclosure means informing users in plain language about the data collected about them and how it’s used. Choice means putting users in control of their data and giving them tools to protect it.
Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing “off the record”? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person using it to know at which website you bank.
What if you want to delete your browsing history after the fact, but you don’t want to lose your preferences at websites that you use frequently?
When we began planning IE8, we took a hard look at our customers’ concerns about privacy on the web. As evidenced by some of the
comments on this blog during the IE7 days, many users are concerned about so-called “over-the-shoulder privacy”, or the ability to control what their spouses, friends, kids, and co-workers might see.
What about your privacy as you browse the web? As Dean outlined is his post earlier today, there is so-called “3rd-party” content on websites, some of which can gather data about how you browse the web. How do you know what that is, or how to control it?
With respect to privacy, IE8 gives users more choice about controlling what information they keep and exchange. In the first part of this post I’ll describe two Internet Explorer 8 features that help you control your history, cookies, and other information that Internet Explorer stores on your behalf. In the latter part, I’ll describe two more features that can help you control how your browsing history is shared by websites. By default, IE8 browses the web the same way IE7 does.
- InPrivate™ Browsing lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data.
- Delete Browsing History helps you control your browsing history after you’ve visited websites.
- InPrivate™ Blocking informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it.
- InPrivate Subscriptions allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of websites to block or allow.
InPrivate Browsing
If you are using a shared PC, a borrowed laptop from a friend, or a public PC, sometimes you don’t want other people to know where you’ve been on the web. Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing makes that “over the shoulder” privacy easy by not storing history, cookies, temporary Internet files, or other data.
Using InPrivate Browsing is as easy as launching a new InPrivate Browsing window. When you’re done, just close the window and IE will take care of the rest.
While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place:
- New cookies are not stored
- All new cookies become “session” cookies
- Existing cookies can still be read
- The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
- New history entries will not be recorded
- New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
- Form data is not stored
- Passwords are not stored
- Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
- Queries entered into the search box are not stored
- Visited links will not be stored
Continue @
Source
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IEBlog
Written by Odd-Magne Kristoffersen on August 25th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Its been several months now I have used Firefox 3 Beta on Ubuntu 8.04. On my windows PC I have Firefox 2.x.
With the latest version now being official I installed Firefox 3 in windows along side version 2.x just incase.
In other words, I choose the custom install option when installing Firefox 3 and installed it into a separate directory on my Windows PC so that it would not overwrite version 2.x . That way I could compare side by side the results , differences and speed. My main concern are the security vulnerabilities and the consumption of memory that Firefox has. Other than that everything else about Firefox is superior to other browsers I have tried in the past.
Below is a walkthrough reviewing my first experience with
Firefox 3 Final release.
This is an unbiased look at Firefox, although I must say overall Firefox still is my browser of choice.
Other Tips Users have watched
Written by PCWizKid on June 20th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on IE7 and IE8 and Internet Explorer and Web Browser and firefox 3 and mozilla and pcwizkid and safari.
Now beta 1 is available for public
Download.
Features you can expect to see in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1: -
- Activities
- WebSlices
- Favorites Bar
- Automatic Crash Recovery
- Improved Phishing Filter
Here are the Download links..If you have the guts to try:
You would also Like to take a look at
IE8
Readiness website.
Written by ShaDow on March 6th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Downloads and Internet Explorer.
The Basics
- Stop page from loading
Esc - Refresh a page
F5 - Set focus on address box
ALT+D - Go back a page
ALT+Left Arrow - Go forward a page
ALT+Right Arrow - Open link in new window
Shift+Click - Add site to favorites
CTRL+D - Open context menu
Shift+F10
Tabs
- Open new tab
CTRL+T - Open link in new tab
CTRL+Shift+Click - Open link in new behind current tab
CTRL+Click or Middle mouse button over link - Switch between tabs
CTRL+Tab or CTRL+Shift+Tab - Close tab
CTRL+W or Click middle mouse button over tab - Close all other tabs
CTRL+ALT+F4 - Jump to tab
CTRL+tab number - Open quick tabs
CTRL+Q
Search
- Set focus in search box
CTRL+E - Change search provider while search box active
CTRL+Down arrow - Search in new tab
ALT+Enter
Page Zooming
- Zoom in
CTRL+(+ key) or CTRL+Mouse wheel up - Zoom out
CTRL+(- key) or CTRL+Mouse wheel down - Zoom 100%
CTRL+0 - Change text size
CTRL+Mouse wheel up or down
Written by ShaDow on February 28th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Internet Explorer and Windows Vista Tips.
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