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<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> WinInfo Short Takes: Week of September 15, 2008 Windows IT Pro, CO - 13 minutes ago And this One is ExcellentWhile I enjoyed the first Windows Vista featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, I was clearly in the ... More...

In this new photo gallery, you can see the unboxing experience with the new Apple iPod nano 3G and iPod touch 2G! More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=dVQEITxxz1gJ&imgurl=www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2008/09/12/seinfeld2_wideweb__470x268,0.jpg width=80 height=46 alt="" border=1> Sydney Morning Herald <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Seinfeld/Gates odd couple ads continue VNUNet.com, UK - 27 minutes ago Microsoft has started showing the second in its series of Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates advertisements aimed at boosting interest in the Windows platform. ... New Seinfeld/Gates ad surfaces, campaign costs ~$300m Electronista Editor's blog: Microsoft's charm offensive Management Today Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld = What?!? CIO Insight Loudoun Times - Los Angeles Times all 56 news articles More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Join the Resistance 2 Beta! Digital Video Editing, CA - Sep 10, 2008 The XENA 2K video card is AJAs topoftheline card for Windows Vista 32bit and XP delivering uncompressed SD HD and Dual Link HD and enabling customers to ... Red Giant Sale! %30 OFF Broadcast Newsroom all 142 news articles More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=dVQEITxxz1gJ&imgurl=www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2008/09/12/seinfeld2_wideweb__470x268,0.jpg width=80 height=46 alt="" border=1> Sydney Morning Herald <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> New Seinfeld/Gates ad surfaces, campaign costs ~$300m Electronista, CA - 1 hour ago Microsoft eventually hopes to use the ads to show users how Windows Vista, Mobile, and Live can be used to increase productivity. ... Editor's blog: Microsoft's charm offensive Management Today Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld = What?!? CIO Insight Seinfeld and Gates get in touch with regular folks engadget Los Angeles Times - Loudoun Times all 74 news articles More...

