At Velocity , we showed Internet Explorer 9 as the first browser to support the W3C Navigation Timing proposal to provide performance information to developers at runtime. This interface is aimed at helping developers measure and understand the performance of their website . Web developers can use this performance information to make their web sites faster. For IE9 Platform Preview 6, we updated the Navigation Timing interface to reflect the latest work of the Web Performance Working Group. Special...

Since we released IE9 Beta we’ve received lots of great feedback on the Add-on Performance Advisor . It’s encouraging to see how users are able to stay in control of their browsing performance in IE9. Ultimately, we want to enable users to use more of their add-ons without negatively impacting performance. To that end, we dedicated many of our recent posts to providing guidance to add-on developers on how to measure and improve add-on performance. Our internal partners have focused on making performance...

Today we feature a post by Nishant Kothary & Joshua Allen, web standards evangelists at MIX Online who work closely with the web community to listen, learn and help them make the most of the Microsoft platform. The recurring theme for IE9 is about putting sites in the center—from enabling hardware-accelerated HTML5, to the simplified browser UI building on the familiar experiences of Windows and the power of whole PC. In fact, the public launch of the IE9 beta on beautyoftheweb.com centered on...

Internet Explorer 9 introduces sub-pixel ClearType® font positioning as part of its hardware-accelerated rendering of HTML5 content. With IE9 now in beta, we’re getting a lot of feedback and questions about this feature. The bulk of this post describes issues Web developers should be aware of. But first, since all Windows users can benefit by tuning ClearType for their display, let’s start there. Tuning ClearType For best results, you should tune ClearType for your particular...

IE9 is the first version of Internet Explorer to natively support XHTML. For those not familiar, XHTML is the XML serialization of HTML. Among other benefits, XHTML can help maintain cleaner markup due to its fail-fast nature in the face of parsing errors. You can see IE9 running XHTML for yourself by visiting examples on the Internet Explorer Test Drive site like SVG Helicopter , IE Beatz , and SVG-oids . In this post I’ll share a few details about XHTML and IE9's support for it. What version of...

We’ve had 10 million downloads in the six weeks since we released the IE9 beta. That popularity reflects the significant improvements in browsing that IE9 brings to the web. Users can pin sites directly to the Windows task bar, and sites can program jump lists and offer notifications just as Windows applications do. The web standard markup (HTML, CSS, and script) in pages runs faster and smoother, taking advantage of modern PC hardware. The popularity of the beta also reflects the early...

In June, we wrote about IE9’s support for ECMAScript 5 (ES5) and published a TestDrive demo to explore some of the features. With IE9 Beta available, it’s a good time to talk about how developers can use ES5 to improve their code. Many of the features in ES5 are designed to help developers working with very large code bases by making the language both more robust and easier to maintain. In this series of blog posts we’ll look specifically at how ES5 helps you write more reusable code.

For this post, we’ll focus on how ES5 makes it easier to create and clone objects and helps you ensure that your code is robust to mistakes when it is reused – even if you’re the only developer who will be using it.

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Each type of file delivered from a web server has an associated MIME type (also called a “content-type”) that describes the nature of the content (e.g. image, text, application, etc). Back in Internet Explorer 8, we made a few changes to IE’s MIME-sniffing feature that attempts to determine the actual content-type for each downloaded resource. In this post, I discuss how recent changes to IE further improve MIME-handling and make browsing more secure. Certain HTML elements (LINK and SCRIPT in particular...

With site developers verifying that their sites run well in IE9 and taking advantage of the new HTML5 capabilities and better performance in IE9’s Standards mode, now is a good time to recap how to use Browser Mode and Document Mode to test sites for IE9 and previous IE versions. In summary, developers can use IE’s Developer Tool’s Browser Mode menu to test how their site will run in different versions of IE. The Document Mode menu is what developers use to determine the best rendering mode for their...

We've talked a lot about UI and browser features lately. Today I want to get back to web development by discussing some additions to the platform in IE9 Beta: DOMParser and XMLSerializer. What do they do? DOMParser enables building a document from an XML string and XMLSerializer allows you to serialize it back again. Together they make XML to DOM conversions as simple as using JSON , making it easier to use XML as a data-transfer format. More importantly, the nodes created by DOMParser are...

With IE9, we wanted to make tabs more useful than ever before. We know that tabs are a great way to experience multiple sites within a window, and we showed how you can increase the number of tabs possible in IE9’s site-centric frame design. In IE8, we introduced Tab Groups as a way to help you remember which tabs are related to each other. In IE9, you can drag a tab out of and between windows, use Windows 7 Aero Snap to compare tabs, continue watching a video while moving a tab, and pin a...

When we released the IE9 beta about a month ago we talked about the importance of trust and confidence when working with downloads. Today, we are enabling the SmartScreen application reputation service to improve download protection for IE9 beta users. This feature works together with the SmartScreen anti-malware service that protects IE8 and IE9 beta users every day . You can experience the protection of the SmartScreen application reputation service yourself by ensuring SmartScreen is enabled...

