OK, so it's really just a chance to win $10,000 (Australian), but would you?

You'll have to do a few things to get in the action. First, of course, you'll have to become a legal resident of Australia. The DIAC website can help you with the process. Once you've checked that off, you also have to follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter to get the daily clues and then put on your Columbo trench coat and use IE8 to uncover the road to riches.

Gotta love the tagline they used: "But you'll never find it using old Firefox (So get rid of it, or get lost.)"

Oh, you crazy Aussies!

I know it's a contest to promote their own browser and it makes sense to use proprietary features to ensure people are actually using IE8, but how Microsoft is that? "This is the most compliant Internet Explorer yet, but we're running our least compliant contest ever using it! Yeeeeeeeeeehaw!"

Wouldn't we all love it if the winner used Firefox and IETab to pull off a win? To quote Bart Simpson, "The ironing is delicious."

[via NeoWin]

It's a week or so since Microsoft started sending out Internet Explorer 8 through Windows Automatic Updates for customers who installed early beta versions of the browser. But now the company is preparing to start pushing the update to users who still have older browsers including Internet Explorer 7 or 6 installed.

The update should start showing up the third week of April for Windows users running Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server 2003 or 2008. Microsoft is planning a phased rollout, so you might not get the update right away. Of course, you can always just download and install the browser yourself if you don't feel like waiting.

But what if you don't want the new browser? First, IE8 will automatically be downloaded through Windows Update, but it won't automatically install itself on your system. You'll see a prompt asking if you want to install the browser.

You can also install a blocker tool that will prevent Windows from automatically downloading Internet Explorer 8 if you want to hold off on installing the browser indefinitely.

[via ZDNet]

Microsoft has put together a series of videos to promote the launch of Internet Explorer 8. The strategy? Poking a bit of fun at the things we spend our time doing on the internet, like looking at videos of hamsters dancing, ordering completely useless things on eBay, and replacing language with acronyms.

Toward the end of the video above, several of the comedians tapped by Microsoft for the campaign also imply what everyone knows: the new private browsing mode in Internet Explorer 8 (and Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome) isn't just for privacy advocates. There might be another reason people would like to surf the web without saving any cookies or other items that would indicate which web sites they've been visiting. It's not exactly rocket science, but it's interesting to see it (almost) acknowledged in an officially sanctioned video from Microsoft.

You can check out more videos in the series at the IE8 YouTube page or on Microsoft's web site for the campaign. But you'll need to have Silverlight installed to see the videos on the latter site.

[via Mashable]

Despite what CNET announced ealier this week and what Microsoft has announced as the official release time for Internet Explorer 8's RTM (4pm GMT), I've just finished watching the installation wrap up on a system on my workbench via Windows Update. Due to the heavy server load Microsoft is anticipating, that wasn't supposed to happen right away.

In case you're not excited about the prospect of IE8 sneaking on to the systems you support (including your home computer), you can grab the blocker toolkit from Microsoft's web site.

We've looked at the new browser before (just this morning, as a matter of fact). Warnings aside, IE8 is a step in the right direction from Microsoft.

More than a year after releasing the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft plans to give the browser a good and proper launching today at noon EDT. You'll be able to download the browser from the IE8 page at that time. Right now clicking the download link will get you Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1.

Here are a few of the new features that Internet Explorer 8 offers:

• Accelerators that make web-based services available through a right-click context menu. For instance, you can click on a word or phrase and map it or email it.
• Web slices provide information from web sites like Wikipedia or Digg available in little pop up windows that you can check out without navigating away from the page you're on.
• Improved search box features including visual previews and "quick pick" search engine selection.

You can find some of our favorite tips and tricks for making Internet Explorer 8 even more useful in our Pimp Internet Explorer series.

There have been a lot of speed claims lately when it comes to web browsers - when Apple released Safari 4, I put half a dozen options through the paces to see who came out on top. IE8 didn't appear in my chart, because it handled the benchmarks so badly that I canceled them before its javascript engine seized up completely and cracked the block.

