General IE Information

The topic of what some customers need from a browser saw a lot of attention in headlines (e.g. Mozilla to enterprise customers: "Drop dead" ) last week. Both Google employees and Mozilla community members alike ( link ) explained that to support consumers, their browsers cannot fulfill the needs of large organizations. At Microsoft, we believe that all Windows customers should have a great browsing experience, whether they stay at home, go to school, or work in a large organization with managed IT...

The June 2011 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves seven vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer that were disclosed in coordination with Microsoft. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user visits a malicious, specially crafted Web page using IE. Users who run without administrative rights are more secure in general and should be less impacted than other users; you can read more about this security...

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...

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...

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...

This week the W3C holds its annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Committee meeting (TPAC 2009). There will be about a dozen people from the IE team participating and this is a valuable opportunity to continue working together with other W3C members on the next generation of web standards. High quality specifications that improve interoperability between browsers are important. Our goal is to help ensure these new standards work well for web developers and will work well in future versions of IE...

Our typical posts here are original information about the product from the people who built the product. This morning, I ran across a well-written article from PC Magazine with “some tips about features that you may not have noticed” in IE8. We try to post a lot of useful information on this site (e.g. Session Cookies, sessionStorage, and IE8 or “How can I log into two webmail accounts at the same time?” ) and it’s both exciting and humbling to see professional writers take it a step further....

This post walks through the IE setup experience and the choices it offers users. There have been a bunch of web postings recently that have described aspects of IE setup and first run, not entirely accurately. We hope this information clarifies some of your questions about upgrading to IE8 on Windows Vista or Windows XP machines. (While the scenario where IE8 gets installed as part of Windows 7 is essentially the same, this post is focused on the upgrade scenarios that most users will encounter today...

As a follow-up to my prior blog post about Automatic Update/Windows Update distribution that began gradually in April, I want to provide an overview of the control users have over the installation and experience. First, to reiterate what I explained last month: when offered by Automatic Update, IE8 will not automatically install- the user has control over whether to upgrade to IE8. When offered IE8, three choices are offered: Ask later, install, or don’t install. If one chooses “Ask me later”...

In January we blogged about our plan to distribute IE8 via Automatic Update/Windows Update (for simplicity, we'll refer to this as Automatic Update for the rest of this blog post). This post provides some additional information about how users and administrators are in control of browser upgrades. Last week, we released IE8 via Automatic Update to users still running pre-release versions of IE8 (Beta 2 or Release Candidate 1). The goal was to make sure users who chose to install IE8 have the latest...

In a previous post , Andy wrote about some of the new features we introduced to improve reliability in Internet Explorer, such as Loosely Coupled IE and Automatic Crash Recovery. These features help minimize the impact of reliability issues (such as crashes and hangs) once our users encounter them, allowing them to return to their original browsing state as soon as possible. From an engineering perspective, our goal is to minimize the occurrences of these issues in the first place. In today’s...

Thank you to everyone who has provided the IE Team with feedback on IE8. Your dedication to making this product the best it can be is truly amazing. Here is an update on the feedback channels mentioned in IE8 Beta Feedback blog post back in March of 2008: IE8 Technical Beta – We invited a group of beta testers, including anyone who emailed us, from around the world to test and submit issues on IE8 through Microsoft Connect . Compared to feedback during IE7, we received a high percentage...

Internet Explorer 8 represents a leap forward in support for web standards. We believe that IE8 has the first complete implementation of CSS 2.1 in the industry and it is fully compliant with the current CSS 2.1 test suite. The only way to know if a browser has correctly implemented a specification is to develop a comprehensive set of tests for the specification. Those tests are the best reference for how a browser will behave when you’re writing a web page. Today, the IE Team is submitting...