Hello! I am Sameer Chabungbam, one of the Program Managers on the JScript Team. The recently released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 contains a lot of improvements which are aimed at making developing web applications on Internet Explorer 8 easier and more productive. One of these improvements is the JScript Profiler in Developer Tools, which provides critical JScript related performance data to a web developer that helps identify and fix performance related issues. We believe the Profiler is going to be a very helpful tool to fine tune the performance of the scripts in a web application. It is lightweight, easy-to-use and provides the following features: Provides performance data for JScript functions in two views: Functions View – a flat listing of all the functions Call Tree view – a hierarchical listing of the functions based on the call flow [*]Supports exporting the data to a file [*]Provides an inferred name for anonymous functions [*]Profiles built-in JScript functions [*]Supports multiple profile reports [*]Supports profiling across page navigation and refreshes This post gives an overview of the Profiler and highlights some of its features. We hope you will try it out and give us your feedback. Using the Profiler Launch the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 either by pressing F12 or selecting ‘Developer Tools’ from the Tools dropdown on the command bar. Switch to the Profiler Tab, and you can see the new Script Profiler. Click the ‘Start Profiling’ button to begin a new profiling session. http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/Profiler%20MS1.png Now, you can perform the scenario you want to profile, and JScript performance data will be collected by the profiler automatically in the background. Note that the text of the button changes to ‘Stop Profiling’ to indicate profiling is going on. To stop profiling, click the ‘Stop Profiling’ button. The profiler will process the collected performance data and display a profile report for the session just concluded. http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/Profile%20Report2.png Viewing the Profile Report The report presents the data in two views which can be selected from the Current View dropdown: Functions view: This is a flat listing of all the functions with the corresponding performance data. Call Tree view: This is a hierarchical listing of the functions based on the call execution sequence. Each node corresponds to a function and lists all the functions it called and the performance data for those calls. The Call Tree view is useful in finding the call stack trace that has the greatest performance impact in your script. In both views, each row corresponds to a JScript function, with the various performance data in different columns. The view can be customized to show different columns. Right-click a column header and select ‘Add / Remove Columns’ to select the columns you want to view. http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/CT.3.png You can sort on any of the columns by clicking the corresponding column headers or by selecting the column from the ‘Sort By’ menu items in the right-click context menu. The available columns are: Function: The name of the function Count: The total number of calls made to this function Inclusive Time (ms): The time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds Inclusive Time %: The percentage of time spent in this function and its children Exclusive Time (ms): The time spent in this function in milliseconds Exclusive Time %: The percentage of time spent in this function Avg Time (ms): The average time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds Max Time (ms): The maximum time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds Min Time (ms): The minimum time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds URL: The URL of the source file where this function is defined Line Number: The line number of the beginning of this function in the source file Double-click a row to view the source code definition of the corresponding function in the Script Tab. This is available only if the performance data collects the URL information and the source file is currently loaded in the Script Tab. You need to enable script debugging in Internet Explorer for the profiler to collect the URL information. [Note: You can enable script debugging from the Tools > Internet Options > Advanced Tab.] http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/FunctionSV4.png Exporting Data Sometimes, we may want to analyze the profile report further, create graphs, or share it with another application. To facilitate this, the Profiler allows the data to be exported to a file in a Comma Separated Values (CSV) format. The data can then be opened in other applications (like Microsoft® Office Excel®) and can be shared. Simply click the ‘Export Data’ button http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/ExportIcon5.png and give a filename to save the profile data of the current report to a file. Note that presently only the Functions view is exported and not the Call Tree view. Inferred name In Javascript, the function name is optional. You can define a function (called anonymous function) with no name. In practice, this is quite common. Many real-world Javascript functions are defined in the context of an object literal, and more often than not, these are anonymous. This presents a problem in the profile report. When we have multiple anonymous entries, the only way to differentiate the anonymous functions is to look up the actual source definition of the functions from the URL and Line number information. This is far from being convenient and makes the profile report hard to read and confusing. To overcome this problem, the JScript profiler tries to infer a name for each anonymous function based on the context where the function is defined. Let me illustrate how this works with the following example: var Shape = { Area : function () { . . . } // anonymous function 1 }; Foo = function () { . . . } // anonymous function 2 When we profile this code, these functions will show up in the report as “Area” and “Foo” respectively, instead of both being listed as anonymous functions. This way, you can quickly identify which function is being referred to in the profile report without having to open the source code. The heuristic logic used to infer the name is simple enough to limit the performance overhead. In some cases, this might fail to infer a name, in which case, the function is listed with the special name “[Anonymous]”. We hope the profiler comes handy when improving Javascript performance of your web applications in Internet Explorer. We look forward to your feedback. Thanks! Sameer Chabungbam Program Manager http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8945304 More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=PdrUzGWexWgJ&imgurl=news.cnet.com/i/bto/20080911/Adobe_Acrobat.jpg width=80 height=80 alt="" border=1> CNET News <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Acrobat 9 crashes with malformed URLs CNET News, CA - 1 hour ago In one example, Brown uses the string "acroie:///DoS" to cause a DoS in Adobe Acrobat 9 running on Windows Vista. Adobe hasn't responded to a request for a ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> When Windows Goes All 64-Bit eWeek, NY - 56 minutes ago Microsoft has already tipped one of them in this blog by Windows exec Chris Flores. Essentially, it's the same hardware transition problem I just mentioned: ... More...

Next week, Microsoft will roll out its 3rd generation Zune digital media platform. Here's an early look at Zune 3, based on a recent visit with the Zune team in Redmond! More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=9aCnhM6nhdwJ&imgurl=www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/media_stream/mw/1/224332/images/Can_Microsoft_rule_by_cool_2.jpg%3Fforce_download%3Dtrue width=60 height=80 alt="" border=1> Moneyweb <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Editor's blog: Microsoft's charm offensive Management Today, UK - Sep 10, 2008 A billion people use PCs that run with Windows. The geeks that might admire its amazing achievements regard Microsoft as the Evil Empire and Gates as the ... Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld = What?!? CIO Insight Was that an ad, or did I just get punched in the gut? Loudoun Times Apple ad takes a bite out of the NYT home page Los Angeles Times all 19 news articles More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Change Your MAC Address in Windows Lifehacker Australia, Australia - 37 minutes ago The guide is written for Windows XP, but the steps look much the same as they would in Vista. There are currently no AU comments for this post. ... More...

