Tips and Tricks

Recently, Google made available the “ Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on .” This add-on enables consumers to “indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.” We agree that making it easy for consumers to protect their privacy is good, and Internet Explorer offers a variety of features to help keep you in control of your information when visiting websites. In this post, we describe how to use some of these built in features to...

At MIX 10 we released the IE9 Platform Preview and showed some of the included developer tools. You can access these tools by pressing F12, or click Developer Tools on the Debug menu when you use the Platform Preview. The developer tools include some new capabilities and improvements over the tools in IE8: A new tab for inspecting network traffic. Improved performance working with large JavaScript files: think 70k+ lines of code (even if it’s all on one line!) Improved CSS view...

There are many tools in the market that allow you to customize your pages' cascading style sheets (CSS), but there are actually a very few that do the opposite—scan for all the CSS rules in the document and remove those that are not used. Cleaning out the CSS will not only reduce the bandwidth impact, but will also improve the performance of the browser (minimizing the time spent by the CSS engine to parse the style sheets). In this post, I will describe how to build that tool using a bookmarklet...

This post is a guest post from Steve Guttman, of the Expression Web team. Expression Web has created an interesting tool, SuperPreview, which we thought the IE blog audience would be interested in. Internet Explorer 8 is an important release because it reconfirms Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability and renewed emphasis on Web Standards. My team—which develops the authoring tool, Expression Web—is also pretty emphatic about Web Standards. We’re in the process of doing significant tooling...

It’s well understood that the typical computer users today spend much of their time in their web browser, making it the most important software on their computer. Users expect their browsers to be easy to use, fast, stable and secure. Over the past few months, users have downloaded thousands of great browser add-ons from www.ieaddons.com and other web sites. Users want to use browser add-ons to enhance their browsing experience, not hinder it or make it more confusing. We have published a full...

This post follows up on my original Operation Aborted post to provide some additional information and assistance for web site owners or 3 rd party script libraries. Recap Nearly a year-and-a-half ago, I blogged about an error that can occur on some websites that generate content via script. This content can cause Internet Explorer’s HTML parser to get into an unrecoverable state, which makes it doubly-hard to find and diagnose why this error is happening. When this state occurs, the HTML...

Browser add-ons are a great way to enhance the experience and capabilities of your Web browser. Add-ons are loaded by IE when you open a new browser window or tab. This is usually a quick process, but certain add-ons may cause IE to take a longer time than expected. For example, after installing Skype 4.1*, this user (and his father) encountered a slowdown in IE on their computers. Just like most of you, almost everybody on the IE team is tech support for their parents, so improving the user's ability...

For Internet Explorer 8, we’ve made browser session handling a lot simpler. For instance, say you want to have two Hotmail windows open, each logged into a different account. Simply click the New Session item on the File menu, and a new browser window will open. The new browser window will not share session cookies with the original browser window, so you can log into Hotmail (and most web applications) as a different user. For command line junkies, you can run iexplore.exe with the -nomerge parameter...

I am a user interface tester on the Internet Explorer team and one of my favorite things about any application is the ability to personalize the program to give it your own look and feel. I am never content with ubiquitous one-size–fits-all solutions and really look forward to products that value user choice. I’m excited that IE8 now has some personalization options and this cycle I have been fortunate to work on two such features – IE8 Look and Feel (customizations around the Command bar) and...

We’ve previously blogged about Compatibility View ; this post is a follow-up on compatibility and Internet Explorer 8 RC1. As you are browsing the web with Internet Explorer 8 RC1, you might come across some web sites where everything is not displayed correctly: These issues can be fixed by clicking on the Compatibility View button on the address bar: This button draws the page the same way that Internet Explorer 7 would - allowing content designed for older web browsers to still work...

One of the things that I learned from working on IE is that there are common patterns of how users browse the web, yet what they browse varies person to person. We designed Visual Search Suggestions, Accelerators, and Web Slices to simplify common patterns with the flexibility for you to customize these features with services that you enjoy. I want to explain how IE8 treats services and share how I personalize IE8 with my favorite services in less than 5 minutes. Out-of-box services We want...

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...

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...

I’m Christian Stockwell, a Program Manager on the IE team focused on browser performance. Measuring the overall performance of websites and web browsers is important for users comparing the performance characteristics of competitive browsers, developers optimizing their websites for download times and responsiveness, browser vendors monitoring the performance implications of code changes, and everyone else who is generally interested in understanding website performance. I thought it would...