"Hey, wait just a gosh darn minute!" shouts Microsoft. "We ran our own tests, and they showed that our browser is the fastest!" On a related note, I've done my own testing that conclusively proves that I am, in fact, the all time leading goal scorer for the Detroit Red Wings. Sorry, Gordie Howe!

But really. Come on, Microsoft, are we supposed to take this seriously or is this some halfhearted attempt at humor like the recent news about Firefox conquering one entire continent (Antarctica)?

One things I would have liked to include in Pimp Your IE8 was bigger list of webslices, but the collection at the Microsoft addon site isn't all that impressive. The crew at LiveSlices, on the other hand, has put together several that are well worth installing.

Among their listings are slices for CNN headlines, Google News, new Flickr uploads, a slice for viewing Twitter updates, and one for unread GMail messages. The Twitter update slice is perhaps the best executed, though it only updates every 15 minutes - likely not often enough for hardcore users, but you're probably 1) using a Twitter client and 2) not running IE8 as your primary browser anyway. The Flickr slices work nicely as well, and provide instant eye candy right in your bookmarks bar.

Create an account on the site, and your settings can be stored for speedy re-install if you have to reformat your machine or remove and reinstall IE8.

[ via Channel 10 ]

It's no secret that Internet Explorer has a history of thumbing its nose at web standards. IE8 is supposed to change all that, bringing improved (how could it not be?) compliance. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that some sites that have been designed to display properly in IE7 (or older) don't look so hot in the new version.

I particularly like one excerpt from the IEBlog: Site owners are *always* in control of their content. That's important to remember in case you were thinking the browser had something to do with why a site looks fine in Firefox, Chrome, or Opera but not IE.

How, then, to avoid these problems? Why, with the incompatibility list, of course! Sites added to it will automatically load in "compatibility view," thus providing the average user with a more hiccup-free browsing experience. Trouble is, the list is getting big. Stupid big.

ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported that the list currently contains 2,400 sites that don't render properly in IE8. Even better is the fact that the list includes some pretty major sites, like Yahoo! and Google. Google? How does a web browser not render Google correctly?

What do you make of the list? What does it say about the state of Internet Explorer and web standards?

Topical addon: The Register has published a post about Norwegian websites banding together to urge users to upgrade from IE6 to a "more compatible" browser so they don't have to hack up their code.

Accelerators are handy little addons that - surprise, surprise - make getting certain tasks done a little bit quicker and easier.

EMail Accelerators - AOL, GMail, and Live Mail accelerators make sending content to your friends quick and easy.

Share on Twitter - opens a new tab with your Twitter home and auto-fills selected text into your status update box.

Translate with Google - IE8 comes with the Windows Live translator built-in, but Google's tool just works better.

Define with Wikipedia - You may also want to replace the included Encarta tool with this one to search Wikipedia. Previews don't always work, but that appears to be an issue with IE8, not this accelerator.

Wayback Machine - check for older versions of the page you're viewing.

Web slices make accessing key "chunks" of certain web sites faster and easier by adding them as buttons to your favorites bar. While there aren't a huge number available yet, there are a few worth installing.

Digg Top Ten - shows the hottest items from Digg's main page and the number of diggs for each.

StumbleUpon Buzz - like the Digg slice, this one shows what's getting Stumbled by the crowd. Formatting can be hit-or-miss with this one.

Weather from Live Search - displays current weather conditions for your area.

Search Addons
IE8's search box has a number of nice features, including Visual Search previews and "quick pick" search engine selection. It also supports OpenSearch, meaning you can add tons of providers from the Mycroft project - like the ones listed on their Top 100.

OpenSearch - to install these, click on the site name to the right of its favicon. These are all IE7 compatible.

Google Blog Search and Technorati - quickly get results for posts from the blogosphere.

Twitter search - allows you to search Twitter status updates from the search bar.

Usniff - multi-tracker torrent file search. NowTorrents offers a plugin as well, but it didn't work for me in IE8.

