15 Feb 2005

As a little kid, my dad read with me a lot; we usually read detective stories. While of questionable literary merit, those books developed in me a burning desire to figure stuff out, to pull back the curtain, to understand the mysterious. I still maintain that curiosity today-- I joined the IE team because I wanted to learn the browser inside out, and I developed Microsoft Fiddler to expose the secrets of HTTP in a user-friendly way. I recently came across a bug in the bug database for IE7 which...

First of all, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Chris Wilson; I’m the lead program manager for the web platform in IE. (I am NOT Chris Wilson the drummer for Good Charlotte. :^) ) I joined the IE team shortly before we shipped IE 2.0 in 1995, and worked in various releases for every major release from then until IE 6.0’s release in 2001. After IE 6.0 shipped, I worked on the Avalon project until I decided to rejoin the IE team four months ago. During my tenure on the IE team, I’ve frequently...

With the Local Machine Zone Lockdown introduced in Windows XP SP2 an HTML file on your hard drive will no longer be able to run script and active content without user permissions being granted through the information bar and an additional prompt. This is part of the work to ensure that if you do get bad content on your machine it cannot run with elevated privileges and do nefarious things. Users should exercise caution whenever the information bar appears and be sure that this is really content they...

Since this is my first post on the IE Blog, I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Kelly Ford and I’m part of the test team responsible for testing the user experience in IE. I also head up our accessibility testing efforts. Today I wanted to talk about three aspects of accessibility as they relate to IE and Windows in general. First is access to the Windows OS for individuals with disabilities, second are a couple of hints for users of screen readers using IE in XPSP2 and finally is a request...

I haven’t tried the Netscape beta yet, but I have read that it allows users to switch between the Gecko rendering engine (the one used in Firefox) and Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. I think this a good opportunity to write about the Windows Web Browsing Platform (the IE Platform) and its counterpart, the IE Browser. The Browser is easy to explain. It’s the blue e . It’s a nice presentation (with toolbars, a Favorites menu, etc.) of the IE Platform. The Browser is meant for end-users; the Platform...

We received some good questions about how the JScript engine works in IE. What version of JScript is supported? The version of JScript included with IE6 is EcmaScript edition 3 compliant. I’ve seen some confusion recently with some even claiming that we do not support EcmaScript. In fact JScript, JavaScript and EcmaScript are all basically the same language with a different name. At one time Netscape used the name LiveScript before adopting the name JavaScript even though it was not related to Java...

We’ve seen lots of questions about the IE7 announcement. Many of these we are not ready to answer and discuss at this time but there are two things that I can offer clarification on. Platforms. We currently plan to make IE7 available for Windows XP SP2 and later. This will therefore include availability not only for the 32bit version of Windows XP SP2 but also for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 SP1 both of which are due to be released soon. As Dean commented in his original...

Before I answer this, I want to acknowledge that we have a problem if people are asking this question. Listing what we’ve done or our priorities will help but won’t address the problem. Responding to specific questions with a great product and great documentation (for developers, for IT professionals, for deployment specialists, and for other customers as well), and doing that consistently for as long as we’ve been quiet about IE will help more. So, what happened after Microsoft released IE6? Mostly...

Wow, there are a lot of comments. I wanted to recap the main themes I read in the comments and use them as a roadmap for the topics that we will post about over the next few weeks. What have you guys been doing since IE6? What makes IE7 on Win2K so hard anyway? Standards, standards, standards… say something! What’s in IE7, or at least when can we find out? Don’t you understand that your product is fundamentally not secure because of (blank) and you should rip (blank) out? (I want to call out a comment...

My job is focused on receiving feedback from customers and there’s plenty of it. Feedback comes from a great many sources including corporate customers, product support teams, critical problem resolution teams, newsgroups, blogs, ISVs, web developers, colleagues, friends and family. One of the challenges of working on what is arguably the most used piece of software in the world is that there is such a broad array of customers with many different requirements. There are three broad categories of...

Today at RSA, Bill Gates talked about Internet Explorer 7. As the guy responsible for IE, I wanted to say a couple of things about it. First, some basics: we’re committing to deliver a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers. Betas of IE7 will be available this summer. This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software. Why? Because we listened to customers...