June, 2009

For those of you who manage your organization’s desktops using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Internet Explorer 8 will be made available via this technology starting August 25, 2009. Internet Explorer 8 will be made available as an “Update rollup” and will be applicable to all supported languages . Is my organization affected? If your organization uses WSUS and has it configured to auto-approve Update rollup packages, upon acceptance of the Internet Explorer 8 End User License Agreement...

We are pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP for 5 additional languages today. These languages were tagged as “Coming Soon” in our blog post early June . Please visit our World wide sites page to download Internet Explorer in your preferred locale/ language. Languages newly available on Windows XP: Telugu Malayalam Punjabi (India) Kannada Bengali (India) For reference, here’s a table with the full list of IE8 availability: ...

Recently, a number of people have asked me what I think about Mozilla’s Content Security Policy draft spec. Back in January, I went on record as being someone who thinks that CSP is a good idea. CSP is a mechanism for declarative security , whereby a site communicates its intent and leaves it up to the user-agent to determine how to enforce it. There are a number of benefits to declarative security mechanisms: Reduced compatibility risks. Because sites must opt-in and declare what, if...

There have already been a few posts on Compatibility View in Internet Explorer 8 ( here , here , here , here , here , and here ), but none have gone into detail about the user research data we used to help design this feature. We collected data on Compatibility View throughout the IE8 beta releases and have made multiple decisions about its design based on our data from lab studies, field studies, instrumentation, and community feedback. What I’d like to do is go through some common questions we...

I’ve mentioned in several previous posts how Internet Explorer 8 displays pages in its most standards compliant mode by default – a configuration that emphasizes interoperability. This creates some challenges with regards to compatibility with existing web content. Some of today’s web pages expect the older, less interoperable behavior from IE and, as a result, don’t necessarily work as expected in IE8’s standards-by-default mode. To address this, we built features like Compatibility View and...

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for an Expert Zone chat this Thursday, June 18 th 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! If you can’t join us live, the transcript for all chats are available here . Thanks! See you Thursday. Allison Burnett Program Manager

During the IE8 beta periods, we unveiled a bunch of exciting new changes to the address bar. Throughout the beta period, we observed how the feature was being used and listened to your feedback. Two major themes developed from this feedback: performance, and control. Performance Although the Smart Address bar performance during the beta periods was acceptable for the most part, in some cases the address bar performed a bit slowly, and sometimes incredibly slowly. We made several changes under...

The IE Cumulative Security Update for June 2009 is now available via Windows Update or Microsoft Update . This update addresses seven privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles scripts, cached content, and initializes memory. For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09...

We are pleased to announce the availability of Internet Explorer 8 in 20 additional languages today. Internet Explorer 8 is now available in a total of 63 languages! Please visit our World wide sites page to download Internet Explorer in your preferred locale/ language. List of NEW IE8 languages Language Code Windows Vista x86 Windows XP x86 Albanian SQI Yes Yes Assamese ASM Yes - Basque EUQ...