As announced in February 2008 , Internet Explorer 8 sends an updated user-agent string when interacting with web servers. Since we last blogged about the User-Agent string, the Internet Explorer team introduced Compatibility View and today, the Windows team is releasing the Windows 7 Beta . Each of these events has a small impact on the User-Agent string, as I will outline in this post. The Trident/4.0 User-Agent String In order to help users visit sites that block the “MSIE 8.0” user-agent...

Hi, my name is Andy Zeigler, and I’m a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer Foundations team. I’d like to tell you about a new IE8 feature called Loosely-Coupled IE, or LCIE for short. Essentially, LCIE is a collection of internal architecture changes to Internet Explorer that improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of the browser. It also paves the way for future improvements in other areas, including security and usability. To do this, we’ve isolated the browser frame and...

Hi! I’m Eric Lawrence, Security Program Manager for Internet Explorer. Last Tuesday, Dean wrote about our principles for delivering a trustworthy browser ; today, I’m excited to share with you details on the significant investments we’ve made in Security for Internet Explorer 8. As you might guess from the length of this post, we’ve done a lot of security work for this release. As an end-user, simply upgrade to IE8 to benefit from these security improvements. As a domain administrator, you can use...

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...

This post introduces IE9’s User-Agent (UA) String and it builds on previous blog posts and documentation . An important change for site developers to know is that IE9 will send the short UA string by default. This change improves overall performance, interoperability and compatibility. IE9 will no longer send additions to the UA string made by other software installed on the machine such as .NET and many others . Some folks will notice that the IE9 Platform Preview sends IE8’s UA string . We...

We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 . Please try it out! You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon. While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8...

Hi, I’m B. Ashok, the Product Unit Manager for Web Development Tools – we have our own team blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools ), but I wanted to post over here to discuss a change my team has made which has an effect on users of IE7+ in Windows Vista. Specifically, we are removing the DHTML Editing Control from the Windows Vista product. The DHTML Editing Control shipped in Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server, in a file called dhtmled.ocx. This file contained two flavors of the control:...

Quite a bit has been written about the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol and its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS), so I won't cover the protocols in detail here. The following are good references if you want to get a quick refresher. Microsoft KB article describing the SSL Handshake Wikipedia Overview of TLS Happily, a majority of web users now know to look for the lock icon and the HTTPS in the address line to identify when their connection is secure. Unfortunately, relatively...

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. With IE9, we have worked much more closely with the developer community. Developers have had an earlier (and more frequently updated...

With your freshly installed Internet Explorer 7, take time to explore our library of add-ons. The IE Add-Ons website has over 400 add-ons registered to date, and many more are on the way. The IE7 team took the last few weeks (in between last minute bug fixes) to collect our must-have list below. All of the add-ons in our list are free to download, integrate well with IE7, and provide extraordinary functionality. Stay Safe and Secure: Windows Defender is a must-have for anyone concerned about spyware...

We have heard all your feedback asking us for full CSS compliance. With the now public available Beta 2 Preview build on XP, we get a big step closer to this goal. Chris talked about our priorities for IE7 before , but I want to give more detail on our work with CSS. We had 3 objectives, in priority: Fix some really nasty bugs posted on sites like positioniseverything.net Revise parts of our existing CSS implementation to be true to the spec Add the most-requested new CSS functionality...

Hi, I’m Matt Crowley, Program Manager for Extensibility with Internet Explorer. The team was very excited to be at the RSA security conference last month discussing the security features of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. In this, the second part of the IE8 Security blog series, I describe the ActiveX improvements in IE8 and summarize the existing ActiveX-related security features carried over from earlier browser versions. Per-User (Non-Admin) ActiveX Running IE8 in Windows Vista, a standard user...

Developing technologies that work reliably on their own and as part of the computing ecosystem is core to our mission and is an important part of our commitment to Trustworthy Computing. Our customers and partners expect technologies and services they can depend on anytime, anywhere, and on any device. We focus on constant improvements to the dependability of our technologies and services. For Internet Explorer, reliability means that the browser should always start quickly, perform well, connect...

