February, 2009

Myself as well as some other people from the team recently sat down with Charles Torre from Channel 9 to talk about IE8. We thought you might enjoy these: Accelerators with Jon Seitel Developer Tools with John Hrvatin Search with Sharon Cohen Web Slices with Jane Kim You can check out all the IE8 related videos on Channel 9 here . There are also some interesting IE8 “How Do I” videos on MSDN. Thanks! Sharon Cohen Program Manager

We wanted to let you know that an update was released earlier today that will improve Internet Explorer’s reliability for users running the Windows 7 Beta. The update is now available via Windows Update , and can also be downloaded via Microsoft Update . In this post we’ll discuss how we used the information that we’re receiving from Windows 7 Beta customers to determine the reliability fixes to include in this update. We use the term “reliability” to broadly encompass all types of stability...

The February Expert Zone Chat has been rescheduled for Tuesday, February 24 th at 10:00AM PST/18:00 UTC. If you can’t join us live, the transcript for all chats are available here . See you Tuesday. Thanks everyone! -Allison

Opacity. Gradients. Drop shadows. Long before CSS proposals for Transitions and Transforms , Internet Explorer 4 supported visual special effects through CSS. This capability was further extended by Internet Explorer 5.5. As an example, the following rule could be used to apply opacity to an object: filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50); Partly as a consequence of its early design, the syntax for filter properties violates the CSS 2.1 grammar: it includes a ‘:’ character...

Sincere apologies for the trouble we had this morning with the IE chat. A problem in the tool prevented us from initiating the chat. We plan to reschedule and will let you know the new date as soon as possible. As always, previous transcripts are available here . Sharon Cohen Program Manager

We’ve said a lot about our approach to website compatibility in general and the Compatibility View feature in particular. But because we've shared this information across multiple blogs and sources, I’d like to quickly recap what we’ve previously announced in summary form and provide links to additional content / reading as necessary. IE8 Standards by Default Going into IE8 Beta 1, the Internet Explorer team demonstrated its commitment to interoperability and web standards by announcing that...

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for an Expert Zone chat this Thursday, February 19 th 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! If you can’t join us live, the transcript for all chats are available here . Other upcoming Expert Zone chat dates can be found here . Sharon Cohen Program Manager

As we've now entered the last major phase of our product cycle, we’d like to thank everyone for their dedication to making Internet Explorer 8 a better product. As mentioned in IE8 Beta Feedback our Technical Beta Program provides a way for an invited set of beta testers around the world to test and file bugs against IE8. Since the release of beta 1, the technical beta community has continuously provided excellent feedback and we have fixed a significant amount of bugs because of it. By rating your...

We’ve previously blogged about Compatibility View ; this post is a follow-up on compatibility and Internet Explorer 8 RC1. As you are browsing the web with Internet Explorer 8 RC1, you might come across some web sites where everything is not displayed correctly: These issues can be fixed by clicking on the Compatibility View button on the address bar: This button draws the page the same way that Internet Explorer 7 would - allowing content designed for older web browsers to still work...

The IE Cumulative Security Update for February 2009 is now available via Windows Update . Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the 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 two privately reported vulnerabilities. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles the...

Hello, I'm Alex Glover and I'm the test owner of the SmartScreen Filter in Internet Explorer 8. The SmartScreen Filter helps protect IE8 users against phishing scams and sites distributing malware . In a previous post , Eric described the SmartScreen features and improvements over the Phishing Filter in IE7, such as anti-malware support, new user interface, and better performance. Today I'm going to talk about how SmartScreen works with other features to combat malware, and describe the changes we...

A few weeks back, we announced Compatibility View improvements available in the Release Candidate build of IE8. As you’ll remember from my previous post, users can choose to receive a list of major sites that are best viewed in Compatibility View . When navigating to a site on the list, IE8 will automatically display the site in Compatibility View without requiring the user to press the Compatibility View button. There’s been a lot of really good discussion around this and a few common questions...

The IE8 feature Suggested Sites helps you discover related sites that can be helpful to get more information about your interests. Under the hood, Suggested Sites is a system that provides suggestions by using a collection of users’ visited sites. You may be wondering how Suggested Sites works with the investments we’ve made in privacy . Respecting user privacy and giving the user control over the data provided has been part of the design philosophy of Suggested Sites since the beginning. This blog...

One of the things that I learned from working on IE is that there are common patterns of how users browse the web, yet what they browse varies person to person. We designed Visual Search Suggestions, Accelerators, and Web Slices to simplify common patterns with the flexibility for you to customize these features with services that you enjoy. I want to explain how IE8 treats services and share how I personalize IE8 with my favorite services in less than 5 minutes. Out-of-box services We want...

Hi, my name is Kymberlee Price, and I recently joined the Internet Explorer team as a Security Program Manager for IE8, working with Eric Lawrence. Prior to this I spent five years in Microsoft's Security Engineering & Communications team (MSEC) where I founded the Security Researcher Community Outreach team in 2003 and drove the first three BlueHat events. I joined IE at the perfect time to watch a new security feature be created, and thought customers and security researchers might be interested...