April, 2008

Have you ever seen this dialog while surfing the web in Internet Explorer? You browse to your favorite news site. The content starts loading, you've already started reading the headline, and then it happens. Those of you familiar with the operation aborted dialog know that it spells sudden doom for the website you're currently viewing. Unsuspecting users have no idea what it means and simply click 'OK' and then watch in horror as the web page they were just reading disappears; only to be replaced...

If you’re a developer, there’s an easy way to give your eyes a rest and make yourself more productive. Use the Consolas font Microsoft developed specifically for you. When we began work on a project to create a new set of fonts which would take maximum advantage of ClearType, we decided to develop a fixed-pitch font for developers - because no one ever thought of their needs, and we realized a highly-readable fixed-width font would make their lives a lot easier. We call them the C* fonts because...

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for an Expert Zone chat this Thursday, April 17 th at 10.00 PDT/17.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered by members of the IE product team. If you can’t join us online, all chat transcripts are published here . Allow approximately 7-10 days following a chat for the transcript to go live. Hope you can join us on Thursday! Kristen Kibble Program Manager

With the release of IE8 Beta 1, I'm pleased to be able to talk about the first round of improved standards compliance and bug fixes in IE's HTML and DOM support for the new IE8 standards mode . Doug hinted at some of these improvements, and I wrote a little bit about them in the IE8 Beta 1 whitepapers here and here . In this post, I'd like to enumerate the 'change list' (of sorts) here on the blog in response to requests for such a list that I received at MIX08. Personally, I've been long-awaiting...

The IE Automatic Component Activation (IE ACA) update is now available as part of the April 2008 Internet Explorer Cumulative Update . The "click to activate" behavior, formerly required for ActiveX controls embedded in some webpages, is now permanently removed from Internet Explorer. For detailed information on IE ACA, see our blog post from last November announcing this update. This update replaces the IE ACA previews released in December 2007 and February 2008. Thanks, Jefferson Fletcher...

The IE Cumulative Security Update for April 2008 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 to ensure that you receive the latest updates for all Microsoft products. This update addresses 1 remote code execution vulnerabilities. This security update addresses this vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer handles HTML and...

Hi, I’m Eric Lawrence from the Internet Explorer Security Team. With the RSA security conference kicking off this week, I wanted to start sharing more information about the security features and benefits of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. Over the next several weeks, we’ll blog in greater detail about some of the security improvements in Beta 1, such as the new Safety Filter, greater control over ActiveX controls, and new AJAX features for safer mashups (XDomainRequest and XDM). This is not a complete...

The IE team is pleased to announce the availability of Chinese (Simplified) and German versions of Windows Internet Explorer Beta 1 for Developers. The two languages released today are fully localized versions of the IE8 English Beta 1 , released March 5, 2008. They carry with them the same improved CSS 2.1 support, better scripting performance, and other features and improvements that the English beta 1 developer release contains. Download links: IE8 Beta 1 Chinese (Simplified) for Developers...

As we worked towards the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, the IE team focused hard on performance. As part of our effort to improve IE, our investigations have revealed several add-on performance problems. In this post, I want to share some of the common themes that we have discovered. First, I would like to thank those of you who have provided feedback on this blog, in the IE Beta NewsGroup , and around the web . The Internet Explorer team has been working hard on performance in...