Forward secrecy for IE and Safari too (02 Mar 2012)
When we announced forward secrecy for Google HTTPS we noted that “we hope to support IE in the future”. It wasn't that we didn't want to support IE, but IE doesn't implement the combination of ECDHE with RC4. IE (or rather, SChannel) does implement ECDHE with AES on Vista and Windows 7, but I only wanted to make one change at a time.
With the release of MS12-006 a month ago to address the BEAST weakness in TLS 1.0's CBC design, we've now made ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA our second preference cipher. That means that Chrome and Firefox will still use ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA, but IE on Vista and Windows 7 will get ECDHE now. This change also means that we support ECDHE with Safari (at least on Lion, where I tried it.)