2 Sep 2005

Tony and Rob have just wrapped up their keynote here in Kuala Lumpur, and I wanted to make sure that the resources they talked about are listed here both for the benefit of the conference attendees who wanted to get to them and to everyone else who couldn’t be here today. The talk spoke to how Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) has influenced the development of IE 7. Specifically, and quite obviously if you’ve been reading this blog, IE 7 isn’t just about patching problems but about...

Tony Chor , Rob Franco , and myself are in Beijing today as we make our way to Kuala Lumpur for the Hack-In-The-Box conference . We have a great team over here in what we call the ATC (Advanced Technology Center). In the past 6 months they’ve gone from just starting to adding serious value to IE 7. The folks over here have already contributed to IE 7 by re-writing the select control which Chris Wilson alluded to in his post from the PDC . Other improvements that we’ll see come out of the ATC for...

Hello, I’m Marc Silbey, a Program Manager focused on IE security. I’m back from my honeymoon and I want to follow-up to Rob’s last post on IE7 Security by providing you with more detail on Protected Mode’s compatibility features and by telling you about a related workaround to a known issue in the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) build of Windows Vista. As Rob mentioned, Protected Mode helps to eliminate the silent install of malicious code through Windows Vista’s User Account Protection...

While Rob Franco and Chris Wilson were presenting and getting feedback at PDC, I spent most of my time in smaller discussions (for example, with Paul and Joe ) about the security work we’ve done in IE. The discussions reminded me that, before most of the team was working on IE7, before Rob posted about our overall approach to IE7 security, we heard three things about IE and security over and over: "take it out of the operating system (or integrate it less), get rid of ActiveX, and rewrite IE to be...

The developer community has asked for a long time: Where is the free developer toolbar for IE? We recognized the popularity of free IE tools like Fiddler and we listened to your feedback. I am glad to announce the next addition to our developer tool support: The IE dev toolbar. This tool will help developers to explore their HTML documents and understand everything about it. With the IE Dev Toolbar you have several features at your fingertips to go deep into existing pages or pages that you are...

I realized as I read through the comments to my last blog post that I forgot to mention one important item that was in my presentation. We have fixed the DOCTYPE switch so it will skip an XML prolog, so that valid XHTML can be handled in strict compliance mode rather than quirks mode. I’ve also been reading comments for some time in the IEBlog asking for support for the “application/xml+xhtml” MIME type in IE. I should say that IE7 will not add support for this MIME type – we will, of course,...

As Aaron mentioned, the IE team collaborated with A9/Amazon on OpenSearch 1.1. This blog post is a story about how the collaboration took place. IE7 Beta1 shipped with a set of 5 search providers and there wasn’t a way (short of hacking the registry) to add more search providers. When we started looking into how a site should describe itself, our first thought was the ‘src’ format . After all, it was pretty simple and it could describe how to construct the query to get the search result page back...

It’s our goal to make it easy for IE7 users to personalize their list of search providers. The user should be able to target their search directly to site of their choice: MSDN, Intranet portal, Team Sharepoint, PubMed, NYTimes, Costco, USPS, Amazon, WikiPedia, Ebay, Craigslist, etc. My last blog post mentioned we will be adding extensibility for Internet Explorer’s new Search Box in Beta 2. We’re announcing the API at PDC during Chris Wilson’s talk on IE7. Here are the details. The scenario has...

I’m here at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2005 in Los Angeles, and I just finished giving my presentation entitled "What’s New in IE7?" to a pretty full house (for a late afternoon session). I’m still pretty pumped up from my talk, but I wanted to share the features we haven’t previously mentioned (and repeat a few we have) for everyone who didn’t make it to the PDC. Expect to see more detail on these features in the near future here on the IEBlog, and of course these features will...

If you are here at the PDC you probably know that the Keynote presentation went much longer than expected today. Because of that, all of the lunch talks were cancelled, including my talk, “FUNL03 Case Study: building a more secure browser in IE7”. There was already a group of folks waiting in the audience. When the cancellation was announced, I gave folks the option to go forward with the talk and they voted with their feet to stay. We went through parts of the deck but we didn’t really get to explore...

Hi, my name is Tariq Sharif and I am a Program Manager on the IE Security team. One of the threats users face on the web is phishing. Today, I want to tell you about the Phishing Filter in IE7, a new security feature designed to dynamically warn users if they visit a phishing site. I’ll cover the filter service communication flow, show you what some of the filter notifications look like, how can you report a phishing site and most importantly I will let you know the process of reporting an incorrectly...

I’ve been keenly interested in extending Internet Explorer since long before I joined the team last fall. MSDN provides some great documentation on how to extend Internet Explorer, but as a longtime IE enhancer, I’d like to highlight some of my favorite resources. IE provides a number of mechanisms that permit software developers to extend the browser in powerful ways. You can add: Toolbar buttons Tools menu items Context menu items Toolbars Download managers Pluggable transfer...

We've already started talking about a few of the CSS changes that are going to be available in IE 7 when we release, but there are a few hanging points that we haven't talked about yet or haven't covered completely. There are 3 specific items I'd like to talk about: Using the root node wild card selector for IE only rules (* HTML) [strict mode only fix] Multi-class selectors as defined by CSS 2.1 (.floral.pastel) [strict mode only fix] Pseudo-element parsing sometimes flags rules as invalid...