The IE Cumulative Security Update for October 2010 is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves seven privately reported vulnerabilities and three publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative...

I want to provide an update to my last blog post about the W3C process that we follow to develop and finalise Web Standards. The working group published the Release Candidate (RC) of the CSS 2.1 Test Suite on September 17 . The next step is for the major browser vendors to submit their implementation reports using the working group’s template within one month from publication of the test suite. The group has set a deadline on October 18. While each of the browser vendors works through the test suite...

In the first post of this series, we described how add-ons can decrease IE’s performance during tab creation. Many users with add-ons enabled have noticed a performance improvement when they open new tabs after disabling their add-ons. We also walked you through how to measure add-on performance and identify areas of impact using the Windows Performance Tools . In this post, we delve into methods and best practices developers can use to improve their add-ons’ start-up performance,...

Typically in blog posts we focus on the negative feedback we’ve heard, and the changes we make in the product as a result. In this post, we’re going to do something a little different. Below, we share the public feedback about the add-on performance advisor that we’ve heard, as well as some comments that show how aligned we are as an industry around performance. From the Houston Chronicle : One of the most interesting features of IE9 is its improved ability to manage browser...

In the past months we worked with add-on developers to release new versions of their add-ons that follow IE’s guidelines and requirements for add-on development. We used the Upgrade Advisor to help update their users to the new versions. Some add-on vendors asked how IE determines and displays an add-on’s version. This post answers this question so that all add-on developers can design their versioning schemes to be compatible with IE features such as Manage Add-ons and the Upgrade Advisor. There...

We have talked about our goal with IE9 to run the same standards-based markup as other browsers by default. It is also our goal for IE9 to successfully run the Web that you browse today. For sites that are designed to run in older versions of IE, IE9 includes support for compatible document modes and a Compatibility View (CV) List that’s similar to what shipped with IE8. The CV List and compatible document modes are good for site developers because they enable developers to transition between IE8...

How do you know when an experience is ready for consumers? This is something we ask ourselves all the time. In this post, we’ll cover how we set our experience goals for IE9 and how we measured (and continue to measure) our progress toward these goals throughout the development cycle. We set experience goals for all of the products we ship. These goals are at the product and “experience” (i.e., a meaningful unit of experience for people, not at the feature level) levels of analysis...

Today, there are various ways in which the browser communicates with you to help provide a safe and reliable browsing experience. IE9 emphasizes site content , to keep your focus on the site, with a quiet and consistent way for the browser to communicate with you. This builds on the work done in Windows 7 to reduce notifications (see Chaitanya’s blog post that talks about the Windows notification area as “The whisperer”). We designed a new notification bar that delivers messages...

The web is changing rapidly. More than ever before, web sites provide highly engaging, immersive experiences that people revisit frequently (e.g., web email throughout the day) or stay on for extended periods of time (e.g., Facebook all day). From captivating media to highly interactive web games, from social networking sites to online productivity tools, sites enable people to do things that were previously not possible on the web. In turn, people spend the majority of their time (57%) on the PC...

Internet Explorer is a universal product used by people young and old, new and experienced, speaking many different languages.  A lot of people take advantage of IE’s built in accessibility features (like page zoom, caret browsing, find in page, etc) and additional assistive technology such as screen readers to use the web.  Accessibility is beneficial to everyone no matter what their abilities.   

As with every Internet Explorer release, we are committed to delivering a browser that’s accessible for all users.  Part of achieving that goal is making sure assistive technology works well with IE.  IE9 fundamentally changes how users interact with the browser and how the browser takes advantage of the entire PC.  Those changes also impact how assistive technology interacts with IE, which necessitates updates from some assistive technology.  For example, the new notification model is not read by many screen readers, and screen readers can no longer depend on the GDI display subsystem since IE9 uses Windows Direct2D and DirectWrite as part of enabling hardware-accelerated HTML5. 

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In recent posts we discussed the various ways that add-ons can impact browsing performance . We shared some data about add-on performance , described how we measure performance and included guidance to help add-on developers do the same. These efforts help us drive improvements to the quality of the add-on ecosystem. It’s equally important for consumers to be able to stay in control of their browsing experience with add-ons. We recently shared our point of view on the benefits of having...

With this week’s beta release , IE9 brings the most familiar experiences of Windows and makes them available for websites and the people who browse them. Users can pin sites in the taskbar just as they pin applications, and launch web tasks directly, the same way they launch everything else in Windows. Websites can program jump lists for pinned sites, to make common tasks easier for their users as part of the desktop experience. Sites can also program notifications when the user pins them in the...

“IE9 started from the premise that the modern web will deliver HTML5 experiences that feel more like native applications than sites. Building on hardware-accelerated SVG, canvas, video, audio, and text, developers will use the power of the whole PC to achieve great performance. On the modern web, developers will use the same markup across different HTML5 browsers.” – Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Windows Internet Explorer Why start a post on designing the new Windows...