July, 2009

Internet Explorer is releasing an out-of-band update available via Windows Update . Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new 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 three privately reported vulnerabilities which could allow remote code execution. The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying the way...

I’d like to invite you to check out the new tutorials added to the Developer Tools content . These tutorials are written to help you quickly learn how to use the Developer Tools to solve Web page issues. Each tutorial is set up to focus on a programming problem to solve, such as changing text on the page, update a CSS class, or inspect a Jscript variable. You can follow the step-by-step instructions provided to learn how to use the Developer Tools to solve these and similar problems. Hi, my name...

I’ve written a few posts about the Microsoft-supplied Compatibility View List on the IEBlog, calling out the what, how, and why of the feature. I wanted to take this opportunity to bring the community up to speed on what’s transpired since Internet Explorer 8 released back in March of this year and talk a little bit about the future actions planned for the list. The Story So Far… Let’s start with a quick recap of the feature... by default Internet Explorer 8 displays web content using its newest...

Browser add-ons are a great way to enhance the experience and capabilities of your Web browser. Add-ons are loaded by IE when you open a new browser window or tab. This is usually a quick process, but certain add-ons may cause IE to take a longer time than expected. For example, after installing Skype 4.1*, this user (and his father) encountered a slowdown in IE on their computers. Just like most of you, almost everybody on the IE team is tech support for their parents, so improving the user's ability...

This blog post details a change we’re making to IE8’s first run experience, previously described in other posts here and here . The goal of the IE setup experience is to put IE users in control of their settings and respect existing defaults. IE will never install, or become the default browser without your explicit consent. However, we heard a lot of feedback from a lot of different people and groups and decided to make the user choice of the default browser even more explicit. This change is part...

Background As a part of the July security bulletin , Microsoft yesterday released an update to mitigate a vulnerability in the “Microsoft Video” ActiveX control. This control contained a stack-based buffer overflow which could be exploited by a malicious web page. If you haven’t yet done so, please make sure you’ve installed the latest updates from WindowsUpdate to help keep your system secure. The Microsoft Video control should not have been marked as safe because it wasn’t intended for...

Hi, I am Michael Benny, a tester on networking in Internet Explorer. During the Internet Explorer 8 development cycle I was responsible for verifying many of the pieces of Compatibility View. We have discussed earlier about how the Compatibility View feature works and the steps a site author can take to ensure the Compatibility View button never displays for IE8 users visiting your site. There is another scenario that we have not yet covered, if my site was already added by an End-user to their Compatibility...