March, 2006

To learn more about how IE works with the IE ActiveX Update and the options at your disposal to control the user experience of your web pages, please review this article on MSDN. You can try out the new behavior today on released versions of IE6 or IE7 Beta 2 Preview . Again, due to the nature of this topic, we are not taking comments on this post. - Tony Chor

There are two posts on the RSS team blog about the use of the Simple List Extensions , which have been implemented by IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform. The first is Simple List Extensions in action , and it shows examples of live sites (like Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo) using the RSS extensions to add sorting and filtering capabilities to their feeds. The second is a longer post on Understanding Lists and SLE , which explains why RSS list feeds are useful and how they work (with diagrams!)....

For new information on the IE ActiveX Update, please see Mike Nash’s announcement . Due to the sensitive nature of this issue, we are not taking comments on this post. Thanks for your understanding. - Tony Chor

Hi, My Name is Stephen Anacker and I am a tester working on IE7 setup. I have read that a number of you have seen the following error when attempting to install the IE7 preview: “Error loading C:\WINDOWS\system32\msfeeds.dll The specific procedure could not be found.” This error is permissions on registry key X (usually hkcr\.tif) being set to read only on the system. I want to talk about a couple of things to give some help in working around this bug and to explain what is happening. We...

Many customers have asked us about having a better way to enter IE bugs. It is asked "Why don't you have Bugzilla like Firefox or other groups do?" We haven't always had a good answer except it is something that the IE team has never done before. After much discussion on the team, we've decided that people are right and that we should have a public way for people to give us feedback or make product suggestions. We wanted to build a system that is searchable and can benefit from the active community...

Thursday, March 23 rd and I am sitting in the airport heading home from MIX06. It was a great conference with very good customer interactions. Also hanging out with Eric , Molly , Andy , Tantek and Dave was a lot of fun. Yesterday, I had my talk, “ Making your site look great in IE7 ”. Even though the title implied that the talk was only on IE7 the real focus was on making standard based designs great on IE7 and other browsers. To prove that I ran the audience to a CSSZenGarden inspired demo,...

As some of you noticed the developer toolbar ceased to function in the refresh preview build of IE7 made available earlier this week. We made some changes that affected the dev toolbar so we shipped a newer version to line up with the new build of IE7. A refresh of beta 2 of the developer toolbar is now available that will function in the latest available builds of IE7 as well as IE6. As always we really appreciate all feedback on the developer toolbar. This tool for web developers is currently...

I’m really excited for my talk tomorrow here at Mix06 . This conference feels more like a party than work. We’re free from the blue-shirt uniform of normal conferences and I’ve tried to make my talk all content - no slides (ok, there are a few slides for folks who don’t see the live show). I’m trying to dodge the late night party crowd until after my talk but I hear that Phoebe has been hanging out with Chico and James of the Debarge family. During his keynote, Bill Gates teed us up to talk about...

Today is the first day of the MIX06 conference. Internet Explorer team members are presenting this week on much of the work we've done for IE7. As part of the conference, we're handing out the "Internet Explorer 7 Readiness Toolkit" on CD. This toolkit has a roll up of the IE7 information we've published previously and some new features for those attending MIX06. One of the other items on the CD is an updated build of IE7 for MIX06. This is build 5335 of IE7. In order to give something to those...

Hi, I’m Cyra Richardson, relatively new Lead Program Manager on the IE team. As the new person, I was handed the opportunity to coordinate the content for the IE team’s participation at MIX06 . It’s Friday, Tony is running on next to no sleep, Peter is running around trying to make sure the latest IE bits are on the Sandbox Machines, Markus is practicing his demos and Al was bugging me to write a blog entry. The pace before every show is frenetic; MIX06 is no different. Cats in the Sandbox ...

The transcript of last week’s Expert Zone chat is now available. The chat was a lot of fun and the team managed to answer over 160 questions during the hour. This month we were fortified by home baked chocolate espresso bars, next month I expect we’ll return to donuts to keep us going. The IE Expert Zone chats take place on the second Thursday of every month at 10:00AM PST. The next one will be on April 13 th and we hope to see you there. Thanks - Dave

As we’ve described previously, we’ve made some major architectural improvements to improve browsing security in Internet Explorer 7, including Protected Mode , Phishing Filter , Enhanced Validation SSL , and other features in support of our overall security strategy . Our commitment to security goes both broad and deep-- While the major new features described above have received a lot of press, I’d like to mention just a few of my favorites among the myriad tweaks we’ve made...

Hi, this is Max and Uche from the user experience team. We want to talk to you about what we call the Fix My Settings feature. You will encounter this if you set your security settings to an insecure state whilst in the Internet or Restricted zone. When you choose an insecure setting two things will happen: An information bar will appear at the top of the browser with ‘Fix Settings for Me’ as the first menu option. In place of your homepage, you will see a warning page on startup of IE....

On Thursday March 9 th at 10:00AM PST it will be time for the monthly Expert Zone Chat with the IE team. Members of the Internet Explorer team will be present to discuss the product and answer your questions. These chats are always a lot of fun with team members typing answers furiously to keep pace with the incoming questions. As always we’ll publish a transcript of the chat later for those unable to attend. Look forward to seeing you there. Thanks - Dave

Walter has posted details about the RSS Screensaver sample that’s recently gone live on MSDN. If you have IE7 Beta 2 Preview installed (and who doesn’t?), subscribe to a couple of photo feeds (RSS feeds with pictures as enclosures – examples are in Walter’s post) and the screen saver will automatically pick them up using the Windows RSS Platform that powers IE7’s RSS features. More samples using the RSS platform will be coming soon. Of course, if you have any of your own, let us know about...

Hi. My name is Bill Hill, and I’m one of the original inventors of ClearType. My job at Microsoft is Director of Advanced Reading Technologies. The ClearType and Readability Research Group which handles the ongoing development of ClearType reports to me. Our team’s mission is straightforward: "Research and develop innovative technologies that improve reading on the screen for Microsoft customers worldwide". Surprisingly, reading’s the major task for which people use their computers ...

I am sitting here with Molly Holzschlag and Andy Clarke at the W3C Technical Plenary meeting in Mandelieu, France and I am showing them our latest bits, which we plan to hand out for the MIX06 conference (and yes, we’ll hand out publicly after the conference too). They wanted to give me a little challenge and asked me to show them 2 of their favorite pages: Gemination, Egor Kloos’s progressively enhanced CSS Zen Garden design and Malarkey’s personal Web site. Here are Molly’s and Andy’s responses...

Hello World! I’m Sharon Cohen, Program Manager for parental controls in IE7. If you haven’t heard about Windows Vista Parental Controls, be sure to read Brian’s blog post which gives a great overview of the feature. I’d like to fill you in on the great features IE7 adds to Windows Vista Parental Controls. IE7 offers two features which will enhance the Windows Vista Parental Controls experience for both parents and children. As Brian described, when Parental Controls have been enabled on a child...

My name is Brian Trenbeath, a Program Manager on the Windows Vista team, and I would like to take a quick moment to tell you about the new set of Family Safety features coming with Windows Vista. First, many thanks to the IE team for allowing me time on their blog to tell you about this exciting new feature area that is coming with Windows Vista! Parental Controls on Windows Vista is a new, much anticipated part of the overall Microsoft Family Safety story. With Windows Vista, tools are now...