February, 2010

This post discusses some of the work we’re doing on the IE team to fulfill our commitment to document our support of web standards. A good starting point is Microsoft’s interoperability principles , something we’ve written about here on this blog before, and a principle that’s easy to see in action in our products, like IE8. The essence of interoperability in this context is that the same web page markup works the same way across different browsers. There are many challenges in getting to this...

In addition to our engagement in the SVG Working Group , Doug Schepers , W3C Team Contact for the SVG Working Group, and I are going to be presenting SVG: The Past, Present and Future of Vector Graphics for the Web , at MIX 2010 in Las Vegas this coming March to share help developers understand where SVG is headed. At Microsoft we have been investigating how SVG can deliver graphics for the next generation of the Web Development. Its inclusion in HTML5 promises many opportunities for developers to...

This post describes a set of best practices for setting the default search provider. Our goal continues to be keeping users in control of their browser, following our published Guidelines and Requirements for add-on development. If you write software that modifies Internet Explorer’s search settings or defaults through direct registry manipulation, your software may be contributing to user confusion and frustration. Whenever a program tries to modify the default search provider through direct...

As a web browser, Internet Explorer is a platform for many kinds of add-ons (here are some great examples ). IE users generally don’t distinguish between add-ons and Internet Explorer when it comes to performance , reliability , or privacy . They just use IE and expect it to work. That’s why the best add-ons do a good job of integrating with the IE user model, letting customers “just browse”. Recently, Adobe announced that their latest version of Flash supports InPrivate Browsing . Version 10...

In this post, I want to share some examples of the progress going on in the SVG Working Group. Microsoft recently joined the SVG Working Group , and other members ( Mozilla, Apple and Opera among others ) welcomed us warmly. I'm hopeful about the ways that SVG (both its current direction and future potential) could make the web better . We want the spec to be clear, consistent, and predictable for developers. We’re working out ambiguities such as “ Pointer events and clip-paths ”, “ CSS Selectors...