Here's a topic I never thought I'd write about: Dolly Parton, the famed country singer, has endorsed Internet Explorer 8 and its Web Slices feature on YouTube.
During a minute-long video, Parton says she "wouldn't know a gigabyte from a snake bite. But the folks over at Microsoft sure know their computers." She goes on to say Microsoft checked out her "new" Web site and "turned us on to a little thing they call Web Slices."
According to a Microsoft representative, the software giant showed Parton's Web team "the new features in IE 8 and Silverlight, and they liked it so much, they wanted to implement it on their site."
Parton's site now features a three-tab Web Slice that includes her video diary, news on her career, and the option to buy some of her music. The Microsoft representative said in an e-mail that the software company "wasn't involved in the production or scripting" of Parton's Internet Explorer 8 endorsement.
Web Slices, which is available only in IE 8, enables users to keep up with sites they check often, such as ones for Web mail or weather reports. According to Microsoft, "if a Web Slice is available on a page, a green Web Slices icon will appear in the Command Bar." Users can simply click on that icon to subscribe to that page's Web Slice. Once complete, that Web Slice will be displayed in the user's Favorites Bar to make it easier to keep track of those sites the user often visits.
But the very fact that Parton (a portion of whose site is now available as a Web Slice, by the way), would endorse Internet Explorer 8 is a bit surprising. As she points out in the video, she "didn't even know there [were IE versions] 1 through 7."
Regardless, Parton seems to have found her stride. After all, like the singer says, maybe Internet Explorer 8 really is "just like your own little slice of heaven."
Microsoft updated its Windows 7 Engineering blog Friday by discussing its decision to allow users to turn off features in Windows 7. It also released a list of Windows 7 options that can be turned off in the upcoming Release Candidate.
"For Windows 7 we've engineered a more significant list of features and worked to balance that list in light of the needs of the broad Windows platform as well," Jack Mayo, Microsoft's group program manager for the Documents and Printing team, said in the post. "We want to provide choice while also making sure we do not compromise on compatibility by removing APIs provided for developers. We also want to strike the right balance for consumers in providing choice and balancing compatibility with applications and providing a consistent Windows experience."
To achieve that goal, Microsoft has released a screenshot showing what is ostensibly the complete list of features that users will be able to turn on and off in Windows 7. It includes games, an FTP server, Windows Search, and more. But the most important option (and the one that gets the most attention) is the ability to turn Internet Explorer 8 off.
Internet Explorer 8 cannot be uninstalled from Windows 7. According to Mayo, any feature that's turned off "will not be available for use, which means binaries and data are not loaded by the operating system (for security-conscious customers) and not available to users on the computer.
"These same files are staged so that the features can easily be added back to the running OS without additional media. This staging is important feedback we have received from customers who definitely do not like to dig up the installation DVD," he continued.
That's understandable and a welcome option. I will be turning some features off, like all of Microsoft's media services and a few extras like the FTP server and Tablet PC components, which I won't use any way, but Internet Explorer 8 is a different story altogether.
I'm sure some are excited to see they can finally kill Internet Explorer, but I'm not. I won't be using it, but I won't be turning it off either. Why should I?
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