June, 2010

We’re focused on making Internet Explorer 9 amazingly fast, and we want to help web developers make their sites fast as well. Enabling developers to accurately measure the performance of their websites is critical to making the web faster and enabling a new class of HTML5 applications. At Velocity , we announced Internet Explorer 9 as the first browser to provide performance information to developers at runtime, which we introduced in the latest IE9 platform preview . With special thanks to...

Our commitment to same markup includes script along with HTML, CSS, SVG, and the other markup that developers use to build the web. To make same markup real, the community needs a set of official tests to assess how interoperable and standards-compliant different browsers are with the latest version of JavaScript, “ECMAScript Fifth Edition” (fondly known as ES5). As we mentioned in a recent blog post , Ecma International (the standards body behind JavaScript) is working through a process...

Up to this point we have mostly talked about improved JavaScript performance in Internet Explorer 9 but we haven’t said much about any new or changed language features in the “Chakra” engine. Now, with the third Platform Preview, we can tell you about JavaScript feature enhancements which you can try for yourself . As context, the industry standard that defines the JavaScript language is ECMA-262: ECMAScript Language Specification developed and published by Ecma International...

Being all in with HTML5 means being committed to enabling developers to use the Same Markup on the Web, and that includes the same JavaScript code. The Chakra JavaScript engine in the latest Platform Preview release of Internet Explorer 9 includes significantly improved support for the ECMAScript (ECMA-262) standard, including features new to the recently finalized ECMAScript Fifth Edition (often called ES5 for short). This also includes complete support for JavaScript tests in Bucket 6 of the...

As developers experiment and begin the transition from writing today’s websites to building HTML5 applications, they will test the limits of browsers. For example, the huge difference between hardware accelerated HTML5 video and plain HTML5 video support in a browser was clear in the demo we showed at MIX . Because some browsers run on many different operating systems, there can be a tendency to use a “least common denominator” approach to implementing HTML5. By using more of...

One of the major investments we’re making during the IE9 project is support for more web standards. Web developers all around the world consistently gave us feedback that they wanted to use the same pages with the same markup across browsers. By working closely with the W3C and its members on the newest web standards, we can make that dream a reality for web developers. 118 New Test Cases Submitted to the W3C Today, we released an updated version of the IE9 Platform Preview build. In conjunction...

We’ve recently discussed the performance characteristics of the Flying Images and A GPU-Powered HTML5 Flickr Photo Viewer samples across different browsers. On the Internet Explorer team we use the Windows Performance Tools to measure browser runtime performance. The Windows Performance Tools are among the most accurate performance tools available which is why they’re commonly used across the industry. In this post I will give an introduction to using the Windows Performance Tools with...

Site developers have been clear that they want interoperability and standards compliance (or “Same markup”) for newer technologies as well as backward compatibility for their existing sites. After reading questions and comments on the last few compatibility-related blog posts , I thought now is a good time to recap IE’s compatibility features for site developers. As IE changes and supports new technologies, developers will still want, in some scenarios, IE’s legacy behavior...

Cutting edge web applications push the boundaries of the web development model. In the security space, this raises an interesting question – who owns security for a web application built on a complex platform hierarchy? Is it the application at the top of the stack, the intermediate platform component, or the browser itself? We believe that web application security is a shared responsibility between the browser client, web platform components (such as ASP.Net), and web applications themselves...

It’s great to see that the web community and browser vendors are getting value out of the test cases on the IE Testing Center . People are discussing these in blog posts, email, and the W3C mailing lists , which is excellent. We want to make sure these tests are valuable and conform to the various specifications they test. We received some great feedback over the last few weeks on a number of the test cases we posted on May 5 th . I want to thank everyone who provided actionable feedback...

Last month I posted general guidelines for writing cross-browser code . Specifically I emphasized that feature detection (rather than browser detection) is better for working around differences between browsers. This is because feature detection automatically adapts to what a given browser supports and thus deals gracefully with new releases. Browser detection requires researching the level of support in every version of every browser and must be updated each time a new browser is released. Today...

The IE Cumulative Security Update for June 2010 is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves five privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user...

With Patrick fresh off the plane from Brussels (see previous post), this is a great time to share that Patrick and I will be attending the SVG Open 2010 conference late this summer. The theme of this year’s conference is “Ubiquitous SVG.” We’re excited to help make this theme a reality through our continued participation in the W3C SVG Working Group and the broader developer community and with our implementation of SVG in IE9. SVG Open 2010, the 8th International Conference...

After months of conference calls, the most recent face to face meeting of the SVG Working Group helped us make progress on this web standard. The biggest ‘news’ from this meeting was the group’s decision to take the next step to finish the current SVG proposal – “SVG 1.1 2nd Edition” – and send it as a Proposed Recommendation to the W3C Advisory Committee for final endorsement. We also started more serious conversations about SVG 2.0. As the Web has advanced...

In recent posts we talked about giving feedback and filing a great bug using a tool called IE Diagnostics that is included with the publically available Internet Explorer Platform Preview releases. We encourage you to include IE Diagnostics reports with every bug submission. This blog post sheds more light on the IE Diagnostics tool by detailing the data included in an IE Diagnostics report, what you can learn from it, and how you can use this information to debug problems you see in IE. What...

With Internet Explorer 9, developers can build new classes of HTML5 applications that were previously not possible. We’re having fun building sample web applications that provide a glimpse into the types of experiences that hardware acceleration provides. In this post, we take a closer look at Flickr Explorer , one of the samples that we released alongside IE9 Platform Preview #2 . Flickr Explorer is written using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It uses AJAX to asynchronously search Flickr...