September, 2008

Hi, my name is Helen Drislane, I am a program manager on the IE team responsible for some of the user interface including tabs and I‘m going to discuss the new Tab Grouping feature (tab color!) with you. We had a lot of fun putting this feature together, so I am going to explain a little bit about the process involved in designing it and then describe the things you can do with it. EVOLUTION OF THE DESIGN AND ALGORITHM After shipping Internet Explorer 7, the IE team collected data from user...

Greetings, I’m Russ McRee of Microsoft’s Online Services Security & Compliance Incident Management team. My team serves as incident handlers for the various types of attacks our online services face. High on the list of incidents we handle are cross-site scripting attacks. There’s an unfortunate misconception surrounding cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks that result in them being perceived as less impactful than other types of attacks, and often more theoretical than practical. I believe...

The latest Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) release, ACT 5.0.5428.1080 is publicly available and can be downloaded here . To give you some background, ACT helps customers understand their application compatibility situation by helping identify which applications are compatible with Vista, IE7, and IE8 and which require further testing. ACT allows compatibility data to be uploaded from individual machines to a central location for analysis, grouping and reporting. Once an issue has been...

Hi, my name is Jatinder Mann and I work on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) and Group Policy. Back in June , James Pratt and Jane Maliouta alluded to IEAK improvements for IE8. Today, I will be talking about the work we have done in this area. Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Beta IEAK8 Beta is now available publically for everyone to try. To give you some background, the IEAK allows you to deploy customized packages and manage IE settings post deployment within corporations...

Hello, My name is Sébastien Zimmermann. I’m the developer owner for the Visual Search Feature , which Sharon already described in detail. I also own the Accelerators Button Feature , and during IE7 worked on Setup and Phishing Filter—now “ SmartScreen® Filter ”. In this post, I would like to get you started on creating your own Visual Search service/provider for Internet Explorer 8. If you own or develop websites of any kind—even if it’s a small website or an intranet site—this post is for...

In August 2008, Dean announced the release of IE8 Beta 2 in English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Today the IE team is pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer Beta 2 in 21 additional languages. The languages released today are fully localized versions of the IE8 English Beta 2. The Complete List of IE8 Beta 2 Languages Arabic Chinese (Hong Kong) Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Czech Danish Dutch English Finnish...

Hello World! I’m Sharon Cohen, Program Manager for Search in Internet Explorer 8. If you’re already using IE8 Beta 2, you’ve probably already seen the new search features available in IE8, perhaps you’ve even tried them out. Today I’d like to show you these features in greater detail and fill you in on some of the things we were thinking about when we created them. Our goal for IE8 is to make searching for what you need faster and easier. We want you to search for the right term on the right...

In an earlier post , we introduced the new IE8 Smart Address Bar dropdown functionality. Now we thought we’d spend some time discussing some of its less obvious features in more detail. More about the IE8 Smart Address Bar Autocomplete Suggestion With Windows Search installed, IE8 makes an attempt to determine what site you’re trying to get to. The site that it determines is most likely the one you’re looking for is called the “Autcomplete Suggestion.” This entry is given the SHIFT+ENTER shortcut...

Hello! I am Sameer Chabungbam, one of the Program Managers on the JScript Team. The recently released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 contains a lot of improvements which are aimed at making developing web applications on Internet Explorer 8 easier and more productive. One of these improvements is the JScript Profiler in Developer Tools, which provides critical JScript related performance data to a web developer that helps identify and fix performance related issues. We believe the Profiler is going...

As mentioned in the first post on this topic , the IE8 Smart Address Bar works better with Windows Search installed. However, IE8 does not require Windows Search, and IE8 will still provide a superior experience to IE7 if it’s not there. We are going to go through and detail the differences between IE8 with and without Windows Search so people can understand the trade-offs. To start with, we made a choice to use Windows Search as our index & query engine when we began work on IE8 almost two...

Hello everyone! One of the features we improved in IE8 is the ‘new tab’ page, which is the page you see by default when you click the New Tab button on the Tab row, or if you hit CTRL+T (the keyboard shortcut that does the same thing). We’re the Program Managers for this page and would like to walk you through the history and evolution of this feature to what it is today in IE8 Beta 2. When IE7 was released in 2006, many users did not know what tabs were, so our new tab page didn’t really do...

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, Internet Explorer 8, as of Beta 2, offers native JSON parsing and serialization. This new native JSON functionality enables Internet Explorer 8 aware AJAX applications to run both faster and safer! What’s JSON? For those of you that are not die hard AJAX developers, allow me to provide a bit of background. JSON is a simple human readable data interchange format often used by AJAX applications when transmitting data between the server and...

For Beta 1, we discussed some of the technical improvements (like domain highlighting, multi-line paste, and improved click behavior) we made to IE8’s address bar. For Beta 2, we took the covers off of even bigger changes which fit in with our goal of making navigation easier and faster with IE8. Starting with Beta 2, when you type in the Address Bar, IE8 returns results not just based on the URL of the sites you’ve visited, but the title and other properties as well. It has an updated look that...

One of the key themes for IE8 is developer productivity. IE8 Beta 1 improved developer productivity through an optimized core scripting engine and script debugger. In this release, we continued to invest in the areas that bring more power and productivity to the web developer community. Here is a quick summary of the work that we’ve done for IE8 Beta 2: Scripting Engine Many enhancements have been done to the scripting engine. One feature that will bring a lot of value to the AJAX developers...

As you may know, all browsers have a set of CSS features that are either considered a vendor extension (e.g. - ms-interpolation-mode ), are partial implementations of properties that are fully defined in the CSS specifications, or are implementation of properties that exist in the CSS specifications, but aren’t completely defined. According to the CSS 2.1 Specification, any of the properties that fall under the categories listed previously must have a vendor specific prefix, such as '-ms-' for Microsoft...

We’ve been sharing plenty about the work we’ve done in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 for browser users; we also want to share some of the notable advances we’ve made in the web developer platform in Beta 2. This post serves as an overview of the web platform changes since beta 1 that will be covered in more detail in the coming days and weeks. The Layout Engine First and foremost, we’ve been hard at work improving our standards support – we are now “CSS2.1 property complete,” meaning we’ve implemented...

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for an Expert Zone chat next Thursday, September 11 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. Thank you to all who have attended the chats to date! If you can’t join us online, all chat transcripts are published here . Hope you can join us on Thursday for our first chat sine IE8 Beta 2 released! Kristen Kibble Program Manager P.S. Upcoming IE chat dates are...

In March I wrote about the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and outlined three key benefits: Integrated and simple-to-use Provide a visual interface to the platform Enable fast experimentation Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 brings the Developer Tools closer to realizing the full potential of these benefits with significant improvements to existing features and new functionality meant to make you more productive. Profiling and Debugging JScript Beta 1 introduced a JScript...

Now that Beta 2 has released, I want to provide a short update on some of the smaller security changes the team has recently made. I’ve also linked to a great article on the IE8 XSS Filter implementation written by the architect of that feature. Restricting document.domain The document.domain property initially returns the fully qualified domain name of the server from which a page is served. The property can be assigned to a domain suffix to allow sharing of pages across frames from different...