February, 2011

ActiveX Filtering in the IE9 Release Candidate gives you greater control over how Web pages run on your PC. With ActiveX Filtering, you can turn off ActiveX controls for all Web sites and then turn them back on selectively as you see fit. While ActiveX controls like Adobe Flash are important for Web experiences today for videos and more, some consumers may want to limit how they run for security, performance, or other reasons. In this post, we’ll show how you can improve your browsing experience...

Today, the W3C has accepted and published Microsoft’s member submission for an Internet standard to help protect consumer privacy. This announcement from the Web standards body responsible for HTML5 is an important step forward for people and businesses that interact online. The privacy concerns from consumers and academics and governments world-wide have both technical and non-technical aspects. Addressing these concerns will involve technology. The W3C’s involvement provides the...

Thanks for your Feedback! When we released the first IE9 Platform Preview, we talked about the importance of feedback. Since that first release last March, we’ve released six more platform previews , an IE9 Beta , and a bug-fix update to that Beta and the IE9 RC . We want to thank everyone who provided feedback during the last nine months. Sharing your experiences with the IE Test Drive and Testing Center while testing your sites for compatibility and trying out new features like Pinned...

IE9 RC includes support for the W3C Geolocation API , which enables Web developers to request the user’s physical location. This capability is useful for many Web sites, especially those that are already location-aware. For example, mapping services can now center the map based on where you actually are. Sites that let you check in can recommend nearby places. Local search can work more reliability. Internet Explorer respects your privacy . With your permission, Web sites can obtain your approximate...

Your feedback is an essential part of how we refine the user experience for the final product. The IE9 beta reached millions of users around the world (over 25 million downloads), and we received a lot of feedback – a total of over 17,000 pieces of feedback since the start of IE9. The extensive reach of the beta gives us the opportunity to learn how users really use the product. Your feedback and opt-in user instrumentation are used to better understand your experiences with IE9. By listening to...

IE9 introduces improvements to the interfaces used by assistive technologies (ATs) to enhance the accessibility of Internet Explorer. These changes relate to IE9’s switch to hardware-accelerated rendering of HTML content. Previously, some accessibility tools depended on IE’s GDI-based rendering to scrape information from Web sites. Since IE9 has no GDI-based rendering, these features do not work with IE9. Anticipating this problem, Microsoft has worked closely with assistive technology vendors (ATVs...

Starting today, Monday, February 14, 2011, the Automatic Update (AU) feature of Windows Update (WU) will offer users of Internet Explorer 9 Beta an upgrade to the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. This rollout will start with a narrow audience and expand over the next few days to cover all Internet Explorer 9 Beta users. This post provides information on how the Automatic Update delivery will work and announces the release of Internet Explorer 9 Automatic Update Blocker Toolkit. How IE9 RC Automatic...

Today’s announcement that IE9 will come to Windows Phone reflects our commitment to deliver the best experience of the Web on Windows. IE9 on the desktop provides consumers and developers with great HTML5 support that takes full advantage of the hardware for great performance. IE9 on Windows Phones will as well. We’ve worked closely across the Windows Phone and IE teams over the last few months to deliver the same IE9 browsing engine—the same code, the same standards support, the same hardware acceleration...

The Release Candidate of Internet Explorer 9, available now at www.BeautyOfTheWeb.com in 40 languages, reflects our unique approach to building the best experience of the Web on Windows. IE9 also reflects a more open and transparent approach with its regular cadence of platform previews for developers and enthusiasts. With the Release Candidate, we’ve taken to heart over 17,000 pieces of feedback about IE9. You will find the product has made progress on all fronts—performance and standards, user...

Today the University of California Berkeley Center for Law & Technology held a Browser Privacy Mechanisms Roundtable with participants from government, including Commissioner Julie Brill and Chief Technologist Ed Felten from the US Federal Trade Commission, academia, and industry, including Microsoft. Privacy spans technology and policy, and conversations that reflect these different points of view are important to have publicly. During the sessions, Microsoft announced that it is bringing our...

To deliver on the industry promise of “same markup,” browsers must implement features in the same way. Open Web standards and their associated public test suites provide the means for making sure this happens. Using the same process for tests as for the standards themselves is so important that Microsoft contributes to this industry effort in many ways, such as submitting conformance tests to the W3C . In addition, we believe it’s important for these tests to be comprehensive and test the depth and...

The February 2011 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities and two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer or if a user opens a legitimate HTML file that loads a specially crafted library file. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these...

One engineering objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to build the world’s fastest browser. Browser performance matters to everyone. Consumers, enterprises, developers, and the technology industry share a desire for a faster and more capable Web platform. To build the world’s fastest browser we focused on the real world Web performance metrics that matter to customers. Web performance is a complex and nuanced problem and while some in the industry have become distracted with artificial performance...

Previous posts described the importance of developing sites with feature detection and debugging a site’s behavior in older versions of Internet Explorer using IE’s browser and document modes . Testing production Web sites against multiple browsers and multiple browser versions is a reality of Web development. IE9’s emulation of older IE document modes makes this easier but those emulations are not exact. Some developers need a convenient way to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one PC...

A Web without video would be a dull Web and consumers, developers and businesses want video on the Web to just work. As an industry we know this and have, until recently, been on a path to make this a reality with HTML5 by integrating video into Web pages more natively using H.264. There is more detail and discussion below but I want to be unambiguous on some key points: IE9 will support H.264. Microsoft has released an add-on for Firefox on Windows to support H.264 and today we are releasing a plug...