March, 2009

I’ve blogged about the Compatibility View features included in Internet Explorer 8 a few times during the Beta 2 and Release Candidate milestones. Now that Internet Explorer 8 has released, I wanted to follow-up with a quick post highlighting the content that’s been created on MSDN regarding the Compatibility View List. To review, Internet Explorer 8 includes a suite of features under the umbrella term ‘Compatibility View’. These features give users a way to mitigate website compatibility problems...

Accelerators are a robust and customizable way of bringing you closer to the services you use most. We’ve said a lot about the technology behind Accelerators and how to build on it, but I thought it might be nice to step back for a minute and look at some of the things people have already built. So for the rest of this post, I’ll be throwing a few interesting Accelerators into the spotlight. These are five Accelerators that I thought were notable in some way, either because they did something...

Over the last year, we’ve published two posts about how the IE8 SmartScreen ® filter helps to prevent phishing and malware attacks. In this post, I’d like to share some real-world data on the protection provided to IE8 pre-release users by the anti-malware feature. We’ve invested heavily in this feature, and we’ve seen significant results. Here are some key statistics: We have delivered over 10 million malware blocks in the past six months That’s a block for one out of 40 users, every...

Just a quick reminder that we’ve got two great opportunities for you to interact with the IE team this week. Tomorrow, March 25 th at 10.00 PDT/17.00 UTC is the Expert Zone chat . This is our first chat since IE8 released and we are excited to hear what you think and answer your questions. Thursday, March 26 th is the Internet Explorer 8 FireStarter event . This is a full day of talks and discussions about IE8. Everyone is invited to attend either in person or via Live Meeting . Thanks,...

During Beta1 and Beta2 pre-releases of IE8, we’ve blogged about the performance optimizations done in the Script engine and the addition of new language features such as native JSON support . We also provided details about the JScript Debugger and the JScript Profiler –that shipped as part IE8 Developer Tools One of the big pieces of feedback during our beta cycles was for compatibility, which, for JScript, meant focusing on how we version some of the language features we’re adding. As a result...

Thank you to everyone who has provided the IE Team with feedback on IE8. Your dedication to making this product the best it can be is truly amazing. Here is an update on the feedback channels mentioned in IE8 Beta Feedback blog post back in March of 2008: IE8 Technical Beta – We invited a group of beta testers, including anyone who emailed us, from around the world to test and submit issues on IE8 through Microsoft Connect . Compared to feedback during IE7, we received a high percentage...

Internet Explorer 8 represents a leap forward in support for web standards. We believe that IE8 has the first complete implementation of CSS 2.1 in the industry and it is fully compliant with the current CSS 2.1 test suite. The only way to know if a browser has correctly implemented a specification is to develop a comprehensive set of tests for the specification. Those tests are the best reference for how a browser will behave when you’re writing a web page. Today, the IE Team is submitting...

Hi, I’m Kris Krueger, the Test Lead for the developer platform in Internet Explorer. When we announced the IE8 Release Candidate , the call to action for site owners, software developers, designers, and administrators was to test with the Release Candidate build and make any changes necessary to create the best possible customer experience with IE8. We stated that we would continue listening to feedback from the community, but would be very selective about the changes to the platform made from...

Today we’re excited to release the final build of Internet Explorer 8 in 25 languages. IE8 makes what real people do on the web every day faster, easier, and safer. Anyone running Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server can get 32- and 64-bit versions now from http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 . (Windows 7 users will receive an updated IE8 as part of the next Windows 7 milestone.) We’ve blogged a lot here about what’s in IE8. Stepping back from individual features, Internet Explorer is focused...

Thinking back, I think we can all remember a time sitting in our high school computer labs, clamoring away on the keyboard trying to finish some assignment our Computer Studies teacher, Mr. Smith for the example I’m going to use in this post, had assigned. Something that I always found amazing was how the high school IT Administrators, usually also Mr. Smith, would be able to manage such an environment on a relatively tiny budget. Today’s large corporations can afford fairly specialized IT Pro...

While the team continues getting ready for Mix09 coming up this week, we wanted to let you know about another unique opportunity coming up next week. On Thursday, March 26 th , the IE team will host the Internet Explorer 8 FireStarter event. This is a one-day conference with IE8 talks from myself and other team members. If you are local to Redmond, we invite you to attend the event in person . Other options to attend are via Live Meeting or at a live streaming session hosted by your local user group...

The March IE Chat will be rescheduled for March 25 th at 10:00AM PST/18:00 UTC. A significant number of the IE PM team will be attending the Mix09 conference in Las Vegas on March 18-20 th and didn’t want to miss out on chat. We apologize for any inconvenience. See you next Wednesday! Thanks! Allison Burnett Program Manager

Reports of broken sites are an important part of the feedback the IE team receives from the community. When we receive a report of a broken site, we take it and identify the core issue causing the problem. A number of these issues end up being side effects of changes we deliberately made in IE8, but even these are useful. They help us identify which IE8 changes have the broadest compatibility impact. In this post I'll share some of these issues with you so you can quickly identify problems affecting...

Hello, my name is Amy Adams and I’m a Lead Software Design Engineer in Test on Internet Explorer’s Web Service Integration team. I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the different mechanisms for providing a great and secure experience for Web Slices and feeds. We first described Web Slices when we launched them in IE8 beta 1, and also talked about the improvements we made to Web Slices and RSS in IE8 beta 2 as well as the post Ritika recently made about Dynamic Web Slices . Now available...

We’ve made a few improvements to our extensibility model in IE8 RC1 based on feedback we’ve received both internally and externally. WebBrowser (WebOC) Rendering Mode Changes About a year ago, I posted an entry talking about WebBrowser Control Rendering Modes in IE8 . You may recall that applications using the WebBrowser Control (also known as the WebOC, or Trident hosts) can use a Feature Control Key to select the default rendering mode of webpages they load. Since our release of IE8 Beta...

Internet Explorer 8 now allows users to more easily manage their toolbars and add-ons. Feedback from Internet Explorer 7 users clearly indicated that there is a need for easier management of toolbar and add-ons. Our IE7 user feedback showed that less experienced users had problems with hiding toolbars to free up browser screen real estate, or to get rid of a toolbar that they no longer wanted. More experienced users understood that any toolbar and add-on that runs in a browser will have an impact...

Mix09 is just around the corner, approaching quickly. I’m really excited to get back to Vegas and back to the conference. The Internet Explorer sessions are now live on the MIX website ( http://2009.visitmix.com ) and there’s lots of great content there. If you aren’t already registered, there is still time. It’s a great opportunity to find out what’s going on with Internet Explorer. Many people from the engineering team will be at the conference both giving talks and helping out at the IE compatibility...

Web Slices are a cool new feature in Internet Explorer 8! With Web Slices, users can add little snippets of the web to the favorites bar and monitor their updates. Web Slices were introduced in a previous post here . In this post, I want to walk you through creating a dynamic Web Slice in as little as 5 minutes! What is a dynamic Web Slice? Dynamic Web Slices use an Alternative Display Source (not to be confused with Alternative Update Source ). As the name suggests, the content displayed in...

Internet Explorer 8 has a new feature that keeps you in control of your search engine default, by informing you when software attempts to change your settings. If you are using Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 or RC1, you might have seen the following dialog when installing new software: The default search preference is the search engine Internet Explorer uses when you type a search query into the search box in the top-right corner of the main Internet Explorer window: (Wikipedia is set...