May, 2011

Sounds form the background of our life. Today the HTML5 <audio> element enables Web developers to embed sounds in their applications. The flexibility of the control coupled with the integration with the rest of the platform allows several scenarios, from simple sound effects to background audio to gaming experiences to more sophisticated audio engines. This blog post walks through some of the best practices for using the <audio> tag in your Web applications, and includes useful tips from...

Social-engineering attacks, like tricking a user into running a malicious program, are far more common than attacks on security vulnerabilities. Application Reputation in IE9 helps protect users from these socially engineered malware attacks. This post offers details about real-world attacks and how these protections work. For context, recent studies (like this one ) show that despite the headlines that exploits of software vulnerabilities get, people browsing the Web are more likely...

Last November, we released the Galactic test drive alongside IE9 Platform Preview 7. This test drive is a 3D simulation of our solar system and depicts planets orbiting around the sun. You can press the “V” key to toggle between a close up view centered on the sun and a zoomed out view showing more of the entire scene. When I set out to build Galactic, I knew that I wanted to use HTML5 Canvas to render my scene in 3D, but I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. After skimming a handful of 3D math...

We are extremely excited to be able to provide vendor-prefixed support of CSS3 Gradients in Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 1! CSS3 Gradients comes from a subsection of the CSS3 Image Values and Replaced Content specification , which is still in Working Draft status. Using CSS markup, a gradient image is generated by the browser and can be rendered where CSS images are permitted. In Platform Preview 1, CSS3 gradients can be used as a background-image. Why use CSS Gradients...

Internet Explorer 9 is now available in more local languages than any other browser on Windows. Today, we released support for IE9 in 53 additional languages, making IE9 available in a total of 93 languages: Please visit the Worldwide downloads page to download IE9 in a language of your choice. Here’s the complete list of languages Internet Explorer 9 is available in, starting with the originally released 40 and followed by the 53 new languages in blue: Arabic Lithuanian Bengali (India) Malayalam...

If you follow Web Privacy issues, you’ve probably heard about “ Flash Cookies .” In the same manner that Web developers can use HTTP Cookies to store data, developers who use Adobe Flash Player on their Web site can use Flash Cookies to store data. Internet Explorer users are accustomed to deleting their cookies via Delete Browsing History . However, because Flash is an add-on and not part of standard HTML content, browsers have not been able to delete Flash cookies the same way they delete HTTP...

One of our guiding principles in Internet Explorer is to keep users in control of their browser. This applies to settings like the home page , enabled add-ons , and the default search provider. Sometimes, 3rd party software changes the consumer’s default search provider without their consent . Consumers may be surprised to see search results from an unfamiliar Web site and may not know how to change back to their previous default search provider. As we work with developers to ensure that they use...

As we’ve discussed many times on this blog , Internet Explorer 9 provides developers powerful new capabilities with the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript used for other browsers. In addition to improving the product in an effort to make Web developers’ lives easier, we’ve also strived to improve the developer content provided on MSDN. The Internet Explorer developer content team writes and maintains all of the content you see in the “ HTML and CSS ” and “ Internet Explorer...

When we introduced ActiveX Filtering with the IE9 Release Candidate, we focused on delivering a great user experience that stays out of the way from regular browsing and makes it easy for users to turn off filtering when they want to. At the same time, we want users to have a great experience viewing Web sites while ActiveX Filtering is enabled. This includes minimizing site compatibility issues and clearly indicating when content on a Web page is blocked by ActiveX Filtering. ...