Trustworthy Browsing with IE8: Summary

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 we’ve made in each of these key areas. This post serves as a summary for readers who would like to refer back to the posts we’ve made on this topic.

Trustworthy Browsing: Security

• Part I: DEP/NX Memory Protection details how Internet Explorer 8 will mitigate memory-related vulnerabilities by working with Windows and your processor to help prevent code from running in memory that was marked non-executable.
  
  
• Part II: ActiveX Improvements explains the important attack surface reduction changes we’ve made to add-ons for IE8, and provides references to help developers build more secure controls.
  
  
• Part III: The SmartScreen® Filter describes how we’ve built upon the success of the IE7 Phishing Filter to deliver reputation-based protection against malicious sites, including those that distribute malicious software.
  
  
• Part IV: The XSS Filter explains cross-site-scripting attacks and details how the new IE8 feature will help mitigate the most common vulnerability in software today.
  
  
• Part V: Comprehensive Protection describes how the Web Application Defenses, Local Browser Defenses, and Social Engineering defenses we’ve built for IE8 help provide comprehensive protection from malicious sites.
  
  
• Part VI: Beta 2 Update, coming to the IE Blog next week, will describe minor changes we’ve made to Beta 2 security features in response to customer feedback and to improve support for the current HTML5 draft proposal.

Trustworthy Browsing: Reliability

• IE8 and Loosely-Coupled-IE explains the architectural changes which have been made to Internet Explorer to help improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of the browser.
  
  
• IE8 and Reliability describes how LCIE enables the new IE8 Automatic Crash Recovery feature, designed get users back to browsing as quickly as possible after a crash.

Trustworthy Browsing: Privacy

• Privacy Beyond Blocking Cookies: Bringing Awareness to Third-Party Content discusses one aspect of privacy on the web: third-party content.
  
  
• IE8 and Privacy discusses new IE8 InPrivate™ features that give users more choice about controlling what information they keep and exchange.

Trustworthy Browsing: Business Practices

• IE8 and Trustworthy Browsing frames our overall approach in Security, Privacy, Reliability and Business Practices for IE8 in reference to Microsoft’s framework for Trustworthy Computing.
  
  
• Font Embedding on the Web describes our proposed standard for font embedding that supports the intellectual property rights of type designers.

Thank You!

This summer, we’ve done our best to keep you informed about the investments we’re making in Trustworthy Browsing for IE8 while working feverishly to deliver these improvements as soon as possible. Our blog community, chat participants, standards bodies, partners and even competitors have provided tons of great feedback on the work we’re doing, and Internet Explorer 8 will be a much better browser for it.

Thank you all—we hope you enjoy IE8.

Eric Lawrence
Program Manager
IE Security

Update 12/1: Adding a link to the Beta 2 Update security blog post.