November, 2006

Many of you have asked how to run IE6 and IE7 in a side by side environment. As Chris Wilson blogged about early this year, it’s unfortunately not so easy to do. There are workarounds, but they are unsupported and don’t necessarily work the same way as IE6 or IE7 would work when installed properly. As Chris said, the best way to use multiple versions of IE on one machine is via virtualization. Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2004 a free download; we’ve taken advantage of that by releasing...

Congratulations Adobe Flash team on shipping the Flash Player 9 update on Tuesday! This Flash update serves as a model implementation for how browser extensions can work with Protected Mode to keep users safe. As most of you already know, on Windows Vista, IE7 includes a special feature called Protected Mode where the IE process runs with low privileges. This helps IE significantly reduce the ability of an attack to write, alter or destroy data on the user's machine or to install malicious...

Hello again, this is Peter Gurevich, Performance PM for IE. We have gotten a lot of good feedback from our first post on IE + JavaScript Performance Recommendations so I am eager to hear what you think of our second installment. This is the first of two posts concerning inefficiencies in Javascript code itself. JScript Code Inefficiencies – Chapter One There are plenty of ways to use JScript (and other Javascript engines) inefficiently since the interpreter performs almost zero optimizations...

The IE cumulative November 2006 security update is now available via Windows Update . Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update and I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already. This update addresses 2 security issues: 2 remote code execution vulnerabilities. For more information on the contents of this update, please see: Microsoft Knowledge Base article: MS06-067 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer...

Some of you may have seen stories comparing IE7’s anti-phishing accuracy with our competitors, citing different studies than the one I blogged about earlier that showed IE7’s Phishing Filter had the best overall accuracy. Paul Robichaux, from 3Sharp (the company that ran the study I cited), provides his initial take on this other study here . Tony Chor Group Program Manager

As an engineer, I’m proud of the protections we delivered by finishing IE7 but I want to set your expectations that we didn’t and, never will, reach perfection. There have been a few posts on ways to steal data or spoof URLs in IE7 but they really don’t detract from a very simple truth: IE7 will be more secure than IE6 was and frankly, comparisons to other browsers are still too early to be objective. I want to talk about the “big picture” of how I will judge the progress we made in IE7 and how...

We want you to know that some IE7 and Windows Vista users will need today’s security update for MSXML even though by default Windows XP and Windows Vista are not affected. Many applications install and use versions 4 and the original version 6 of the control as a part of the XML Core Services. The most common versions of MSXML don’t require any update such as MSXML3 and the version of MSXML6 installed with Windows Vista. Rob Franco Lead Program Manager

We have received a bunch of questions about the Automatic Updates (AU) distribution process for IE7 and the worldwide rollout over AU. Here are some facts that hope will answer some of those questions. Prior to starting general AU distribution to IE6 users, IE7 was available via the IE site for several weeks. This brought IE7 to a wider range of users than the beta and enabled us to watch for any issues. The initial rollout went well and we continue to monitor customer feedback through many channels...

As you may have seen on the Windows Vista blog , we released Windows Vista to manufacturing today! Wahoo!!! IE7 in Windows Vista is mostly the same as the IE7 for XP we released a few weeks ago (in fact, we have a single code base for both.) There are a few additional benefits in IE7 in Windows Vista that take advantage of some of the improvements in the new OS, the biggest of which is Protected Mode which allows IE to run at lower than user privilege, thereby providing an additional layer of...

Since we announced the release of IE7, we’ve noticed many questions and discussion about how well the program works with various screen readers and screen enlargers on the net. We wanted to provide the latest information we have from the various manufacturers of these products and answer some concerns around automatic updates. IE7 and Automatic Updates As we announced earlier , IE7 is now being distributed via automatic updates.That said, no matter what setting a user has for automatic updates...

Hi, I’m Kelvin Yiu, a program manager with the Windows Crypto team, and I’m very excited to be posting today on the IE blog, announcing plans to make Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates available in January 2007. For over a year, we’ve been working on shaping the form of the next generation SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificates, so that they not only provide encryption but also a standard for identity on the Internet. For that purpose we teamed up with many Certification Authorities (CAs...

I previously blogged about the availability of the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0, a tool that can help you find potential compatibility issues, particularly for corporate IE departments. Since distribution of the beta download ended in October, I am excited to announce that the release candidate of ACT 5.0 is now available to download and can be used on XPSP2 with IE7 to help you find compatibility issues. You can find more about ACT 5.0 by visiting here . In addition to ACT 5.0, the IE7...

We have released Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP in five new languages: German, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Finnish. You can download these today from the IE website . As with the English version, we’re making the localized downloads available a few weeks ahead of distribution via Automatic Updates . German, French, Spanish and Finnish users should be prepared for AU distribution by mid-November. Japanese AU distribution will begin this spring. We will release additional languages as...