March, 2007

We’ve noticed a few blog posts asking why IE7 in Windows Vista displays a prompt to launch Notepad. You can see this prompt by right clicking on a webpage and selecting View Source. I want to explain why the prompt is displayed and also tell you how to turn it off. As you probably already know from previous blog entries , Windows Vista includes an IE security feature called Protected Mode. Protected Mode runs the IE process with lower privileges and also helps protect against malicious webpages...

Jeremy Dallman here with some important information from the MSXML team to the IE development community. The XML Team’s Blog has recently announced that they will be issuing a kill-bit for MSXML4 at the end of 2007 (October-December timeframe). Please read through the below post copied from the XML Team’s Blog and start validating your applications against MSXML6. They have provided an email address to field your questions or concerns. Please don’t hesitate to contact them with your feedback....

Hi, my name is Mike Chan, and I’m a product manager for Internet Explorer focused on businesses. This week, we released two documents to help businesses get IE7 deployed. The first document explains the business value of upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP and can help you convince your management to deploy the latest version of IE. The second document provides detailed guidance on how to get moving on that deployment. The IE7 Technology Overview for Businesses describes how improvements...

In my original blog post about releasing the IE6 Virtual PC Image, we mentioned that it would expire on April 1st, 2007 (no, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke), and that we’d be releasing a new VPC image to replace it sometime in March. Well, I’m happy to report that I propped the new VHD up on Monday morning. You can download the image here . Take note that a free download of Virtual PC 2007 is now available, replacing VPC2004. I didn’t make any major changes to the image other than adding the latest...

Just after we released IE7, we announced a contest for developers. Create and submit an add-on to www.IEAddOns.com and the best add-on would win a trip for two to MIX07. Entries needed to be submitted to www.IEAddOns.com between November 1, 2006 and February 9, 2007, had to be either a completely new add-on or an enhanced version of an existing add-on. We recruited members of the Internet Explorer product team to install and review the add-ons. With over 400 entries, it was a difficult decision to...

I would like to announce that Microsoft released Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 . This service pack contains a roll-up of all IE6 fixes to date. It will not upgrade IE6 users to IE7. For more information about other changes in the release please refer to the "Evaluate and Plan" section of the Windows Server 2003 SP2 download page . IE7 users can upgrade directly to Windows Server 2003 SP2 without uninstalling IE7 first. There has been some confusion around this point. We are in the process...

Hi, I’m B. Ashok, the Product Unit Manager for Web Development Tools . As mentioned in my earlier post last summer, we have removed the DHTML Editing Control from Windows Vista as part of making the operating system more secure. One application that used the DHTML Editing Control in the past was OWA (Outlook Web Access). We have issued a required update to both Exchange 2000 and 2003 that enables OWA support for IE7 in Windows Vista. However if your server does not have this update applied, you...

I posted a short FAQ on troubleshooting Favicons in IE7 on my blog . The post has been fairly popular since the initial posting, and these questions come up a lot, so we thought we’d bring it to the attention of the larger IE community. If you have further questions, I will be happy to answer them. –Jeff Davis, SDE

One thing I like to do when I set up my machine is customize the location of my personal stuff like photos, documents, pictures, and favorites to a different drive in order to preserve my files during the onslaught of dual booting, upgrading the OS etc. which I often perform as a tester on IE. For the sake of relevance and simplicity, I am going to limit this discussion to only Favorites and not all of the shell folders. What used to be an undesirable hack in XP is now a fully supported feature...