August, 2008

At the start of the Internet Explorer 8 project we made a commitment to great website compatibility. It’s worth noting that this commitment hasn’t changed, even given the short-term impact of our announcement to better align with Microsoft’s interoperability principles. In other words, compatibility has been and continues to be a very important part of the Internet Explorer 8 feature set. With Beta 2 we’re announcing a brand new feature known as Compatibility View. In a nutshell, Compatibility...

As others have written here before, users should be in control of their information. That’s at the core of privacy. Privacy has two aspects: disclosure and choice. Disclosure means informing users in plain language about the data collected about them and how it’s used. Choice means putting users in control of their data and giving them tools to protect it. Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing “off the record”? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know...

We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 . Please try it out! You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon. While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8...

I am here to tell you how to upgrade to IE8 Beta 2. IE8 Beta 2 system requirements are the same as IE8 Beta 1 and it’s currently available in English, Chinese Simplified, German and Japanese. Stay tuned for more localized IE8 Beta 2 versions to be available shortly. Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 Getting Ready Before you start IE8 Beta 2 installation, there are a couple of things to keep in mind: Uninstalling IE8 Beta 1 If you have Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 installed, the...

Hi! I’m Christian Stockwell, and I’m helping to improve Internet Explorer performance. In the past few months, each of the browser makers has made very similar claims around their performance: “Superior speed and performance”, “The fastest and most powerful Web browser available”, and “The fastest web browser on any platform.” In some fundamental way, I think the likeness of these statements is a by-product of the complexity inherent in performance measurement and analysis. Rather than join...

As Paul mentioned in Part 1 of this post, we’ve really focused on making your everyday browsing experience better. In addition to the useful changes he talked about, we’ve made IE8 even more useful with integrated services so that you can easily accomplish the common things you do on the web – search for a product, check the weather, map an address, and more) In Beta 1, we showed how IE8 could be better with services with features like Accelerators and Web Slices (BTW, Accelerators are the same...

Back in June, Dean Hachamovitch kicked off a series of blog posts explaining how the IE team approached the task of building a trustworthy browser. Trustworthiness is the foundation of Internet Explorer 8, and we’ve worked hard to deliver a product with improved security, reliability and privacy, while supporting these new features with responsible business practices that respect users’ choices. Throughout a lengthy set of blog posts this summer, my colleagues and I have detailed the investments...

It’s been just over five months since the MIX08 conference and IE8 Beta 1. One of the things I remain committed to is the furthering of web standards through a comprehensive test suite for each standard. This is necessary to eliminate ambiguities or differences that cause implementation differences between user agents (aka browsers). Those differences create frustration for web developers who are just trying to build web sites that interoperate. The IE team has been actively working on Internet...

Hi, my name is Paul Cutsinger and I’m the Lead Program Manager for the IE8 User Experience. As Dean mentioned in his beta 2 announcement post, for IE8 we focused on improving people’s everyday browsing experience – what they do all the time. We looked closely at what people do and how they do it to design ways to make their browsing even better. For all of the top usage patterns, we looked for ways to reduce steps, introduce new capabilities, and improve on how people actually browse. In this...

Previous posts have covered trustworthy principles in general and some product specifics as well. Privacy is an important part of trustworthy computing. This post discusses one aspect of privacy on the web: third-party content. When most people browse the web, they think what they see in the address bar and the site they are visiting are the same thing. However, web sites today typically incorporate content from many different web sites. For the sake of clear terminology, the site the user browses...

The IE Cumulative Security Update for August 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 six remote code execution vulnerabilities. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles...

Earlier today, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky kicked off the Engineering Windows 7 blog ; we hope to have a discussion with the community about how we are building the next version of Windows, much like we have with the IE Blog and IE development. Be sure to check it out for yourself! Tony Chor IE Group Program Manager

Hey there, just a short post to let you know that new VPC images are ready for download. You can access them from the tools section on the Internet Explorer Developer Center , too. Thank you for your patience! Kristen Kibble Program Manager