The March IE Chat will be rescheduled for March 25 th at 10:00AM PST/18:00 UTC. A significant number of the IE PM team will be attending the Mix09 conference in Las Vegas on March 18-20 th and didn’t want to miss out on chat. We apologize for any inconvenience. See you next Wednesday! Thanks! Allison Burnett Program Manager

Myself as well as some other people from the team recently sat down with Charles Torre from Channel 9 to talk about IE8. We thought you might enjoy these: Accelerators with Jon Seitel Developer Tools with John Hrvatin Search with Sharon Cohen Web Slices with Jane Kim You can check out all the IE8 related videos on Channel 9 here . There are also some interesting IE8 “How Do I” videos on MSDN. Thanks! Sharon Cohen Program Manager

We wanted to let you know that an update was released earlier today that will improve Internet Explorer’s reliability for users running the Windows 7 Beta. The update is now available via Windows Update , and can also be downloaded via Microsoft Update . In this post we’ll discuss how we used the information that we’re receiving from Windows 7 Beta customers to determine the reliability fixes to include in this update. We use the term “reliability” to broadly encompass all types of stability...

Sincere apologies for the trouble we had this morning with the IE chat. A problem in the tool prevented us from initiating the chat. We plan to reschedule and will let you know the new date as soon as possible. As always, previous transcripts are available here . Sharon Cohen Program Manager

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for an Expert Zone chat this Thursday, February 19 th at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered by members of the IE product team. Thank you to all who have attended our previous chats! If you can’t join us live, the transcript for all chats are available here . Other upcoming Expert Zone chat dates can be found here . Sharon Cohen Program Manager

As we've now entered the last major phase of our product cycle, we’d like to thank everyone for their dedication to making Internet Explorer 8 a better product. As mentioned in IE8 Beta Feedback our Technical Beta Program provides a way for an invited set of beta testers around the world to test and file bugs against IE8. Since the release of beta 1, the technical beta community has continuously provided excellent feedback and we have fixed a significant amount of bugs because of it. By rating your...

The IE8 feature Suggested Sites helps you discover related sites that can be helpful to get more information about your interests. Under the hood, Suggested Sites is a system that provides suggestions by using a collection of users’ visited sites. You may be wondering how Suggested Sites works with the investments we’ve made in privacy . Respecting user privacy and giving the user control over the data provided has been part of the design philosophy of Suggested Sites since the beginning. This blog...

Since the release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, we’ve listened, watched and learned a lot about how people use the new features and our focus has been to refine them for RC1 (the Release Candidate). This post will give you an overview of the end user changes we’ve made which we’ll discuss in detail over the coming weeks. In IE8 we made a big push to make sure you can easily get to the sites and use the services you care about. If you’re anything like us, you visit a lot of websites and use...

The Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate is the last major IE8 testing milestone. It indicates that we believe that IE8 is implementation complete for CSS 2.1 . We also believe IE8 RC1 has the most complete implementation of the CSS 2.1 specification in the industry. The only way to know if a browser has correctly implemented a specification is to develop a comprehensive set of tests for the specification. These can be used to determine both the support for a specific part of the spec and the...

Hello all, Just like for previous beta releases, I am going to guide you through the upgrade steps for Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 (IE8 RC1). Before we begin, let me summarize the major changes you will see when installing IE8 RC1: If you are a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 user and you are upgrading from IE8 Beta 1 or Beta 2 to IE8 RC1, you are no longer required to manually uninstall earlier IE8 builds. Instead, IE8 RC1 installer will automatically upgrade your machine...

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for the first Expert Zone chat of 2009 this Thursday, January 22 nd at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered by members of the IE product team. Thank you to all who have attended our previous chats! Other upcoming Expert Zone chat dates can be found here . If you can’t join us live, the transcript for all chats are available here . Sharon Cohen Program Manager

After a great turnout this year, we are continuing our monthly online Expert Zone chats with the IE Team in 2009. Here is our schedule for the first half of next year: January 22 nd February 19 th March 19 th April 23 rd May 21 st June 18 th All our chats start at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered and hear from members of the IE product team. In case you miss the chat, a transcript will be published afterward and available...