As mentioned in the first post on this topic, the IE8 Smart Address Bar works better with Windows Search installed. However, IE8 does not require Windows Search, and IE8 will still provide a superior experience to IE7 if it’s not there. We are going to go through and detail the differences between IE8 with and without Windows Search so people can understand the trade-offs. To start with, we made a choice to use Windows Search as our index & query engine when we began work on IE8 almost two years ago. We could have written our own engine, or we could have used a different engine, but it came down to a simple realization: we have a team of people here at Microsoft who are dedicated to creating a great search & indexing experience, and it’s called the Windows Search team (formerly known as “Windows Desktop Search.” And to avoid any confusion, we’re talking about the local search index team, not the folks who run live.com – those are separate organizations). The people on that team are experts at what they do, and by leveraging their technology, we get the benefit of all of their hard work and expertise. We consider the folks on the Windows Search part of the extended IE team (the same way you can consider, say, the folks on the networking team, who write TCP/IP for Windows, as part of the IE family). Once we made the decision to use Windows Search, the next question was simple: what happens to IE8 when Windows Search is not installed? Well, on one hand, you could argue that IE8 should work just as well with as without Windows Search, but then we’d just be duplicating Windows Search inside IE, which reverses the decision we just decided not to make. So, while it was clear we would have to make some trade-offs in IE8 when Windows Search was not present, we still wanted to make sure that IE8 without Windows Search was superior to IE7. This screenshot shows IE8 on Windows XP, where Windows Search is not included by default: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/no.search.png As you can see, even without Windows Search, you still get the new look with Titles, URLs, grouping, and hit highlighting. Typed addresses are still available, and you also get the expandable keyboard shortcut section at the bottom. This is one of those areas where we think the IE8 experience is better than IE7: IE8 is providing richer data back to the user in an easier-to read format. An IE8 user in front of the keyboard of this machine will instantly recognize this as IE8, and therefore should be familiar with the other IE8 features (all of which you can read about here on the IE blog). Despite the new look, underneath, IE8 acts a lot like IE7 did when you type in the address bar. Here are the details about what’s different in IE8 when Windows Search is not available, but first, a primer about Windows Search. Windows Search has two basic parts: an index and a query engine. We’re not going to go into detail about these here, but IE8 works with both parts to return results to users quickly. The part of Windows Search that we rely on when the user types in the address bar is the query engine. It’s fast, and it does a bunch of hard work (like word breaking) for us. It’s the presence of this fast and flexible query engine that enables us to take what you type, search across a huge amount of disparate data, and return results in time measured in milliseconds. Remember that Favorites are file objects, History is represented in an internal WININET container, typed addresses are stored in the registry, and RSS uses structured storage. That’s four different storage mechanisms for four different data types, all of which are first class citizens in IE. Windows Search allowed us to standardize how we search across these four data types, and made it fast. Best of all, by not changing the underlying data types, we incurred no compatibility costs. People can continue to XCOPY their Favorites around or roam them with 3rd party services, and IE8 will continue to work just fine. Windows Search allows for smarter searches (because of word breaking) Without Windows Search, IE8 loses the ability to do word breaking when it searches. “Word breaking” refers to taking a string (say, “http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx”) and splitting it up into individual words or elements (“http” + “www” + “microsoft” + “com” + “windows” + “products” + “winfamily” + “ie” + “default” + “mspx”). Word breakers know to split up strings not just at spaces (which typically don’t occur in URLs), but at characters like slashes, hyphens, and question marks (which are common characters in a URL). Without word breaking, my example URL is just one long big unbroken word, and all IE8 can do quickly in the address bar is strip away the prefix (the “http://www.”) and match against the domain (Microsoft.com). IE7 (and earlier) did not do word breaking when it tried to match what you typed against URLs in your history. For matching against Favorites, I can type “Microsoft at” to match against the string “Microsoft At Home,” but I won’t get a match if I type “Home.” Windows Search allows IE8 to search across multiple fields for matches One of the benefits of Windows Search is the ability to quickly search for matches across many fields or properties, all at once. For instance, for Favorites, IE8 can match what you type against a variety of properties of that Favorite: the Favorite’s URL, the Favorite’s local name (whatever you called it when you saved it), and the folder(s) the Favorite is saved in. Without Windows Search, IE8 is limited to just searching for the Favorite by name. For History items, we’re limited to just searching by URL. This is how IE7 worked as well. One improvement we made in IE8 without Windows Search is that, unlike in IE7 where it only checked the top level of your Favorites folder for matches, with IE8, we’ll search your entire hierarchy of Favorites for title matches. Windows Search allows IE8 to search for Feeds and Feed Items Without Windows Search, IE8 won’t return any Feeds or Feed Items in the dropdown. That means the entire Feeds section of the dropdown will never be present on a machine without Windows Search. If you read a Feed Item in the browser, its URL and Title will be in your History, so it will show up in the list as a History item. This is how some of the other browsers (including IE7) already treat Feeds and Feed Items: they show up once they’re in your History. Windows Search allows IE8 to provide relevancy sorting Because the rich data about a site you visit is stored in the Windows Search index, without it IE8 can’t quickly save and compute the relevance of any given address compared to another. Instead we’ll fall back to alphabetic sorting, which is how IE7 sorted its results. Unfortunately, without relevancy, we also cannot provide an Autocomplete Suggestion. For that reason, this option (and its SHIFT+ENTER shortcut) will not be visible when Windows Search is not installed. Without Windows Search, History entries will be sorted alphabetically by URL, and Favorite entries will be sorted alphabetically by Title. So in summary, here’s what you get when you use IE8 without Window Search: The new look, including page titles, URLs, grouping, highlighting, typed addresses, and keyboard shortcuts The ability to do simple matching against domains for History items, like IE7 did The ability to do simple matching against Favorite names, like IE7 did (although IE will search your entire Favorites folder hierarchy with IE8) Alphabetic sorting of sites & Favorites that match For the corporate IT people out there, there are no policies (or preferences) in IE to enable or disable using Windows Search separately. IE8 will use Windows Search if it’s available and running. As a reminder, IE8 works with either Windows Search 3 or 4. Windows Vista ships with Windows Search 3, and Windows Search 4 is available as a free download for users running Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 & 2008, and Windows Vista (with some restrictions on service pack levels). For users who choose to run IE8 without Windows Search, we hope this post clears up any questions about how IE8 should act. And for others, we hope it’s convinced you to try out Windows Search to see what IE8 can really do! Thanks, Christopher Vaughan and Seth McLaughlin Program Managers http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8945202 More...

