February, 2007

I can’t believe it’s already been almost a year since MIX06 , and the countdown for MIX07 has started. With 63 days until MIX07 starts, and the early bird discount still available, now is the time to register ! While the list of sessions is still being finalized, the IE team is going to be there in force again this year. We’ve already announced a few IE specific sessions, including “IE7 Past, Present and Future”, “Making Money with RSS”, and “Thinking in CSS: How to Build Great Looking Sites with...

One of the benefits of creating a new URI parsing API for IE7 was that we were able to more easily add support for IPv6 addresses in URIs throughout IE7. This blog post will describe the use of IPv6 URIs in IE7. IPv6 Syntax One of the advantages of IPv6 over IPv4 is that IPv6 addresses are four times longer than IPv4 addresses (128 bits vs. 32 bits) allowing for about 3.402 * 10 38 unique IPv6 addresses. Due to the longer length, a new and more compact textual representation is used for IPv6...

It’s always good practice when developing web pages to test them in browsers with default settings as it is most likely that your users will have default settings when using their browsers. One thing that we’ve seen catch a couple of people out with IE is that the default settings can be a little different depending on the security zone the page is running in. Many of you will be familiar with the different security zones in Internet Explorer with the internet and intranet zones being two that...

The IE cumulative February 2007 security update is now available via Windows Update . Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update . I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already. This update addresses 3 security issues – all three are remote code execution vulnerabilities. For more information on the contents of this update, please see: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-016 Microsoft Knowledge Base article 928090...

Recently, I received an interesting customer question I thought I would share. A web developer presented me with the following scenario: his web application lets users create and manage a list of items, and this list is exposed as a feed so users can be updated when it changes. However, after the user deletes an item using the web application, that item is still present in the feed view of the RSS aggregator. Since the feed is supposed to correctly reflect the state of the user’s item list, this...

Introduction New to IE7 is more reliable and standards-compliant support for international mailto URIs. This post will describe how users, application developers, and web developers can use this new feature of IE7. The following is a simple example of a mailto URI which, when clicked, will launch your default email client to send a new message: mailto:name@example.com In IE6, mailto URIs containing characters not found in your system codepage may or may not appear in your mail client...

We’ve refreshed the look of the IE Add-ons site and integrated the site with Windows Marketplace . You can go there directly at ieaddons.com or from within IE7 (choose Tools->Manage Add-ons->Find More Add-ons.) While you’re there, take a look at my favorite IE7 add-on, the NewsGator Desktop Synchronizer , which keeps the IE7 RSS feed list in sync with the NewsGator Online list. This lets me keep the same RSS feeds on my work and home computers as well as giving me a web UI to read feeds. ...

Back in November, we announced our intention to bring Extended Validation SSL Certificates to IE7 . This week at RSA we’ve announced that IE7’s EV SSL support is now live! Many Certification Authorities (CAs), including VeriSign, CyberTrust, Entrust and GoDaddy, are already issuing EV SSL Certificates. We are already seeing businesses such as eBay , PayPal , Charles Schwab , Overstock.com , French Soaps and Stardock ) beginning to use EV to offer verified identity information to their users. I recently...