March, 2005

With so many customers relying on IE, it helps to get a solid grasp of the Windows Lifecycle Policy , which at first blush can appear to be a bit cryptic. Fortunately I think I can shed some light on Microsoft’s policy with these simple rules: We support the version of IE that shipped with an OS or Service Pack for as long as the OS or Service Pack is supported We support the latest standalone version of IE (that’d be IE 6 SP1) on every OS that’s still supported (unless superseded by a newer version...

My name is Tariq Sharif and I am a program manager in the IE security and networking team. I joined IE team shortly after Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released. Windows XP Service Pack 2 introduced many new security features for Internet Explorer, which can cause compatibility issues for some web applications and sites. In order to help solve such issues I am pleased to announce that the Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator (IECE) is now available. IECE is released as part of Microsoft Application...

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...