April, 2009

The idea behind Accelerators has always been to reduce the distance between services and the end-user. Ideally, we’d like people to be able to select content, very quickly find the service they want to use, and then preview or execute the output of that service easily. Because of that, we found it really important to make sure that nothing hinders users from finding the services they’re interested in. Of particular concern was the case of users with many installed Accelerators—trying to pick out...

We are pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer 8 in 18 additional languages. Internet Explorer 8 is now available in a total of 43 languages. List of NEW Internet Explorer 8 Languages: Language Code Windows Vista Windows Server 2008 Windows XP X86 X64 X86 X64 X86 Bulgarian BGR Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Bosnian (Cyrillic) BSC Yes - ...

Do you read about Internet Explorer and related technologies on MSDN? We’ve recently reorganized the table of contents for the HTML/DHTML Overviews . We would like your feedback. Hi! My name is Lance Leonard; I'm a Programmer/Writer on the Internet Explorer Developer Content team. I'm part of the team that’s responsible for the content on MSDN that relates to Internet Explorer, specifically HTML and CSS and Internet Explorer Development . You may have noticed that we've added a lot of new content...

I am a user interface tester on the Internet Explorer team and one of my favorite things about any application is the ability to personalize the program to give it your own look and feel. I am never content with ubiquitous one-size–fits-all solutions and really look forward to products that value user choice. I’m excited that IE8 now has some personalization options and this cycle I have been fortunate to work on two such features – IE8 Look and Feel (customizations around the Command bar) and...

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for an Expert Zone chat this Thursday, April 23 rd at 10.00 PST/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 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 . Thanks! See you Thursday. Allison Burnett Program Manager

The IE Cumulative Security Update for April 2009 is now available via Windows Update or Microsoft Update . This update addresses four privately reported vulnerabilities and two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer searches the system for files to load, performs authentication reply validation, handles transition errors when navigating between Web pages, and handles memory object. For detailed information...

Yesterday was a significant milestone in the web’s continuing evolution—the announcement of ECMAScript, Fifth Edition Candidate Specification (formerly known as ECMAScript 3.1 back when I last mentioned it ); the “Candidate Specification” stage is the last stop on the road to becoming a final standard. Read more about it on the Jscript blog ! This is a great achievement and paves the way for enhanced web programming scenarios in all browsers. I’d also like to personally thank Allen and Pratap...

In January we blogged about our plan to distribute IE8 via Automatic Update/Windows Update (for simplicity, we'll refer to this as Automatic Update for the rest of this blog post). This post provides some additional information about how users and administrators are in control of browser upgrades. Last week, we released IE8 via Automatic Update to users still running pre-release versions of IE8 (Beta 2 or Release Candidate 1). The goal was to make sure users who chose to install IE8 have the latest...

For the past several months, I’ve had the unique pleasure of helping to diagnose a variety of web site compatibility problems. Now I realize that I just called debugging web site issues a “unique pleasure”—why? Because I was able to use IE8’s enhanced script error dialog and developer tools! I found that script errors are one of the most common web site compatibility issues—often the source of many visual discrepancies in the layout of a page. These errors raise a lot of questions. What can you do...

In a previous post , Andy wrote about some of the new features we introduced to improve reliability in Internet Explorer, such as Loosely Coupled IE and Automatic Crash Recovery. These features help minimize the impact of reliability issues (such as crashes and hangs) once our users encounter them, allowing them to return to their original browsing state as soon as possible. From an engineering perspective, our goal is to minimize the occurrences of these issues in the first place. In today’s...

For those of you who didn’t make it to MIX, I wanted to take a quick minute to point out that the MIX team has made all of the sessions available for viewing and downloading. If you’re building any type of web site or web application, I’d highly recommend checking out Eric’s Security session and John’s performance session. Both will give you some great tips for writing better code, not just in Internet Explorer, but for browsers in general. A Brief History Of The Web http://windows.com...