IE 9 public beta

im running the release cand. (some call it beta 2) and it def has a lot of fixes over the beta 1.

 

Awesome just became more awesome!

 

It's great, but just like InPrivate Filtering, it comes off by default as well. (I wonder how many IE users around the world are exactly aware of InPrivate Filtering, or even InPrivate Browsing, for that matter. None of my relatives were, that much I know.)

Why not enabled by default (I guess for the same reason InPrivate Filtering wasn't/isn't.)

Will these lists contain Microsoft domains as well?

Still, a great start... Maybe now people will have the chance to have created lists alike those for AdBlock Plus.

 

If they had it enabled by default they would take a lot of heat from various advertising companies.

Having it off by default allows them to deliver the feature, miss out on the "heat", and the people that care can turn it on.

It also opens up new opportunities for 3rd party developers which is always good in my eyes.

 

I just checked the security settings and noticed something weird. SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 are of course on, and SSL 2.0 is (also of course) turned off, but TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are also turned off :S Why would they have better and newer protocols turned off by default? There are not many sites using 1.1 and 1.2 but it's still strange.

 

Good question. I did a little research and couldn't find any reason to not turn on the advanced TLS options. I would enable them and see what happens. I would think the worst that could happen would be problems accessing secure sites. You can go back and turn them off if there are issues.

 

I enabled it, secure sites work fine and a test page using TLS 1.2 worked fine too.

 

I just saw that IE8 has TLS 1.1 and 1.2 off by default too :S

 

As far as I can see, Firefox and Chrome don't even support it or have it off and hidden. I'd leave them off.

 

TLS 1.1 & 1.2 are on by default in Opera. It's a backwards compatibility issue. Some servers don't handle situations where the client identifies its highest level of SSL supported in the Client Hello which is above the highest level supported by the server. The server is meant to look at the version type presented by the client and then choose the matching cipher suite or next highest from its list and send back the chosen cipher suite in the Server Hello response. But some don't do this well, hence that's probably why they disable it.

 

What's the difference between Beta 2 and the Platform Preview? I saw there were releases for both.

 

Ah, thanks for that.

"Beta 2" is an unofficial title given to a leaked copy of IE9 beta with the update engine.

We should see RC in January to clear up all the mess.

 

So if I want to run one or the other I should choose the beta 2?

 

No, be a good guy and only run official builds.

That means "run Beta 1 until RC gets released".

 

Or be a bad guy and run beta 2