April, 2005

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 is fast approaching. A tiny but significant code change was checked in this week: Internet Explorer's new User-Agent string. The User-Agent (or UA) string is sent along in the headers of every HTTP request so the server knows what type of browser is making the request. For a quick introduction on handling of the User-Agent string, check out George Shephard's article in MSDN Magazine. Internet Explorer 7 User-Agent As we updated the User-Agent, we considered application...

My name is Sam Fortiner and I’m a developer on the Internet Explorer team here at Microsoft. I joined the company about a year ago when I was given the opportunity to work on IE. Since then I’ve worked on several aspects of IE and recently settled down into the layout and display team. As part of my work in this team, I implemented support for per-pixel alpha in PNGs. Support for per-pixel alpha in PNGs in IE, or transparent PNGs as I’ll refer to them going forward, has been called many things...

We’ve heard some great feedback on what web developers would like to see in IE7, both from the responses to my last post and from the resources I referred to.  The rest of the team was cranking away while I was away on parental leave, and I wanted to share a few details about what they were doing: The first couple of things they’ve done are: Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We...

Quite a bit has been written about the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol and its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS), so I won't cover the protocols in detail here. The following are good references if you want to get a quick refresher. Microsoft KB article describing the SSL Handshake Wikipedia Overview of TLS Happily, a majority of web users now know to look for the lock icon and the HTTPS in the address line to identify when their connection is secure. Unfortunately, relatively...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Jeremy Mazner just posted news on his blog that there is a position opening for a technical evangelist focusing on IE. That’s great news! Working either on or with the IE team is definitely a great experience. Thanks -Dave

Hello. My name is Al Billings and I'm a test engineer on the Internet Explorer test team posting to the IE Blog for the first time. I want to announce that the April 2005 security updates are available and that a critical update for Internet Explorer is included: MS05-020 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (890923) This contains fixes for the following vulnerabilities: DHTML Object Memory Corruption Vulnerability ( CAN-2005-0553 ) URL Parsing Memory Corruption...

From time to time, I've heard the question: "Why can IE only download two files from the same site simultaneously?" Some more savvy users observe that this limitation probably makes sense in dialup cases where bandwidth is constrained or when lots of small files are being downloaded, since the TCP/IP slow start algorithm comes into play. But for those of us lucky enough to be on broadband, this limitation can be annoying. If I want to download a large number of large files, I have to sit around...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Our documentation team has just completed updating our documentation covering how administrators and developers can control certain features. This includes the following articles: About Zone Elevation Introduction to Feature Controls About URL Security Zone Templates These documents are useful in understanding the security work undertaken in Windows XP SP2...