I just saw this in my computer. As I have just written, there is a problem on iTunes 8. However, Alisha commented she installed it without problems. Good for her, but until there is a quick patch installed, I would hold off from installing as I cannot afford to mess up my system.Share This More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=9aCnhM6nhdwJ&imgurl=www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/media_stream/mw/1/224332/images/Can_Microsoft_rule_by_cool_2.jpg%3Fforce_download%3Dtrue width=60 height=80 alt="" border=1> Moneyweb <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Editor's blog: Microsoft's charm offensive Management Today, UK - Sep 10, 2008 A billion people use PCs that run with Windows. The geeks that might admire its amazing achievements regard Microsoft as the Evil Empire and Gates as the ... Was that an ad, or did I just get punched in the gut? Loudoun Times Apple ad takes a bite out of the NYT home page Los Angeles Times all 18 news articles More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Windows 7: Straight from the VPs Mouth Tom's Hardware Guide, CA - 8 minutes ago Ever since the lukewarm reception of Windows Vista, the next version of the operating system Gates built has been on a lot of peoples minds. ... More...

Why pay more? That was the only and simple message the commercial of Seinfeld and Bill Gates had going for them when they decided to launch (commercial here) their 300 million dollar campaign anchored on the former TV mainstay. Microsoft wanted to create the buzz and so they did — in a way that they [...] More...

from SamBeckett: I just installed itunes 8 over my itunes 7 on Vista. Now whenever I plug in my ipod nano, I get a blue screen death. 3 times so far. even if it is plugged in on boot, I get a blue screen. Before itunes 8 I never seen a blue screen with vista since it [...] More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=KI0EoN2M700J&imgurl=images.theglobeandmail.com/archives/RTGAM/images/20080910/wgtbrowserwars0911/browsers188.jpg width=30 height=80 alt="" border=1> Globe and Mail <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Google the Browser Builder: Chrome InfoToday.com - 41 minutes ago At launch, it was only available for Windows Vista or Windows XP Service Pack 2 or above. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been quoted as saying that "it’s ... IE8 is praised but doubts over compliance remain Small Business all 243 news articles More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Google the Browser Builder: Chrome InfoToday.com - 6 minutes ago At launch, it was only available for Windows Vista or Windows XP Service Pack 2 or above. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been quoted as saying that "it’s ... More...

