Microsoft readies IE 11 for Windows 7, too

Hi there
From some of this it seems Ms has given up on encouraging businesses to "Upgrade" to W8 -- there's no ENTERPRISE version of W8.1 (yet and none has been announced) and IE11 is NOT being made available to W8. So Ms obviously thinks most if not all businesses will stay with W7.

There's no point anyway of a business swapping to W8 since it's already essentially Out of Date and with no W8.1 enterprise versions available why would any I.T admin risk installing an already out of date W8 when W7 has a proven and well liked track record and will still be around until 2020.

With XP's end rapidly approaching businesses have to finally decide W7 or W8 -- with no ENTERPRISE version of W8.1 available for testing and the deadline fast approaching -- I think any "sensible" I.T admin would say -- What the heck - I'll go with W7. Nobody ever got fired upgrading to W7 as far as I know --remember back in the Mainframe days the standard saying was "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM". !!!

Mind you IE11 will have its own problems too at eventual final roll out with some large commercial software -- for instance some SAP applications using web services and browser facilities - (SAPGUI) (for example WEB DYNPRO) still only work with IE9 and earlier -- even IE10 in compatibility mode doesn't always work in these cases. (Also alternative browsers don't work either with these type of SAP web services). Note these are specialized services so some stuff not relying on these services might work -- which is why rigorous testing is obviously needed before rolling out into production.

This is why enterprises do need time to test this sort of stuff out and get together with their "Back end" providers.

For a typical example - this is some of the stuff testers have to go through -- and this is just for IE10 -- never mind IE11 with HTML5 rendering and all that stuff.

http://www.stechno.net/sap-notes.htm...ote&id=1785100

Good to see though IE11 in test -- fine for Home users to test this out. Backup your system of course before as an uninstall of IE (any version) and reversion back to the previous version can often lead to problems. Restoring a backup image is much simpler and avoids all the problems in case the software doesn't work as expected.

Cheers
jimbo

If you don't want to run it "live" you can download VM's with it pre-installed with a 90 day testing licence from here. Cross-browser testing simplified | Testing made easier in Internet Explorer | modern.IE

Trying the development preview now. I haven't noticed any problems yet. I did have issues with some sites when trying out IE11 on Windows 8.1, even with compatibility mode, but none of the sites are giving me problems on Windows 7. Not sure is the made improvements for this release or if its just an OS thing.