YouTube - the most popular Mycroft plugin lets you find videos in a jiffy.

Visual Search
Visual Amazon and Visual Ebay - These both add useful thumbnail images to your search suggestions. The relatively small thumbnails don't work so well with some other Visual Search options (like Wikipedia), but they're very handy for window shopping on Amazon and eBay.

New York Times - another succesful implementation of Visual Search. Provides links to articles ordered by dates. Neat trick NYT: you've got one listed with tomorrow's date!

It look as though Microsoft is ready to officially release Internet Explorer 8. In a post on the IEblog, Microsoft UX and Compatibility Manager Frank Olivier seems to indicate that the countdown has begun.

In discussing a glitch in IE8 on Windows 7 where the whitehouse.gov drop-down menus don't hide properly, he states that "the version of IE8 in Windows 7 Beta is somewhat older than the Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate that we're about to release for Windows Vista and Windows XP."

That statement, coupled with last week's arrival of the IE8 blocker kit make a strong case for an impending release. If you're not excited about receiving IE8 as an automatic update, you may want to download the blocker tool.

There is speculation that RC1 will be build 18343. If that's the case, you can get your hands on it already - it's been leaked on torrent sites.

Windows 7 beta users will have to sit tight. RC1 for you is on the way, though there has been no official word as to when.

Want to see how that newfangled WebSlices in Internet Explorer 8 work? Just fire up IE8 beta and surf on over to Wikipedia, where you can find a WebSlice in an article on the Acid3 internet standards test. Blogger Long Zheng brought the new feature to our attention.

Here's how it works. When you visit a page with an embedded WebSlice, like the Acid3 Wikipedia page, a little purple symbol will pop up when you scroll your mouse over a portion of the page which is available as a WebSlice. Click the icon and a pop up menu will ask if you want to save the content to your favorites bar. Once you do, you'll be able to see that content by clicking the bookmark in your favorites bar, without clicking through to the actual web page.

What makes this different from a regular bookmark is that you'll only see a portion of the page. In this example, a chart showing how well different web browsers perform on the Acid3 test. As the Wikipedia article is updated, you'll always see the latest version in your browser without having to constantly revisit the Wikipedia page.

Now honestly, we're not convinced this is the best use of WebSlices. There's only so much room in the favorites bar, and do you really want to clutter it up with a chart showing Acid3 compliance results? But until more blogs and news sites that are updated more frequently start adopting WebSlices, we figured we'd point you toward Wikipedia just so you can see the technology in action.

[via istartedsomething]

If you had any doubt that Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 was released as a developer preview and wasn't really meant for general consumption, consider this: You can't access Windows Update using Internet Explorer 8. If you try to visit the Windows Update page, you'll get a message telling you that you need to use Internet Explorer 5 or later.

Microsoft plans to add IE8 support to its software update page, but it's not available yet. In the meantime, you can get your updates by clicking the Emulate IE7 button in IE8 and restarting your browser.

[via ComputerWorld]

Been spending the week gearing up for SXSW and then realized that you forgot to book tickets to Austin? Worry not, Download Squad will be bringing you blow by blow coverage from SXSW Interactive over the next few days. In the meantime, sit back, relax, and check out some of the top stories from the week that was.

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8 beta

Microsoft released the first beta version of IE8 this week, and while it's explicitly for developers and not early adopters, we rushed out to test it, and were severely disappointed with its performance. Sure, it renders the Acid2 test properly -- sometimes, but it does a pretty poor job with many other sites, including Download Squad. And many of you told us you were having even bigger problems. Check out the IE8 reviews and comments left by Download Squad readers.

Microsoft launches Office Live Workspace beta

IE8 wasn't the only Microsoft beta to launch this week. The company also pushed the first public version of Office Live Workspace out the door. And while the service does provide users with a way to store and share Office documents online, we can't help but wonder whether people who have gotten used to actually being able to create and edit documents online with services like Zoho and Google Docs are going to care.