<img src=http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=9aCnhM6nhdwJ&imgurl=www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/media_stream/mw/1/224332/images/Can_Microsoft_rule_by_cool_2.jpg%3Fforce_download%3Dtrue width=60 height=80 alt="" border=1> Moneyweb <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Editor's blog: Microsoft's charm offensive Management Today, UK - 21 hours ago The punters get frustrated with Vista and wonder why Macs look so much cooler than PCs (which isn’t Microsoft’s fault). Love and a 95 per cent market share ... Apple ad takes a bite out of the NYT home page Los Angeles Times all 13 news articles More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Join the Resistance 2 Beta! Digital Video Editing, CA - 54 minutes ago The XENA 2K video card is AJAs topoftheline card for Windows Vista 32bit and XP delivering uncompressed SD HD and Dual Link HD and enabling customers to ... SFF - 1 x Pentium Dual Core E2160 / 1.8 GHz - RAM 1 GB - HDD 1 x ... Animation Artist all 39 news articles More...

Hello everyone! One of the features we improved in IE8 is the ‘new tab’ page, which is the page you see by default when you click the New Tab button on the Tab row, or if you hit CTRL+T (the keyboard shortcut that does the same thing). We’re the Program Managers for this page and would like to walk you through the history and evolution of this feature to what it is today in IE8 Beta 2. When IE7 was released in 2006, many users did not know what tabs were, so our new tab page didn’t really do anything except say “I’m a tab” and offer a link to help content for folks who were interested in learning more. Now it’s 2008, and web users are even more sophisticated and tab-enabled browsers are ubiquitous, so we decided that it was time to start making the new tab page more useful than just saying “I’m here.” So what kinds of tasks do we add to the new tab page? We started with our first goal for this page: provide easy access to tab-related tasks. We recognize that when you open a new tab, you’re probably on your way to go do something else in the browser like visit a new site or start a new search. So, it seemed logical to make this new tab page offer up tab-related tasks to the user, especially given our desire to make navigation easier in IE8. However, as we looked at all the tasks and links that we might put on the page, it became clear that not all tasks were suitable. For instance, we could have added a search box to the new tab page, since we know a large number of users issue Internet searches with some frequency. However, IE’s search box is already visible and available to the user, as are any search toolbars the user may have installed, so adding yet another redundant search entry point was uninteresting. We considered adding links to commonly-visited sites (or maybe your very favorite Favorites), but again, that seemed duplicative – that list was already a click away with the new Smart Address bar autocomplete dropdown. So here is our second goal for this page: be a discoverability aid to cool features that might otherwise be hidden, and its corollary, don’t bother with features that are already visible to the user. We know this page would be a good advertising surface for features that users might not otherwise discover. The ability to restore a closed tab from a window was new to IE8, but many users might not even know that the feature existed (our customer feedback data indicates that most users don’t right-click tabs to see what menu options are available to them). With our two goals in mind, we created a page that showed what this might look like. Here’s an early, early version for comparison in case you’re curious: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/old.tab.page.png This was essentially IE7’s new tab page rearranged, with some new IE8 functionality thrown in. It had a few tab-related tasks (re-opening closed tabs & windows), and a new feature now known as InPrivate browsing. First, we’d heard feedback that even in IE7, this page looked a lot like an error page, down to using the same color scheme and fonts. Some users might see this page and assume that something was wrong. So, we knew we needed to differentiate the page from the product’s error pages. Second, we thought it was visually distracting. While many users would certainly use and welcome the functionality of this page, often times users don’t care what it says and just want to go somewhere else. Having large, colorful icons on the page, lots of text, and a complex layout created a page that drew your eye towards it instead of letting you focus on the task you were about to undertake. This feedback and our early mockups led to goal #3: Don’t let the page distract users if they’re not going to use it. We knew we had to tone the page down a bit. It had to be visually serene, so it wouldn’t be jarring when users opened a new tab. We’ve iterated a bit in our designs to take our goals & concerns into account, and so here’s what the New Tab Page looks like in IE8 Beta 2: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/New.1.png As you can see, we’ve changed the theme of the page so it doesn’t look like an error page, we’ve eliminated the large & colorful icons (although we kept FavIcons in), and simplified the layout. The help link at the bottom will take a user to a help topic that explains all the features on the page, tabs, and shortcuts if they want to learn more (although our help won’t be finalized until later, so for now it goes to a placeholder topic). This new look is also consistent with other IE8 informational pages, like the one you see when you start a new InPrivate browsing session. Here’s information about each section of this page: Reopen closed tabs On the left, the user can easily restore a tab they’ve closed in that window just by