July, 2006

Domain names are not limited to ASCII any longer, and as the web is growing more and more domain names now contain characters from other character sets. Such domain names are called Internationalized domain names (IDN), for example http://ايكيا.com is a domain in Arabic for IKEA. IE7 added support for IDN in Beta 2. We listened to your feedback during Beta 2 and we are changing the principles of IDN to accommodate the way customers want to use international characters on the web. Preventing IDN...

Hello again! If you are already using Internet Explorer 7 you might have noticed our tab settings. Perhaps you already changed one or more of them to better suit your browsing habits. Whenever we create a setting, we always have many discussions about what its default should be, what it should be called, and where it should go. In some cases we have great information (such as usability studies, customer surveys, and instrumentation) to help guide us in our decision making. In other cases we...

As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year. During the past year, we’ve discussed many of the advanced security features in IE7 that will help make our users more secure, including ActiveX...

In our previous post about IE’s Reset Internet Explorer Settings feature, we’ve discussed how incompatible browser extensions, add-ons, spyware or malware can cause compatibility issues such as application hangs in IE7. In this post, we wanted to go into more detail about how to troubleshoot with Internet Explorer 7. So, how does one go about identifying the cause for toolbar or add-on program problems? To identify if an incompatible browser add-on or extension is at the root of your troubles...

For nearly a year now, I’ve been following a cool social browsing addon called StumbleUpon . As of last week, the StumbleUpon addon is available for Internet Explorer, and is one of my favorite addons. Here’s how it works: As you browse the web, whenever you come across a page that is particular interesting to you, you can click the “thumbs up” button in your toolbar. And if you don’t like a page, you can hit the “thumbs down” button. You don’t have to rate every page, just the ones you feel strongly...

I am happy to announce the Beta 3 release of Internet Explorer Administration Kit 7 [IEAK 7]. IEAK 7 allows enterprises, ISPs, ICPs, OEMs to create custom packages of IE7 on XP or IE7+ on Windows Vista. If you are looking to provide your IE7 users with your own default set of preferences, toolbars etc, read on. Some of the common customization scenarios for IE7 are: Customize your users’ IE7 with related home pages, feeds, etc. Create a version of IE 7 that has these values and make it...

The transcript from the July 13 th chat is now available online . The response to Beta 3 has been great and people are overall happy with the recent improvements. There were a bunch of us and we enjoyed answering the stream of questions as they poured in. You can find our chat schedule at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/default.mspx . We typically hold the IE chats on the second Thursday of every month. Keep sending us your feedback and see you at the next chat! Cheers,...

The IE team is proud to announce the availability of Arabic, Finnish, German and Japanese versions of IE7 Beta 3 in addition to the English versions we released a week and a half ago . You can download IE7 Beta 3 from the following locations: Arabic: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ar-xm/betadownload.mspx Finnish: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/fi-fi/betadownload.mspx German: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/de-de/betadownload.mspx Japanese: http://www.microsoft.com/japan/windows...

It’s that time again! Members of the IE team will be online for an Expert Zone chat this coming Thursday, July 13th at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM GMT). These chats are great opportunities to have your questions answered and hear from members of the IE product team. A transcript will be published after the chat and transcripts of other recent chats are available. These chats are lots of fun and we hope you will join us for the chat if you can. Cheers, Uche Enuha Program Manager Edit: Added the hyperlink...

If you plan to use Complex Scripts (like Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, etc), you should ensure that you have support for complex scripts installed. I know that sounds obvious, but we wanted to make sure people know how and why to do this. Let us examine this in detail using an international URL issue that Dean recently encountered while dogfooding IE7. What is the issue? Internet Explorer will sometimes display Right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Arabic or Hebrew, in the address bar in left-to-right...