Hi, my name is JP Gonzalez-Castellan and I’m the Accessibility Program Manager for IE8. The IE team has been working towards making IE8 the most accessible browser possible, and we wanted to detail some of the work we’ve done toward this end. In this post I will provide you with some background on Accessibility, I’ll cover new UI features (Caret Browsing, Find on Page, Adaptive Zoom , High DPI , etc) and also platform features (support for ARIA , support for IAccessibleEx , and support for additional...

Hi. In previous posts I talked about the IE8 IEAK and new event logging for IE8 in the Application Compatibility Toolkit . Today, I’m going to discuss the improvements we made to Group Policy support for Internet Explorer 8. Background For those of you who might be new to Group Policy, here is a quick background. Let’s first assume you use an Active Directory environment to administer the computers in your corporate network. If that is the case, Group Policy provides a wide set of policy...

Hi, my name is Helen Drislane, I am a program manager on the IE team responsible for some of the user interface including tabs and I‘m going to discuss the new Tab Grouping feature (tab color!) with you. We had a lot of fun putting this feature together, so I am going to explain a little bit about the process involved in designing it and then describe the things you can do with it. EVOLUTION OF THE DESIGN AND ALGORITHM After shipping Internet Explorer 7, the IE team collected data from user...

Hello, My name is Sébastien Zimmermann. I’m the developer owner for the Visual Search Feature , which Sharon already described in detail. I also own the Accelerators Button Feature , and during IE7 worked on Setup and Phishing Filter—now “ SmartScreen® Filter ”. In this post, I would like to get you started on creating your own Visual Search service/provider for Internet Explorer 8. If you own or develop websites of any kind—even if it’s a small website or an intranet site—this post is for...

In an earlier post , we introduced the new IE8 Smart Address Bar dropdown functionality. Now we thought we’d spend some time discussing some of its less obvious features in more detail. More about the IE8 Smart Address Bar Autocomplete Suggestion With Windows Search installed, IE8 makes an attempt to determine what site you’re trying to get to. The site that it determines is most likely the one you’re looking for is called the “Autcomplete Suggestion.” This entry is given the SHIFT+ENTER shortcut...

As you may know, all browsers have a set of CSS features that are either considered a vendor extension (e.g. - ms-interpolation-mode ), are partial implementations of properties that are fully defined in the CSS specifications, or are implementation of properties that exist in the CSS specifications, but aren’t completely defined. According to the CSS 2.1 Specification, any of the properties that fall under the categories listed previously must have a vendor specific prefix, such as '-ms-' for Microsoft...

At the start of the Internet Explorer 8 project we made a commitment to great website compatibility. It’s worth noting that this commitment hasn’t changed, even given the short-term impact of our announcement to better align with Microsoft’s interoperability principles. In other words, compatibility has been and continues to be a very important part of the Internet Explorer 8 feature set. With Beta 2 we’re announcing a brand new feature known as Compatibility View. In a nutshell, Compatibility...

I am here to tell you how to upgrade to IE8 Beta 2. IE8 Beta 2 system requirements are the same as IE8 Beta 1 and it’s currently available in English, Chinese Simplified, German and Japanese. Stay tuned for more localized IE8 Beta 2 versions to be available shortly. Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 Getting Ready Before you start IE8 Beta 2 installation, there are a couple of things to keep in mind: Uninstalling IE8 Beta 1 If you have Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 installed, the...

Hi, I’m Sharath Udupa, developer on the IE team focusing on AJAX features for IE8. One of the AJAX improvements we adopted in IE8 from HTML5 is AJAX page navigations. In IE8 mode, we provide support for script to update the travel log components (for e.g. back/forward buttons, address bar) to reflect client-side updates to documents. This allows a better user experience where users can navigate back and forth without messing the AJAX application state. For more information regarding the feature...

As James and I mentioned in our blog post What’s coming in IE8 for IT Pros? , IE8 can now be slipstreamed into Vista and Window Server 2008 OS images. If you manage the desktop images for your organization, slipstream saves you time by simplifying the task of adding Internet Explorer 8 and any IE updates. If you’re adding Internet Explorer 7 to a Windows XP image you’ll typically install XP and then add IE7 before capturing the image -this can take 2 hours! With IE8 and Windows Vista, you are able...

Bill Gates’ recent Tech Ed keynote and Tony Chor’s follow-up blog announced that IE8 Beta 2 will be available in August in many languages. We are encouraging sites to get ready for Beta 2 prior to release as it will present a big jump in IE8 browsing traffic. What does “getting ready for IE8” mean for web sites? IE8 displays content in IE8 Standards mode – its most standards-compliant layout mode – by default. In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed how this aligns with our commitment to Web standards...