Now that IE 8 is available for download via Microsoft Download website, users should expect IE 8 being delivered via Windows Update soon. TechARP is reporting that Microsoft will release IE8 via Windows Update a week later and schedule automatic updates at the end of April, 2009.

Refer the IE 8 release notes for more info on the known issues, compatibility issues and other issues.

Microsoft released the Wave 0 (25 languages) which is the RTM version of IE 8 yesterday. The Wave 1 (18 languages) is scheduled on the week of April 20, 2009 and Wave 2 (21 languages) is scheduled on the week of June 1, 2009

Wave 0 (RTM) – Languages
Arabic, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional),Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew,Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil),Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

Wave 1 – Languages
Bosnia (Cyrillic), Bosnian (Latin), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Hindi, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Wave 2 – Languages
Albanian, Assamese, Basque, Bengali (Bangladesh), Bengali (India), Gujarati, Indonesian, Kannada, Kazakh, Konkani, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Malay (Brunei Darussalam), Malay (Malaysia), Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi (India), Tamil, Telugu, Uzbek (Latin)

Below is the release schedule

Microsoft Download Center
Wave 0 – March 19, 2009
Wave 1 – Week of April 20, 2009
Wave 2 – Week of June 1, 2009

Windows Update
Wave 0 – Week of March 23 (for Beta / RC users) & Week of April 13 (for all other users)
Wave 1 – Week of May 18, 2009
Wave 2 – TBD

Automatic Updates
Wave 0 – April 27, 2009
Wave 1 – May 5, 2009
Wave 2 – June 24, 2009

News source: Neowin.net

Today 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.

Continues at source: Microsoft.com

So IE8 should be available at 4pm here in the UK

The E7 team has posted a massive list of changes from Beta to RC based on feedback. Below are some of the changes.

Desktop Experience

1. Improved taskbar thumbnail overflow

Our customers are enjoying how windows are grouped and revealed on the enhanced taskbar. Some enthusiasts who have a significant number of open windows for a program encounter our scaling mechanism; the thumbnail view turns into a list view. Although this UI is virtually identical to experience in XP and Vista, customers still want to enjoy new functionality of the thumbnail view. Bentronic wrote, “It’s nice that there’s a little close button on the thumbnail previews–why not have a similar button for when it’s showing as a list?  Being able to run down the list clicking the close button instead of right-clicking would be great.” For RC we’ve made the list view architecturally the same as the thumbnail view, just sans thumbnails. Customers will now enjoy close buttons and the menus open on hover (in Beta one had to click to open them).

Fig 1.

List View of running windows appears on hover and supports close

2. Control Panel Jump List

Right-clicking on the Control Panel icon on the taskbar in Beta revealed a noticeably sparse Jump List. A few people such as Britney told us “Should most recently used items be displayed in the Jump List of the CPL when pinned to the taskbar? Something should be shown and nothing is there right now”. In RC the Control Panel Jump List offers quick access to recently used items.

Fig 2.

The Control Panel Jump List now surfaces recently used items

2. PowerShell Jump List

By default PowerShell in Beta launched a streamlined console. Customers could load optional modules via distinct shortcuts in the Start Menu. We heard from you that this was a confusing experience. Additionally, PowerShell did not surface a way to launch related tasks such as the Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) from within their console experience. PowerShell now has a robust Jump List that affords a method to load modules, launch the ISE and open documentation.

3. Remote Desktop Jump List

Rajeev made us smile with his comment, “Being able to add my Remote Desktop shortcut to the taskbar—good. Saving settings and showing them in the Recent items section—awesome. Being able to pin the connections in the Jump List, so they always appear—priceless!” Well, Rajeev and others who shared this request, you will be enjoy this functionality in RC.

4. Applying taskbar settings

Have you ever customized the taskbar, only to find your changes were not saved across sessions? Has the taskbar ever inexplicably moved on you after you log in? For a variety of reasons, previous versions of Windows saved taskbar settings only after Explorer exited at the end of a session. However, if the OS is not shutdown properly these settings did not persist. Based on the bugs we saw from Beta, we decided to change our architecture and write these settings within 30 seconds (providing enough time to batch a group of changes) during the session. This means settings will now be more reliable.

