April 18, 2008 - Some IE8 Defaults will be different on Vista than on XP

Is Internet Explorer still the same IE8 when running under Vista? 

According to Eric Lawrence from the Internet Explorer Security Team, Internet Explorer 8 will have at least one different default when running under Vista than when running under XP.

"Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista introduced an off-by-default Internet Control Panel option to “Enable memory protection to help mitigate online attacks.” 

 

This option is also referred to as Data Execution Prevention (DEP) or No-Execute (NX). 

 

We have enabled this option by default for Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 and later.

 

...

 

Test your code with DEP/NX enabled using IE8 Beta 1 on Windows Vista SP1.

 

(Alternatively, test with IE7 on Windows Vista after enabling the DEP/NX option. To enable DEP/NX for IE7: Run IE as an administrator, then set the appropriate checkbox in the Tools > Internet Options > Advanced tab) "

 

see: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/08/ie8-security-part-I_3A00_-dep-nx-memory-protection.aspx

Until now, we haven't found anything in our systems that was different on Vista.  Looks like we'll have to test and see if that is still true.