IE, 32bit, 64bit, flash & java

Windoz 7 64-bit operating system has both IE8 32-bit and IE8 64-bit web browsers.

m$ ie8 32-bit m$ ie8 64-bit

If you want to use the Java plugin with both of them you'll need to download and install Java 32 bit and Java 64 bit !

You should see that the 64 bit edition of Java gets installed into

C:\Program Files\Java

and that 32 bit edition of Java gets installed into

C:\Program Files (x86)\Java

To check if you are running 32bit or 64bit apps run task manager and look on the processes tab and you should see that 32bit apps have  a "*32" appended to their image name.

Note there is currently only a 32bit version of the Adobe Flash Player plugin !

If you are interested in which version visitors to your webpage are using you can look at the http browser headers for the 32 bit browser

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1;
WOW64; Trident/4.0;
SLCC2;
.NET CLR 2.0.50727;
.NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729;
Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)

and the 64 bit browser

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1;
Win64; x64; Trident/4.0;
.NET CLR 2.0.50727;
SLCC2;
.NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729;
Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)