Touch

5. Multi-touch zoom

One of the pieces of feedback we heard from the Beta was that customers enjoy the new multi-touch zoom feature, but wish it was supported in Windows Explorer.  In response to this feedback we have added support for the zoom gesture in Windows Explorer.  Using the zoom gesture you can switch between view modes in Explorer such as zooming from Small Icons to Extra Large icons.

Windows Explorer and Libraries

6. Invert Selection

In an effort to make improvements to performance, network bandwidth and memory footprint for various scenarios (e.g. libraries, search and search federation), we rearchitected the implementation of the view code in Windows Explorer. As part of this we did not to port “Invert Selection” since this rarely used feature is pretty complex to implement in the context of virtualized lists.  Despite the small percentage of usage we’ve recorded, those who missed it have been pretty vocal :-)  On one of the blog posts, GGreig summarized what we heard from several of you—“Invert Selection; that’s a useful – sometimes absolutely invaluable – little piece of functionality, and I definitely don’t want to see it go…Please reinstate Invert Selection.” Given the feedback from enthusiasts, we added back the functionality for RC.

Continues at source: Engineering Windows 7 blog

By linking your Live ID to your user account in Windows 7 (from build 7048), you can now stream your home media to your another PC/laptop connected to a work or public network. Both your home network PC and work network PC should be linked to the same Live ID account. The media is streamed always from home network to work or public network.

This feature partially worked in build 7048, but works pretty neat in the recent 7057 build. Below is a step by step procedure to allow internet access to your home media

Home Network
In your home PC, link your user account to your Live ID

Open Media Player and choose to Allow Internet Access to home media

You can see users who have access to home media in the resulting screen

Now you are ready to stream your home media library

Work or Public Network
In your work PC, link your user account to the same Live ID you linked above in your home PC

Open Media Player and choose to Allow Internet Access to home media

Wait for few seconds, and you will see your home media library listed in the Other Libraries. The remote media library icon indicates that it is being accessed via internet

The file properties indeed show that this is being streamed via internet from your home

If at all your home media library doesnt appear, refresh the Other Libraries list

You can now browse your home media library from your work PC!

One thing to note is that your Live ID account is tighly integrated with your user account in your home network. This enables the media player to remember your home media library. If you ever change your network connection from home to work/public network or vice versa, always remember to unlink and link your Live ID with your user account again. This can change when Windows 7 gets released. For now, enjoy streaming!

Source: Neowin.net

The E7 team has posted an interesting blog post about the various Windows features that are available to turn on or off in the Windows 7 RC. Customers are now given more control, flexibility and choice in managing the features available in the RC of Windows 7.

Below are the list of extra features that are added to Windows 7 RC:

• Windows Media Player
• Windows Media Center
• Windows DVD Maker
• Internet Explorer 8
• Windows Search
• Handwriting Recognition (through the Tablet PC Components option)
• Windows Gadget Platform
• Fax and Scan
• XPS Viewer and Services (including the Virtual Print Driver)

Neowin had already reported about Internet Explorer 8 being an optional component in the latest Windows 7 build 7048, and so are the other features. Interesting features to note other than Internet Explorer 8 are the Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center.
However these options (turning Windows features on or off) are not made available during the Windows 7 installation and are available on the post-setup experience for Windows 7

“Finally, we know some have suggested that this set of choices be a “setup option”. Some operating systems do provide this type of setup experience. As we balanced feedback, the vast majority of feedback we have received was to streamline setup and to reduce the amount of potential complexity in getting a PC running. We chose to focus this feature on the post-setup experience for Windows 7″

Deselecting a Windows feature makes that feature not available for use, which means that the files are not loaded by the operating system and are staged so that they can be easily added when the features are selected back again. Since these files are staged, users dont require the Windows 7 installation DVD to turn on the features again.
It would be interesting to see whether will there be an option for OEMs to streamline the Windows 7 post-setup experience where they could deselect/select some of the Windows features. This is also a great addition for Corporates where they would be able to streamline the Windows 7 setup for deployment (using the MDOP)

News source: Neowin.net