A lot has been talked about recently regarding Internet Explorer 9. At the PDC, Steven Sinofski talked about IE9’s new development lines and there are some interesting features and improvements being taken care of. For starters, the standards! IE9 will support CSS 3.0 and HTML 5, which was already expected.

Performance-wise, Microsoft is making a huge investment. Performance disadvantages of IE8 are widely known and the team wants to change this in the 9th iteration of Internet Explorer.

Javascript rendering engine and DOM processing are getting huge improvements. Steven admitted that script performance in IE was the worst, and this was shown in a chart ported in the IEBlog, on the left.

Also, DirectX will be put into the equation. PC hardware will be taken into account on web page text and image rendering and animations.

Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop, announced today at the Microsoft Tech-Ed Europe 2009 conference in Germany,  that Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is now available worldwide.

 “Exchange Server 2010 customers are already reporting cost savings of up to 70 percent thanks to a simplified high-availability model and support for lower-cost storage. Customers are also seeing productivity gains of more than 20 percent with a universal inbox that delivers e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging and text messaging consistently across virtually any device…”

 “Together with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the combined cost savings and improved productivity helps customers generate long-term business success.” According to Stephen Elop, more than 45,000 partners are trained on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange Server 2010, with several partners announcing new services and solutions today, including AMD, Avanade, Dell, EMC, Kaspersky Lab, Symantec and Unisys.

 Exchange 2010 is now available for MSDN and TechNet customers, a trial edition is available at http://www.thenewefficiency.com

Internet Explorer’s enhanced Security Configuration is a windows add-on that adds extra security functionality to Internet Explorer by limiting web access and browsing. You can see it as a recommendation or best practice of server web browsing security configurations. I’ve been asked a few times how to disable Internet Explorer’s Enhanced Security Configuration that comes enabled out of the box in Windows Server 2003, and this weekend it happened again. So I thought of putting out a small and simple article that shows how to disable this feature, although this should be well thought.

What happens when you open Internet Explorer on a Enhanced Security-enabled machine and request an URL is this message box showing up:

There are two ways to uninstall IE’s Enhanced Security: for Administrators, or for users. This tutorial will show how to remove the entire feature:

First, click the Start button, go to Control Panel and click Add/Remove Programs

Click Add/Remove Windows Components. This will load a windows feature list. Please wait a bit till the window opens.

Search for Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration in the list and uncheck it. Click details if you wish to choose Administrators or Users.

Click Next to end apply your changes, and that’s it.

The next time you open Internet Explorer, you’ll see a page saying:

Caution: Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration is not enabled

Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration is an option that is provided in Windows Server 2003 operating systems and above. You can use it to quickly enhance Internet Explorer security settings for all users.

When you enable Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration, it sets Internet Explorer security settings to limit how users browse Internet and intranet Web sites. This reduces the exposure of your server to Web sites that might pose a security risk. For more information, including the complete list of changes that are implemented by Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration, see Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration overview.

Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager of the Internet Explorer Team, has announced in MIX09 the availability of Internet Explorer 8. Windows users can now download and install the final version here.

Internet Explorer 8, Release Candidate 1 (aka “IE8 RC1”) has just been released for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows Server 2008 (64-bit, too). However, the RC will not be available for download by Windows 7 Beta testers because IE8 already ships with the Windows 7 Beta OS.

If you’re still running IE7, the high-level changes you’ll notice in the new IE8 include increased speed, increased responsiveness, and overall improved stability. However, it’s the new features like Accelerators and Web Slices that are getting the most attention.

Check it out here.

Early this year Microsoft made a promise that let everyone with full hopes for six months, specially the entire web standards community. Regarding the new Internet Explorer 8, they said that it will “use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default.”.

Well, now that the beta is out, we are now finally able to check for living proof. And, sadly, may pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. Microsoft kept this option hidden deep in the Configuration Panel, under “compatibility View”. You can see that the option “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” is checked by default, thus leaving the standards View clearly away from promises made…

As you all probably know, Internet explorer Beta 2 will be available in August, and with it, probably some new development issues that developers shoud be prepared for.

Every new browser version release comes filled with changes destined to improve compliance and (supposedly) make it more meaningfull. The problem is, some websites of today might experience problems with this new release.

Well, apparently Microsoft added a new feature in internet explorer that allows you to specify wich version of IE is your application targeting. With this information, upcoming versions of Internet Explorer will be able to validate and render it acoordingly to the specified version.

To do so, add the following meta tag to the head of your pages. This tag will tell future versions of IE that your pages were designed for IE7.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

This way it will know that the page should be rendered like IE 7.