July, 2005

As promised , I want to talk today a little bit more about printing experience in IE7. Printing is after navigation/search one of the most used features but it still lacks the fidelity of like say a photo printing program. Why is that? Content for the Web is in general not designed for printing. If laid out at 100% it generally exceeds the space provided on the paper. In IE6, for example, you end up often with cut-off right margins. Another very common problem when printing for example...

I’m very happy that we’ve shipped IE 7 beta 1. I wanted to make it clear that we know Beta 1 makes little progress for web developers in improving our standards support, particularly in our CSS implementation. I feel badly about this, but we have been focused on how to get the most done overall for IE7, so due to our lead time for locking down beta releases and ramping up our team, we could not get a whole lot done in the platform in beta 1. However, I know this will be better in...

Yesterday, rumors were circulating stating that the IE 7 beta 1 release causes the Google and Yahoo! toolbars to vanish. As Dean stated in Scoble’s blog , we support Google’s and Yahoo’s (and anyone else’s) toolbar in Beta 1 and will do so in the final release. In our internal testing, we have not encountered these problems in the released version of IE 7 tech beta. (There was a bug like this in earlier builds, so it’s possible that the report came from someone who had access to our pre-beta builds...

Beta versions of both Windows Vista (formerly codenamed “Longhorn”) and IE7 for Windows XP are now available. Back in February we committed to releasing betas this summer. I’m sure it surprises some people, but we did what we said we’d do. How interested you are in actually running pre-release software should depend on who you are. For example, I think that running pre-release MSN Virtual Earth or the Windows Antispyware Beta is interesting for everyone. I think NetScan is less...

Hi, I’m Patrick Mann , a security tester on the IE team. It’s a big week for me and a few other folks from IE, as we head down to Las Vegas to attend Black Hat 2005. Expect to see some of the IE blog familiars (such as John Bedworth , Eric Lawrence , and Christopher Vaughan ) along with other members of the IE product team. Personally, I’m very excited at this opportunity to hear about the latest in security research. But above all I’m looking forward to meeting folks, and putting some faces...

Robert Scoble and I are going to give a keynote together at the Blog Business Summit on August 19 in San Francisco. Why? We think that RSS is becoming a critical tool for businesses to communicate with customers and we want that to happen even faster. Robert will talk about how businesses can use RSS to create strong, ongoing connections with their customers. I’ll talk about how the RSS platform in Windows Vista will make tapping into the power of RSS easier, as well as some of the new opportunities...

The IE team took some time recently to relax in the sun (well actually rain – we do live in Seattle). Here is a picture of the unflappable Dave Massy and Jean Hartmann in Dave’s incredible motoring machine enjoying themselves at the event. Note that the color of Dave’s car is a variation of IE blue. - Scott Stearns

We’ve recently published some articles and a few updates on MSDN. Here are some particularly useful articles: About Windows Restrictions outlines the restrictions around controlling windows in Windows XP SP2. Faster DHTML in 12 steps contains some useful tips around performance in DHTML. Although this article is not entirely new it had been lost from MSDN and we felt it deserved to be resuscitated. Handling MIME Types in IE outlines how MIME handling works in Internet Explorer. As...

I just read Art Manion’s perspectives piece on cnet . I agree with much of what he says and encourage anyone who cares about browsers, security, or both, to read it. A few months ago, I offered my opinion on this topic. We’re still open to feedback on this. We’re getting a lot of it, privately, as we work closely with and listen to many security experts as we build IE7. As Art says, Windows XP Service Pack 2 made important improvements. I strongly recommend XP SP2, whether you browse...

Jeremy Dallman here from IE Security team with an update on the security advisory that Microsoft published last Thursday. In the revised Security Advisory provided earlier today, we recommend disabling Javaprxy.dll by using the registry key update (A.K.A. “killbit”) that is available now from the Microsoft Download Center. You’ll find a link in the updated advisory. This killbit package will also be available on Windows Update soon. - Jeremy