January, 2009

This is one of my favorite times in the product cycle. IE8 is platform complete and as we get closer to releasing the final product, more and more web developers and designers will take advantage of the browser’s features to enable scenarios we haven’t even imagined! Since the release of IE8 Beta 2 we’ve listened to feedback from many channels including IE8 Beta Feedback , standards working groups and this blog. We’ve made thousands of platform improvements in response to both feedback, and from...

Since the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, we’ve listened, watched and learned a lot about how people use the new features and our focus has been to refine them for RC1 (the Release Candidate). This post will give you an overview of the end user changes we’ve made which we’ll discuss in detail over the coming weeks. In IE8 we made a big push to make sure you can easily get to the sites and use the services you care about. If you’re anything like us, you visit a lot of websites and use...

As we planned Internet Explorer 8, our security teams analyzed the common attacks in the wild and the trends that suggest where attackers will be focusing their attention next. Over the course of IE8’s development, we’ve also worked closely with those in the security research community to stay on top of new classes of threats. One of the most subtle and interesting web application security vulnerabilities is called Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF); security researcher Jeremiah Grossman calls CSRF...

The Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate is the last major IE8 testing milestone. It indicates that we believe that IE8 is implementation complete for CSS 2.1 . We also believe IE8 RC1 has the most complete implementation of the CSS 2.1 specification in the industry. The only way to know if a browser has correctly implemented a specification is to develop a comprehensive set of tests for the specification. These can be used to determine both the support for a specific part of the spec and the...

We're excited to make the IE8 Release Candidate available today for public download today in 25 languages for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server customers. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 . Please download it now and try it out . We welcome your feedback ! What’s New The team will post more about all changes between Beta 2 and RC. In brief: Platform Complete . The technical community should expect the final IE8 release to behave as the Release Candidate does...

Hello all, Just like for previous beta releases, I am going to guide you through the upgrade steps for Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (IE8 RC1). Before we begin, let me summarize the major changes you will see when installing IE8 RC1: If you are a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 user and you are upgrading from IE8 Beta 1 or Beta 2 to IE8 RC1, you are no longer required to manually uninstall earlier IE8 builds. Instead, IE8 RC1 installer will automatically upgrade your machine...

I’m Christian Stockwell, a Program Manager on the IE team focused on browser performance. Measuring the overall performance of websites and web browsers is important for users comparing the performance characteristics of competitive browsers, developers optimizing their websites for download times and responsiveness, browser vendors monitoring the performance implications of code changes, and everyone else who is generally interested in understanding website performance. I thought it would...

…notice this yesterday while running the Windows 7 Beta: If you open the newly redesigned whitehouse.gov in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 Beta, you’ll notice that the dropdown menus don’t hide correctly when you hover over other menu items. This is because the version of IE8 in Windows 7 Beta is somewhat older than the Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate (IE8 RC1) that we're about to release for Windows Vista and Windows XP. Internet Explorer 8 RC1 displays whitehouse.gov correctly...

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for the first Expert Zone chat of 2009 this Thursday, January 22 nd at 10.00 PST/18.00 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 our previous chats! Other upcoming Expert Zone chat dates can be found here . If you can’t join us live, the transcript for all chats are available here . Sharon Cohen Program Manager

Hi, my name is Tony Ross and I’m one of the Program Managers for Internet Explorer. As JP mentioned in an earlier post , the IE Team has been working to make IE8 the most accessible web browser possible. We have also been working on improving interoperability and making things easier for web developers. Following these goals, I want to introduce you to a change we’ve made in the RC aimed at improving our support for ARIA , a syntax for making dynamic web content accessible. I’ll walk you through...

Back in October , Sunava described changes that we made to the XDomainRequest (XDR) object in IE8 between the Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases. This object allows your AJAX web pages to request data from sites with a different hostname from the page itself, something that IE doesn’t allow for security reasons via XMLHttpRequest . Since Beta 1 we’ve been working with the W3C Web Application group on the Access Control framework and the changes we made in Beta 2 were to adopt the Simple Cross...

As a Program Manager, I love to write feature specifications (that’s a job description requirement)! In each spec, PMs carefully weigh the pros and cons of certain design tradeoffs , consider the customer requests, available feedback and telemetry data , etc. Based on all of that information, we make certain informed assumptions about what we would like to build and how. Despite our best planning efforts, we know that some of the assumptions made in early specs may change at any time through development...

The Windows 7 Beta includes a beta of Internet Explorer 8. I say “a beta” because IE8 in Windows 7 Beta is a pre-release candidate build of IE: it’s IE8 Beta 2 plus end user features that are only available on Windows 7 plus many fixes based on feedback we’ve gotten from IE8 Beta 2 usage. This post is an overview of what you’ll find new in Windows 7’s Internet Explorer, as well as some suggestions about how to get the best experience with this pre-release software. Tabs in the Taskbar Tabs...

As announced in February 2008 , Internet Explorer 8 sends an updated user-agent string when interacting with web servers. Since we last blogged about the User-Agent string, the Internet Explorer team introduced Compatibility View and today, the Windows team is releasing the Windows 7 Beta . Each of these events has a small impact on the User-Agent string, as I will outline in this post. The Trident/4.0 User-Agent String In order to help users visit sites that block the “MSIE 8.0” user-agent...

We believe IE8 helps make browsing the web faster, easier, safer and more reliable. To help our users be more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE8 via Automatic Update (AU) and the Windows Update (WU) and Microsoft Update (MU) sites much like we did for IE7. We know that in a corporate environment, the IT organization will often want to delay the introduction of a new browser until they have tested compatibility with internal applications and sites. We’ve done a lot of work in IE8 to maintain...