We often talk with our partners about all the ways they can take advantage of the extensibility in IE7. Today, Yahoo! released something new and (I think) pretty cool. “Internet Explorer 7 optimized by Yahoo!” presets the homepage and search to Yahoo properties. Of course, users can easily change the settings just as they can with the standard version that we ship. The Yahoo! version of IE7 is available now on the Yahoo site . Yahoo! used the beta version of the Internet Explorer Administration...

Over on the Ajax Blog, Dion Almaer passed on an important tip from Brent Ashley and Tim Aiello for AJAX developers – to have your cross-browser AJAX work better with IE7, you really should be invoking the native XMLHttpRequest (the cross-browser one) first to see if it’s available before instantiating the ActiveX control, instead of the other way around. In addition to the reasons that Brent and Tim discovered, I’ve seen a bunch of code that creates the XMLHttpRequest object, uses it for a request...

Members of the IE team will be online for an Expert Zone chat this coming Thursday June 8 th at 10.00AM PST. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered and hear from members of the IE product team. A transcript will be published after the chat and transcripts of other recent chats are available. These chats are a lot of fun and we hope you will join us for the chat if you can. Cheers - Uche

Hello, Eric Lawrence here from the IE Networking team. I’ve seen a few bug reports and blog comments regarding an observed change in IE7 Beta 2’s caching behavior, and I wanted to post a quick explanation about the situation and assure you that it will be resolved in the next beta. In IE7 Beta 2, we made a change our handling of the Post-Check and Pre-Check extensions in the HTTP Cache-Control header. If you’re not familiar with these extensions, you can get a quick overview here: http://msdn...

With the release of Windows Vista Beta 2 , I want to announce that we will be naming the version of IE7 in Windows Vista “Internet Explorer 7+”. While all versions of IE7 are built from the same code base, there are some important differences in IE7+, most significantly the addition of Windows Vista-only features like Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics. These features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel...

If you’re at the WWW2006 conference here in beautiful Edinburgh Scotland, you’ve probably seen a number of great presentations already such as yesterday’s discussion on Identity Management featuring Kim Cameron from the Infocard team. Today (Friday) I’m sitting on a panel called Phoiling Phishing hosted by Harvard Researcher Rachna Dhamija , where we’ll focus more specifically on the issue of Phishing and techniques browsers can implement to “phoil” the attacks. I hope you’ll come to discuss if you...

Hi there! My name is Laurel Reitman and I’m a Lead Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team working on our Programming Model. I had the pleasure of attending the AJAX Experience May 10th-12th down in San Francisco. A big thanks to Ben & Dion from Ajaxian.com for hosting the conference. It was a great opportunity to sit down with developers who are building AJAX-style web sites as well as developers who are building tools to make it easier for others to build rich applications. I feel...

In my last blog post I mentioned how important compatibility is, for example, you might see a certificate error page and would like to know what the problem with the website digital certificate is. In order to help you get ready for IE7, the IE team released a small tool that can be used to find compatibility issues when using IE7 beta builds. I am happy to announce that Microsoft has released a beta of the fully featured compatibility tool, the Microsoft Application Compatibility...

The transcript from the May 11 th chat is now available online . The Chat was fun as usual and we had a blast. People seemed very excited with IE7 Beta 2 and were curious about what to expect in Beta 3. You can find out when the next chat will be at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/default.mspx . We typically hold the IE chats on the second Thursday of every month. Cheers Uche

Hello everybody, My name is Anurag Jain and I am a Program Manager on the IE team. I am also involved in the sustained engineering efforts to support IE6, and chances are that I might have spoken to some of you on the phone. I would like to thank Al for the great work he has done here, both with the IE blog and his other duties, and wish him the very best in his future endeavors. I hope everyone is enjoying the second beta of IE7. Keep sending us your feedback! - Anurag

Hello everyone, I wanted to let the readers of the IEBlog know that the torch is being passed today on the blog. A fellow program manager, Anurag Jain, is taking over running the day to day activity and moderation duties that keep this blog going on the IE team. You should expect to see posts and comments from him in the future as the official moderator (or “Blogfather” as we call it) for the IEBlog. Please treat him with the love and affection that you have shown me. :-) Today is my last day...

