August, 2005

Hi! I’m Jane Kim, program manager for RSS in Internet Explorer. Now that Beta 1 of IE 7 for Windows XP and Windows Vista are released, I want to introduce to you the RSS features that are available in this release. You may be asking what RSS is. It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a way for web site publishers to publish information from their sites. The publisher creates a specially-formatted file on their web site that contains the most recent items (news stories, blog posts, etc...

Hopefully, by now you’ve seen from our posts that there are a lot of new features and work going into IE 7. As part of this update, we’re refreshing our icon and logotype. We considered more radical departures from our current logo, but blue “e” with the ring is very recognizable and familiar to users, so we elected instead to make more subtle changes. As you can see, the new “e” has more modern look, and the edges are a bit darker so the icon stands out better against different backgrounds...

Internet Explorer 7 includes a new URL handling architecture known internally as CURI. The new optimized URI functions provide more secure and consistent parsing of URIs to reduce attack surface and mitigate the threat of malicious URIs. When designing our security strategy for IE7 , malicious URIs were near the top of the list because secure handling of URIs throughout IE is critical to the security of the system. Hence, a major architectural investment was made in CURI for IE7. Unlike most...

For IE 7 we decided to make some changes to the way the <BASE> tag is handled to bring it up to spec and at the same time fix some really odd behavior. In the process we expect some people relying on the previous behavior to have to update their content otherwise they may find their site doesn't work exactly as planned. Most of the old functionality is still there, but there are some key differences. To start, in previous versions of IE, you could place the BASE tag anywhere in the document...

My last post was intended to introduce our overall security strategy and the specific features in IE7 Beta1 for XP SP2 and Windows Vista. A lot of responses to my post were questions about why and how the Microsoft Phishing Filter in IE7 will check websites. We have also have heard from a number of site owners who want to know how they can correct an evaluation of “suspicious” or “confirmed phishing”. Before we continue posting on the rest of the IE7 security features, I want to let you know that...

The first Microsoft product I ever shipped, Windows 95, launched 10 years ago today. Around the same time we also launched Internet Explorer 1.0 (though with considerably less fanfare), which quickly gave way to IE 2.0 (which shipped with the Plus! Pack for Windows 95). 6 years later we launched Windows XP, which shipped IE 6.0. That’s more or less 1 new version of IE a year for 6 years. Of course the pace with which we ship versions of IE has dropped off since then with our most notable recent release...

Security as a feature can be hard to measure. I want to provide some insight into our security strategy so our customers and partners can understand the direction we’re heading with Beta 1 and beyond to Beta 2. All of the work the IE security team has done for IE7 is designed to make you safer while you browse. While some of our work is front and center like the Phishing Filter, a lot of the features are “under the hood” like Low-rights IE and we hope you will never see them, just know that...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Hi, I’m Aaron Sauve, Program Manager focused on features relating to the Internet Explorer user interface. One of these features is web search. Now that Beta 1 is out in the wild I would like to say a few quick words about what we have included and give some insight into where we are going in Beta 2. Beta 1 includes a few simple enhancements to web search. Search is...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Today we launched a new column on MSDN called “ Exploring Internet Explorer ”. Currently there is a single article there from Eric Lawrence on Zones and Proxies where he explores some of the interesting ways that the intranet zone and proxies can interact. We expect to add more articles to this column over the coming weeks. If there is a particular mystery of Internet...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 As some of you have noted in the comments, I will be doing a keynote presentation at the Hack in the Box conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on September 28. The title of my presentation is “Internet Explorer Security Past, Present, and Future”. I’ll be talking about the kinds of threats we’ve seen, how we started to address them in Windows XP SP2, and our plans to go...

The IE August 2005 security updates are now available! This group of security updates is now available via Windows Update . Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates available via the new Microsoft Update . We encourage you to give MU a try. Information about the IE Security update can be found at: MS05-038 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (KB# 896727) This security update package contains fixes for the following vulnerabilities: JPEG Image...

After some very long days and nights, the IE delegation is back from Vegas . Some sessions I found especially interesting: Alex S & Scott Stender – Attacking Web Services Jeremiah Grossman – Phishing with Super Bait tamos Johnny Long – Google Hacking for Penetration Testers They did a great job of highlighting the challenges of reconciling ease of use and security. Even more valuable than the briefings were the informal meetings with security researchers and other members of...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 The IE and RSS team is going to be attending the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this year between September 13th and 16th in Los Angeles. This is Microsoft’s premier conference for developers where you can learn from and connect with the development teams here. Visit the PDC site to learn more. We’re currently planning two talks for IE and RSS: ...