February, 2006

As Rob pointed out in his last blog post on security and compatibility in IE7 , one of the biggest challenges in software development is making the software secure and compatible at the same time. In IE7, we have many new security features that help protect users against various attacks by blocking certain content, but as a consequence, some web applications may no longer work as they used to. To help web developers and IT professional find such compatibility issues, IE7 offers an application compatibility...

I just wanted to thank everyone who attended the IE Expert Zone chat earlier this month and point out that the official transcript is now available online . The chat was a lot of fun and included eating donuts as we typed answers furiously to keep pace with the questions. There is still some debate around the question that someone asked "Who is the nerdiest of the IE team ?" :-) We do plan to hold these chats regularly on the second Thursday of every month so please join us on March 9 th for the...

One more MIX plug, since it’s coming up fast. The IE talks have been posted to the MIX06 session list now, including “The Future of IE” discussion session where we will present an overview of our direction for IE beyond IE7, and hold an open discussion to take your input to shape the future of IE. There’s also a breakout session led by myself titled “Open, De Jure, De Facto and Proprietary: Standards and Microsoft,” where I will lay out how HTML, Javascript, C#, XAML, XHTML, XML, SVG, and other standards...

I am a program manager on the Internet Explorer team and in this post I would like to share what we are doing in the manageability, customization and deployment space. The two key features are IEAK 7 - The Internet Explorer Administration Kit , and GP - Group Policy in Internet Explorer 7. Before going on to IEAK & GP, I want to briefly talk about some terms I have used ahead - Deployment - The process of distributing and installing a software program on a number of machines. This becomes...

Hi, my name is John Hrvatin and I'm the program manager for Internet Explorer setup. I'd like to share some of the ways setup in IE 7 helps keep you more secure and IE running smoothly. Prior to installing IE 7, setup runs the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool to clean your system of known malware and help prevent problems installing IE 7 or running it for the first time. If you keep your computer up-to-date using Windows Update , which hopefully everyone does, you will already have the...

Hello. My name is Wujun Wang and I am a tester on the IE team in Beijing. My area of test focus is BiDi. Wait, what is BiDi? When I searched for “bidi” at http://www.Dictionary.com , it defined bidi as "A thin, often flavored Indian cigarette made of tobacco wrapped in a tendu leaf." So you know what I do. I am testing cigarettes! Well, not really. BiDi is a short name often used for the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm ( http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/ ). When text is presented in horizontal...

One of the biggest challenges in making software more secure is maintaining compatibility with the existing functionality that customers depend on. We’re here at the RSA security conference in Silicon Valley to work with other software and security professionals to meet our customers’ expectations for safety and compatibility. While we have taken a great deal of care to preserve compatibility, the new security features in Internet Explorer 7 do change the way platform works and only testing with...

The IE February 2006 security update is now available! This security update is now available via Windows Update . Please note: this update only applies to IE5.01 SP4. Users running the supported versions of IE6 or later do not need to apply this update. Windows 2000 customers are encouraged to upgrade to IE6SP1. Windows XP customers are not affected by this update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates available via the new Microsoft Update . I would encourage you...

Hi, I’m Tony Schreiner , and as you may recall from an earlier post I work on the tabbed browsing architecture in IE7. One of the new features in the IE7 Beta 2 Preview is the ability to suppress modal dialogs from background tabs. This addresses one common problem with tabbed browsing where a web site on a background tab can launch a dialog that must be immediately dealt with by the user. Even worse than the interruption is the risk that the user will not realize the dialog came from a background...

We didn’t introduce tabs in the Beta 2 Preview, but we did improve our experience a lot! We heard a ton of feedback from Beta 1, and made some great changes that I’m confident will be appreciated. I’d like to remind everyone about what we introduced in Beta 1, summarize the feedback we received, and then talk a bit about the big changes to look for in the Beta 2 Preview. Remembering Beta 1 Not everyone saw our Beta 1 functionality, here are some highlights… Putting tabs in Internet Explorer...

Several parties have made claims about how search works in IE7. I think those claims are awfully confusing, especially for anyone who has used the product. In this post, I want to describe our overall approach to how search works in IE7 and some of the thinking behind the current behavior. For readers who only skim and don’t want the details, here is how IE7 behaves: Ultimately, the user is in control with IE7. Adding to and modifying the list of search providers and choosing a default provider...

Hi, this is Uche again, I am back to talk about Quick Tabs, a visual way of managing tabs in Internet Explorer that complements the tabbed browsing experience quite nicely. This feature came about when we realized there were two main issues users were likely to encounter when browsing using tabs. First, as you open more tabs there is less space to show titles, making it difficult to identify a specific tab. Second, because many web pages have very similar titles picking the correct tab by title alone...

