January, 2012

The transition to a plug-in free Web is happening today. Any site that uses plug-ins needs to understand what their customers experience when browsing plug-in free. Lots of Web browsing today happens on devices that simply don’t support plug-ins. Even browsers that do support plug-ins offer many ways to run plug-in free. Metro style IE runs plug-in free to improve battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Previously, we wrote about how we use IE’s Compatibility...

With one of those rare Seattle snowstorms underway today, I feel this is a great time to publish this description of our Holiday 2011 Test Drive demo “Let It Snow.” —Editor When a browser effectively uses the underlying hardware, the possibilities are limitless. Over the holidays we released a demo that helps showcase the advantages of a fully hardware-accelerated, touch first browsing experience with Internet Explorer 10. This post takes a closer look at how the Let It Snow demo was created....

With cross-browser support for both the CSS3 @font-face rule and the WOFF font packaging format , modern Web typography has expanded far beyond the realm of ‘ Web-safe fonts .’ Well-known magazines such as the New Yorker use Web fonts to preserve the typographic personality of their headlines, while [US] President Obama’s re-election campaign uses Web font service Typekit to host their identity font. One remaining limitation prevents Web designers from using the entire font: the...

IE10 Platform Preview 4 includes support for a new CSS property, -ms-user-select , which makes it easier for Web developers to control exactly what text can be selected on their Web sites. If you were to watch me all day at my workstation, you would notice that as I read on the computer, I select text. I’m not the only one who reads like this; selecting text on the Internet is important in many other scenarios. Consider a typical news Web site. Most pages will include a news article...

Today we introduce seven new language versions of IEBlog— French , German , Portuguese (Brazil) , Korean , Japanese , Chinese (PRC) , and Russian . Links to these appear in the new “Languages” block at the top of the right column. We plan to publish translated versions five to ten days after their appearance on the English language IEBlog. We’ve worked hard to localize most of the language elements on the page and in the posts themselves. Text within images will remain in English though we translate...

Compat Inspector is now available for IE10. Use Compat Inspector to quickly identify if Internet Explorer platform changes affect your site. Whether you're preparing for IE10 or still updating for IE9, run Compat Inspector on any page experiencing problems. Then watch for messages explaining potential issues and steps you can take to resolve them. About Compat Inspector Compat Inspector is a JavaScript-based testing tool that analyzes your site while it runs. Compat Inspector...

In the last ten years Microsoft has invested heavily in user privacy. Just like security, privacy considerations are baked into every Microsoft product. It is almost a year since the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web, accepted and published Microsoft’s member submission for an Internet Standard to help protect consumer privacy. Last September I described how the W3C had announced...

IndexedDB is a W3C Working Draft that enables JavaScript developers to store, search, and retrieve data on the user's local client, even when Internet connectivity is disabled . This blog post describes IDBExplorer, a tool we use internally to debug IndexedDB applications. IDBExplorer lets you view database schemas, object store content, and index details. Exploring the tool with an example IndexedDB App To illustrate, I created an application that tracks my New Year’s resolutions...

As Web sites transition more and more into Web applications, working with files in meaningful ways is becoming increasingly important. Starting with Platform Preview 2, IE10 includes support for the File API , enabling developers to read and slice files on the client. Platform Preview 4 adds support for BlobBuilder , a way for developers to create new files. IE10 also has two new methods that allow the user to save blobs to their computer, enabling great end-to-end experiences when working...

The bad guys didn’t take a holiday vacation: Internet Explorer’s SmartScreen service blocked nearly 2 million malware downloads per day on average from mid-December through New Year’s. December 25 saw a 30% spike in malware blocks— successfully preventing users from being tricked into giving their PCs an unwanted “present.” January is a great time to resolve to stay safer online. Microsoft works around the clock, year-round, to help. By following a few simple best practices , including opting...