clicking on the title of the web page. In our internal testing, this was the most commonly-used action from the new tab page, which is why it’s got the prime location on the page. When you click any web page from that list, the tab will reopen (with its entire travel log, meaning that you’ll recover the pages associated with that tab’s forward & back buttons too). The tab is then removed from this list. If you click ‘Open All,’ then all the tabs in the list will be restored, and the list will be cleared. “Reopen Last Browsing Session” will re-open the last full non-InPrivate IE window you’ve closed, with all its tabs. If you click the green header or the arrow to the right of it, the list will be visually collapsed. This helps when you’re concerned about over-the shoulder privacy (so people in the room can’t see what tabs you’ve closed). The open or collapsed state ‘sticks,’ meaning that if you like the list to be closed, just leave it closed, and if you like it to be open, just leave it open, and it will (almost) always show that way (see the exception to the rule below). Start InPrivate Browsing Click the green header text to open a new InPrivate Browsing window. This launches an InPrivate Browsing session just as if you launched it from the command bar Safety menu, or via the keyboard shortcut, CTRL+SHIFT+P. Use an Accelerator We’ve provided a handy way for users to get to their default Accelerators via this page. Just click on any Accelerator to launch it as if you’d launched it from the Accelerator menu on any page. We’ll automatically grab whatever’s on your clipboard and send it to that Accelerator. You can click “Show Clipboard” to view what’s on your clipboard in case you’re nervous that you might send personally sensitive information before you click on an Accelerator. Like the list of closed tabs, you can ‘stick’ the list of Accelerators open or closed, depending on your preference. This is also a handy way to use an Accelerator on text from other applications, not just from web pages. For instance, you can copy a line of text from a document in Microsoft Word, then open a new tab in IE8, and use the Accelerator with that text. Over the shoulder privacy concerns We know that people don’t always want to show everyone around them what’s on their machine, which is why we’ve taken care to give you ways to protect your privacy. Lists on this page will stick open or closed, depending on your preference. And, while in Windows Vista’s presentation mode, we’ll automatically collapse both lists for you whenever the New Tab Page is opened. That way, if you’re projecting your screen in a public setting with Windows Vista, you don’t have to worry about IE8 exposing your list of installed Accelerators or closed tabs to your audience. You can of course pop them open while presenting, but changes made to their open/collapsed state won’t affect your preferences when you’re not in presentation mode. Here’s the new tab page while in Windows Vista presentation mode: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/New.Closed.2.png Changing what happens when you open a New Tab in IE8 If you wish to change the behavior when you open a new tab in IE8, you can set IE8 to open the page we’ve described in this post (the default), a blank page, or the first page of your home page set. Just go to Internet Options (off the Tools menu on the Command Bar or classic menu) and select the button on the General tab to change Tabbed Browsing Settings. This screenshot shows the dropdown that you can select your preference with: http://ieblog.members.winisp.net/images/New.Options.3.png Side note - corporations can lock this behavior down via Group Policy if they choose. In IE7, there was a checkbox on the new tab page that said “don’t show me this again,” which flipped your default new tab page to the ‘blank page’ option. We removed this in IE8 because the IE7 behavior was a one-way road for less technical users – if they clicked the checkbox they had no obvious way of reversing their decision, and weren’t likely to discover the settings dialog to change it back on their own. By consolidating the option to change the behavior to one place, a user who changes the option will know how to change it back if they need to. Finally, because we believe that this new tab page has a lot more value than its IE7 counterpart, we’ve made this new page the default new tab page for all IE8 users, even if you had changed this option in IE7 (which is especially useful for those people who accidentally checked the box in IE7 without meaning to). More technical users (like, for instance, those of you reading this blog) know how to change this setting, so you can change it back if you wish to. In summary That’s how IE8’s new tab page evolved, and where we are today. We are interested in your feedback about the IE8 New Tab Page so please leave us a comment in this post. Thanks, and enjoy IE8 Beta 2! Christopher Vaughan & Harel Williams Program Managers http://blogs.msdn.com/aggbug.aspx?PostID=8941819 More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Join the Resistance 2 Beta! Digital Video Editing, CA - 9 minutes ago The XENA 2K video card is AJAs topoftheline card for Windows Vista 32bit and XP delivering uncompressed SD HD and Dual Link HD and enabling customers to ... More...

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> The circus around Seinfeld's ads won't shoo Vista away guardian.co.uk, UK - 1 hour ago (There's a US class action lawsuit about Microsoft's use of the "Windows Vista Capable" label.) But those things should no longer be problems. ... Editor's blog: Microsoft's charm offensive Management Today all 2 news articles More...

Here is some information about the mice, keyboards, and Webcams that Microsoft is launching this fall, along with some photos I took at the launch event! More...