October, 2010

We’ve had 10 million downloads in the six weeks since we released the IE9 beta. That popularity reflects the significant improvements in browsing that IE9 brings to the web. Users can pin sites directly to the Windows task bar, and sites can program jump lists and offer notifications just as Windows applications do. The web standard markup (HTML, CSS, and script) in pages runs faster and smoother, taking advantage of modern PC hardware. The popularity of the beta also reflects the early...

In June, we wrote about IE9’s support for ECMAScript 5 (ES5) and published a TestDrive demo to explore some of the features. With IE9 Beta available, it’s a good time to talk about how developers can use ES5 to improve their code. Many of the features in ES5 are designed to help developers working with very large code bases by making the language both more robust and easier to maintain. In this series of blog posts we’ll look specifically at how ES5 helps you write more reusable code.

For this post, we’ll focus on how ES5 makes it easier to create and clone objects and helps you ensure that your code is robust to mistakes when it is reused – even if you’re the only developer who will be using it.

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Each type of file delivered from a web server has an associated MIME type (also called a “content-type”) that describes the nature of the content (e.g. image, text, application, etc). Back in Internet Explorer 8, we made a few changes to IE’s MIME-sniffing feature that attempts to determine the actual content-type for each downloaded resource. In this post, I discuss how recent changes to IE further improve MIME-handling and make browsing more secure. Certain HTML elements (LINK and SCRIPT in particular...

With site developers verifying that their sites run well in IE9 and taking advantage of the new HTML5 capabilities and better performance in IE9’s Standards mode, now is a good time to recap how to use Browser Mode and Document Mode to test sites for IE9 and previous IE versions. In summary, developers can use IE’s Developer Tool’s Browser Mode menu to test how their site will run in different versions of IE. The Document Mode menu is what developers use to determine the best rendering mode for their...

We've talked a lot about UI and browser features lately. Today I want to get back to web development by discussing some additions to the platform in IE9 Beta: DOMParser and XMLSerializer. What do they do? DOMParser enables building a document from an XML string and XMLSerializer allows you to serialize it back again. Together they make XML to DOM conversions as simple as using JSON , making it easier to use XML as a data-transfer format. More importantly, the nodes created by DOMParser are...

With IE9, we wanted to make tabs more useful than ever before. We know that tabs are a great way to experience multiple sites within a window, and we showed how you can increase the number of tabs possible in IE9’s site-centric frame design. In IE8, we introduced Tab Groups as a way to help you remember which tabs are related to each other. In IE9, you can drag a tab out of and between windows, use Windows 7 Aero Snap to compare tabs, continue watching a video while moving a tab, and pin a...

When we released the IE9 beta about a month ago we talked about the importance of trust and confidence when working with downloads. Today, we are enabling the SmartScreen application reputation service to improve download protection for IE9 beta users. This feature works together with the SmartScreen anti-malware service that protects IE8 and IE9 beta users every day . You can experience the protection of the SmartScreen application reputation service yourself by ensuring SmartScreen is enabled...

The IE Cumulative Security Update for October 2010 is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves seven privately reported vulnerabilities and three publicly disclosed vulnerabilities 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...

I want to provide an update to my last blog post about the W3C process that we follow to develop and finalise Web Standards. The working group published the Release Candidate (RC) of the CSS 2.1 Test Suite on September 17 . The next step is for the major browser vendors to submit their implementation reports using the working group’s template within one month from publication of the test suite. The group has set a deadline on October 18. While each of the browser vendors works through the test suite...

In the first post of this series, we described how add-ons can decrease IE’s performance during tab creation. Many users with add-ons enabled have noticed a performance improvement when they open new tabs after disabling their add-ons. We also walked you through how to measure add-on performance and identify areas of impact using the Windows Performance Tools . In this post, we delve into methods and best practices developers can use to improve their add-ons’ start-up performance,...

Typically in blog posts we focus on the negative feedback we’ve heard, and the changes we make in the product as a result. In this post, we’re going to do something a little different. Below, we share the public feedback about the add-on performance advisor that we’ve heard, as well as some comments that show how aligned we are as an industry around performance. From the Houston Chronicle : One of the most interesting features of IE9 is its improved ability to manage browser...