About once or twice a day, we get an email from someone asking why it is that IE 7 isn't detecting an RSS feed on a particular page that clearly has a feed associated with it. Usually, this means that there's an RSS or XML button somewhere on the page. The user can visually tell that there's a feed, so why can't IE? Well, feed auto-discovery works in a very simple way. Instead of trying guess the intent of the publisher and trying to figure out whether there's an little orange (or blue, or...

Hi, I’m Mike Friedman. I work on the IE team in the area of security. You may remember me from my previous IE blog post . We here on the IE team have a continuing focus on making web browsing safe from a variety of outside threats. Microsoft Windows Vista introduced an enhanced security model that we were able to build on in Vista's version of IE7. I want to tell you about a new major IE defense-in-depth security feature called Protected Mode. Defense in depth is a security principle that a system...

Members of the IE team will be traveling far and wide over the next month, attending conferences and speaking with you, our customers, about IE7. Look for us at RSA next week and Blackhat Europe , South by Southwest , and Mix06 in March. We’re considering attending ETech , and we’re looking at other conferences through the rest of 2006, so hopefully we’ll get to your corner of the world. Be sure to look us up if you have any questions about IE7. See you in San Jose, Amsterdam, Austin, and...

Beta 2 of the developer toolbar is now available. Beta 2 includes numerous fixes to improve stability, usability and performance along with a couple of additional features such as the ability to enable and disable CSS on the page. The developer toolbar has become an essential tool for us in diagnosing issues with web pages. Being able to click on an element in the page and find out where it is in the element hierarchy is just one of the invaluable facilities it provides. Let us know if you...

Many are content to spend all day clicking fancy looking buttons or menu items in order to get their tasks accomplished, but those who know the correct keyboard and mouse shortcuts can often get around applications more efficiently: Browsing the web with Internet Explorer is no exception. I want to take a minute to discuss a few useful shortcuts already available in IE6 that will help you get around the web, and then list some great new shortcuts we are providing in IE7. First: Getting around...

In a previous post , I introduced our Beta 1 search functionality and mentioned we would soon ensure you can add search providers to IE without executable code or a masterful knowledge of the registry. Now that we’ve released the Beta 2 Preview I’d like to take a few minutes to describe the two separate extensibility mechanisms we’ve introduced to make this happen: window.external.AddSearchProvider, and Search Discovery. window.external.AddSearchProvider() In Beta 2 any site...

On Thursday Feb 9 th at 10:00AM PST there will be a public Expert Zone chat on Internet Explorer . The Expert Zone is a community of Windows enthusiasts and this is the Internet Explorer team’s turn to host a chat session. Members of the IE team will be available and ready to discuss Internet Explorer and of course the recent preview of beta 2 of IE7 is likely to be a hot topic. There is a limit on the number of people that the chat room can contain so unfortunately we cannot guarantee that everyone...

Hello again, I hope you have been enjoying the IE7 Beta. Today I want to briefly tell you about one of the cool new features we have developed for IE7: Page Zoom. This feature allows the user to effectively zoom in on a web page to make it easier to see and read. Studies have shown that approximately 1 in 4 people have some sort of vision impairment that makes reading on the web more difficult. I happen to be in that 25% so I am very excited about this feature and how it makes the web easier to read...

I am Jeremy Epling, a Program Manager on the IE User Experience team. One of my foci for IE7 has been improving the Favorites and History experience. I want to tell you about the new features we added and the motivation that was behind them. The IE6 experience for managing your Favorites and History is fairly disjoint and inconsistent. In IE7 we wanted to address these issues as well as make sure that we had a great experience between Tabs and Favorites. Favorites and History issues in IE6...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 17 September 2012 Congratulations to the Pittsburgh Steelers on their fifth Super Bowl victory. Special congratulations to Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers quarterback who wears the number 7. While we obviously wished things had turned out differently, we’re glad to see that 7 is a lucky number this year. We’re proud of the Seattle Seahawks and are grateful for the great season they gave us all. We already look forward...

In my previous post , I gave a glimpse of what to come in IE7 and printing. Now that the Beta 2 Preview build is publicly available I like to walk you through all the additions we added to printing and print preview. Internal studies showed that printing is the second most used feature after navigation in a browser and traditionally has not seen the respect it deserves. To address this IE7 focuses around 3 experiences: Having a great default print experience Intuitive UI, putting you...

Hello there, I’m Peter Gurevich, one of the many program managers on the IE team. My primary feature area focus is on the rendering and display in the browser, including the decoding and display of images and the rendering of Text. I wanted to briefly chat with you all about a change to the way IE7 renders text. You may have noticed that after installing IE 7, your fonts in IE and Outlook Express look different. That is because IE7 has changed our text rendering to use ClearType. I...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 17 September 2012 At the end of April of last year, we blogged about the new Internet Explorer 7 User Agent string. Since our original blog posting, we have also posted two new articles on this topic to MSDN: Understanding User-Agent Strings , and Best Practices for detecting the Internet Explorer version . I’d like to provide a quick update to this topic for the Beta 2 preview version...