October, 2006

Today we released Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP. I encourage everyone to download the final version from http://www.microsoft.com/ie . We listened carefully to feedback from many sources (including this blog) and worked hard to deliver a safer browser that makes everyday tasks easier. When I first posted publicly about IE7 , I wrote that we would go further to defend users from phishing and malicious software. The Phishing Filter and the architectural work in IE7 around networking and ActiveX...

The final release of IE7 is fast approaching … and I mean really fast … and will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download. We want to ensure that you are ready and the information below will help get you there. Compatibility with sites, extensions and applications has been a very high priority for us as we develop new features, enhance the existing features and move the platform forward to be more secure and standards compliant. We are continually...

Just in case you missed it somehow, we released IE7 last Wednesday . In the first four days over three million of you have already downloaded the final release. Thank you! (If you’re not one of those three million, you can get it here .) We expect the numbers to continue to climb steadily until we start distributing via Automatic Updates in a few weeks. Clearly, we expect IE7 adoption to really take off then. If you haven’t tested your website with IE7 yet, please use the tools Scott posted about...

With your freshly installed Internet Explorer 7, take time to explore our library of add-ons. The IE Add-Ons website has over 400 add-ons registered to date, and many more are on the way. The IE7 team took the last few weeks (in between last minute bug fixes) to collect our must-have list below. All of the add-ons in our list are free to download, integrate well with IE7, and provide extraordinary functionality. Stay Safe and Secure: Windows Defender is a must-have for anyone concerned about spyware...

A few people have asked why we recommend temporarily disabling anti-virus or anti-spyware applications (which I’ll refer to together as anti-malware) prior to installing IE7, so here’s a little insight to the situation. Along with copying IE7 files to your system, IE7’s setup writes a large number of registry keys. A common way anti-malware applications protect your computer is by preventing writes to certain registry keys used by IE. Any registry key write that fails during setup will cause setup...

Now that we’ve released IE7 in English, I want to update everyone on our plans for other languages. The short version is that we will be releasing IE7 in all languages available for each version of Windows – twenty-four fully localized languages in total. In two to three weeks, we’ll ship the Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish language versions. The remaining languages will be released in phases between November and January. I’ve listed the set of fully localized languages by...

We’ve been talking for a long time about making sure IE7 is as secure as possible but still compatible with the Internet. The principle that helps us balance security and compatibility is to not impact existing websites unless we need to change IE to help protect end users. As we asked web developers and server administrators to make changes, they spoke frankly with us about what they could and what they couldn’t change. Today, we’ll look at a couple timely examples of how this principle played out...

Now that IE7 has released, I want to remind everyone about the plan we announced back in July to distribute IE7 via Automatic Updates (AU) and point you to the readiness materials we’ve created. To help you become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 via Automatic Updates as a high-priority update. We will start very soon with those of you who are already running IE7 pre-releases and then move onto IE6 users after a few weeks. We will progressively roll out to all IE6 users over...

To help you prepare for the IE7 release we’ve updated many of our tech articles on MSDN including those on Protected Mode , ActiveX Security and CSS Compatibility . You’ll find more sample code, more examples, and best practices for scenarios that you’ve brought to us this year. As an example, Protected mode changes the way IE opens because it needs to create both low and medium integrity processes, IExplore.exe at low and IEUser.exe at medium. If your application opens and closes IE, you’ll want...

Hello, my name is Kellie, I am a Lead Program Manager on the IE Team. First and foremost, the IE team would like to thank everyone in the community who contributed feedback to the IE7 release. You guys rock! This release was the first time we used the Microsoft Connect site to collect feedback for the public beta. We learned a lot of lessons from this feedback program, and we intend to make it better next time around. We received an overwhelming response from you and your efforts provided great ideas...

In addition to the more prominent work we’ve done to enable international scenarios (like adding support for International Domain Names ), Internet Explorer 7 updates the available values for the Accept-Language header. Accept-Language is an HTTP header sent to the server by the browser to indicate the user’s language and locale. As an example, the Accept-Language header sent by the browser of a native French speaker in France and fluent in German might be: Accept-Language: fr-FR,de-DE;q=0...

Some of you may have noticed the following goldbar on some websites: Our friend Adam on the XML team recently posted on the XML Team’s Blog about MSXML versioning. It’s a great read and thoroughly explains the best practices for using MSXML. As we’ve posted previously , MSXML5 is not pre-approved as there are better options such as MSXML6 and IE’s native XMLHTTP control which you can use on your webpage. Users will need to approve MSXML5 before it can be used on your webpage. Please help us give...

Hi, my name is Jane Maliouta and I am a Program Manager on the IE Team working on the Windows Search Guide . Throughout the development cycle, we've blogged about Search in IE7 . The Windows Search Guide is part of Instant Search, a new feature in IE7. The search guide page displays search providers that users can select to customize the list in the Instant Search drop down. The providers displayed in the Windows Search Guide are the most popular for each region based on 3rd party website traffic...

One of the best parts of IE7 is actually yet to come. High Assurance SSL certificates, now known as Extended Validation certificates are a critical part of our strategy to help customers avoid online fraud like phishing scams We’ve been hard at work with the other browsers and certification authorities on a set of common guidelines to identify a legitimate business and issue it an extended validation certificate. While we’re finishing up the guidelines for Extended Validation, some key members...

We wanted to give you guys one last chat session before we ship IE. So if you can, you should join us for the chat this Thursday, October 12 th at 10.00AM PDT (5.00GMT) otherwise you can catch all the action in the transcript. Cheers, Uche Enuha Program Manager

Hey! I’m Pete LePage, one of the Product Managers for IE and I’ve been around Microsoft for some time now. One of my favorite things about Internet Explorer is how easy it is to customize with add-ons. Earlier today, Jeremy posted about some of the cool add-ons recommended by the IE Team. Personally, I’m a bit of a developer at heart, so I’m more interested in creating my own add-ons to really customize my experience. Sure it’s a bit more work, but it’s cool to know I can make IE work exactly how...

Some people are discussing a recently announced security vulnerability that they claim is found in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP SP2 systems. While it is true that a vulnerability exists, the vulnerability is not actually in any components of IE7, although the attack vector makes it appear that way. Our friends at the MSRC have the issue under investigation and have posted a blog entry with more details on which component is affected and what you should do about it. If you’re curious about...

You may recall when Seth originally introduced our Quick Reference Sheet for IE7 in an earlier post . Since then we’ve made a few additions and posted it to the main IE7 site on Microsoft.com . The Quick Reference Sheet pulls together some really useful keyboard and mouse shortcuts that will help you get the most out of your browsing experience, so check out the printer friendly PDF version , print yourself a copy, and keep browsing! Aaron Sauve Program Manager

Last week Channel 9 , with camera in tow, paid a visit to the IE Team. In the first video I talk far too long at the start before we walk the hallways and meet a few members of the team. In the second video we chat with Max Stevens on user experience. The third video is with the RSS team where we discuss the new RSS support in IE7. In the final video we meet Eric Lawrence and Katya Sedova and discuss networking. As you can tell from the videos we had a lot of fun doing them and hope to have the Channel...

Hey all, The transcript for the October Expert chat is now available. Many thanks to all who attended our final chat for IE7. We intend to keep this going after IE7 ships so stay tuned :) Cheers, Uche Enuha Program Manager