Members of the IE team will be online for an Expert Zone chat this coming Thursday May 11 th at 4.00PM PST. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered and hear from members of the IE product team. A transcript will be published after the chat and transcripts of other recent chats are available. These chats are a lot of fun and we hope you will join us for the chat if you can. Cheers - Uche

When we shipped the Microsoft Phishing Filter in Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, many readers on the blog asked: if the Phishing Filter is checking suspicious URLs against a web service, how would Microsoft protect user privacy? We know that for customers to benefit from the work we put into the Phishing Filter, they have to trust us enough to use it. As you’ve been hearing for years, Microsoft now engineers our products to be more secure by default. In the same way, we engineered the Phishing Filter...

After endless nights and countless slices of pizza, the IE team is proud to announce the availability of Arabic, Finnish, and German versions of IE7 Beta 2 in addition to the English versions we released a week and a half ago . We are also on track to deliver Japanese versions of IE7 Beta 2 on Monday, May 8 th , at 9:00PM PST. You can download IE7 beta 2 from the following locations: Arabic http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ar-xm/betadownload.mspx Finnish http://www...

This morning there are some new sessions and videos available that feature the IE team. All of the Mix06 conference sessions are now available online. There are some great sessions to check out including the following ones from the IE team: NGW042 - Making Your Site Look Great in IE7 - The tools Markus shows in his talk are available here . NGW006 - Making Your Site Work with IE7 Security NGW028 - Open, De Jure, De Facto and Proprietary: Standards and Microsoft NGW048 - The Future...

My name is John Hrvatin and I’m the Program Manager for IE setup. Some customers have reported that after successfully completing IE7 setup, they do not have a tab band. I’d like to shed some light on this issue and offer a solution. IE’s tab implementation depends on xmllite.dll which is installed with IE7 but through a separate installer bundled within the IE setup process. If you extract the contents of the IE7 installation package and run update.exe directly, you will skip this step which...

I posted previously that in IE7, the user is in control of search, and that changing the default search provider (as well as modifying the list of search engines in IE7’s list) is easy. In this post I’ll describe some of the specifics and recap feedback we’ve gotten from users. The short version: the search box in IE7 is not Microsoft’s. It belongs to the user. Our guiding principle for the search box in IE7 is that the user is in control. Read on for details. The Default . The typical default...

Hi all, I just wanted to point out that we have also included an entry called 'Give Beta Feedback' under the Tools menu in the command bar that directs you to a webpage with the list of all the ways mentioned in Al’s feedback post of getting information back to us about Beta 2. Check it out!! - Uche

Hi, I’m Tina Duff one of the IE Program Managers focused on improving the customer experience around IE - including the IE add-on web site. It sounds simple, but this means ensuring that wherever IE is talked about on Microsoft.com, it’s technically correct, easy to navigate, and provides the information customers want. We quickly realized that we should do a better job making all the great add-ons to IE that developers have created easier to find and download. Thus the new IE add-on site was born...

Hi, this is Al and I wanted to talk about feedback and support for Beta 2 of IE7 now that it is available. There are two main avenues for feedback for Beta 2, which are newsgroups and the Internet Explorer Feedback site. Internet Explorer Feedback As I posted about on March 24 , we have a site live to collect bug reports and product suggestions for future versions of IE. I'll have a blog post soon about how that is going and top issues but the site is especially important for Beta 2. The...

This evening we released IE7 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie . This release is not the preview or the update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Simply: please try it. We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability...

Back in October, we blogged about some of the HTTPS improvements we’re making to IE7. At the time, we mentioned that we have encountered some HTTPS servers which claim to support TLS, but violate the RFC and “hang up” when extensions are received during the HTTPS handshake process. On Wednesday, Windows Networking GPM Billy Anders posted to the Windows Networking team blog , explaining why buggy TLS servers will result in connection failures when Windows Vista clients send TLS extensions. The...

The transcript from yesterday's IE chat is now available online . The chat was a lot of fun and donuts kept us going as we answered more than 120 questions in the hour available. In the photograph you can see from left to right Peter Gurevich, Amy P (hiding behind Peter), Chris Wilson, Max Stevens, Uche Enuha and Cyra Richardson with donuts in the center of the table as they all type answers to questions at a furious pace. There's also a news article covering some of the answers in the...

Just a notice that the April Security Update for IE also contains a non-security change to the handling of ActiveX controls, as we’ve previously mentioned . Again, due to the nature of this topic, we are not taking comments on this post. - Tony Chor

The IE April 2006 security update is now available! This security update is now available via Windows Update . Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates available via the new Microsoft Update . I would encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already. This update addresses 10 security issues: 8 remote code execution vulnerabilities, one information disclosure vulnerability and one spoofing vulnerability. For more information on the contents of this...