Hi, I’m Eric Lawrence from the Internet Explorer Security Team. With the RSA security conference kicking off this week, I wanted to start sharing more information about the security features and benefits of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. Over the next several weeks, we’ll blog in greater detail about some of the security improvements in Beta 1, such as the new Safety Filter, greater control over ActiveX controls, and new AJAX features for safer mashups (XDomainRequest and XDM). This is not a complete...

It’s been a little over a year since we released IE7 on Windows XP and for Windows Vista, so I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about where we are after the year. According to internal Microsoft research based on data from Visual Sciences Corporation, there are over 300 million users are experiencing the web with IE7. This makes IE7 the second most popular browser after IE6. IE7 is already #1 in the US and UK, and we expect IE7 to surpass IE6 worldwide shortly. Perhaps more important...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 21 August 2012 Before we start let me shortly introduce Adrian Bateman. He is the developer currently working on our IE7 print experience. Since he works out of Microsoft's offices in Reading, England, we are much better now at printing “tomatoes”. Without further ado: Today, there is a well known problem with printing from Internet Explorer where the layout of the page sometimes...

Site developers have been clear that they want interoperability and standards compliance (or “Same markup”) for newer technologies as well as backward compatibility for their existing sites. After reading questions and comments on the last few compatibility-related blog posts , I thought now is a good time to recap IE’s compatibility features for site developers. As IE changes and supports new technologies, developers will still want, in some scenarios, IE’s legacy behavior...

The topic of site support for IE6 has had a lot of discussion on the web recently as a result of a post on the Digg blog . Why would anyone run an eight-year old browser? Should sites continue to support it? What more can anyone do to get IE6 users to upgrade? For technology enthusiasts, this topic seems simple. Enthusiasts install new (often unfinished or “beta”) software all the time. Scores of posts on this site and others describe specific benefits of upgrading. As a browser supplier, we want...

As Dean announced , a beta version of Internet Explorer 8 will be released in the first half of 2008. The HTTP headers of every web request contain a simple string called the "User-Agent" that allows servers to identify the type and version of the visitor’s browser. For a deeper understanding of the User-Agent string, please see Understanding User-Agent Strings . When released, the IE8 beta will introduce an updated User-Agent string. For IE8, we’ve simply replaced "MSIE 7.0" with "MSIE 8.0...

Previous posts described the importance of developing sites with feature detection and debugging a site’s behavior in older versions of Internet Explorer using IE’s browser and document modes . Testing production Web sites against multiple browsers and multiple browser versions is a reality of Web development. IE9’s emulation of older IE document modes makes this easier but those emulations are not exact. Some developers need a convenient way to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one PC...

Hello! Just wanted to give you a quick update that we’ve dropped two new VPC images that you can use with the free copy of Virtual PC 2007 . The first is a refresh of the Windows XP SP2 + IE6 image . A few people were encountering a non-genuine Windows warning from the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notification Tool. We did not install the WGA Notification tool on the image this time around. As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts , these images have had their product keys deactivated, thus...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 22 August 2012 Hi, I’m Jason Watters, a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer Team. As Dean just announced, the IE7 Beta 2 Preview is now available for download. We hope you are looking forward to installing and testing it as much as we are looking forward to hearing your feedback on it. We have several different ways for you to send us your feedback. First, you can post any...

There have been a number of blog posts recently about JavaScript developments, e.g. Gabriele Renzi’s " ECMAScript 4, the fourth system syndrome ". For ECMAScript, we here on the IE team certainly believe that thoughtful evolution is the right way to go; as I've frequently spoken about publicly, compatibility with the current web ecosystem - not "breaking the Web" - is something we take very seriously. In our opinion, a revolution in ECMAScript would be best done with an entirely new language, so...

In my previous post , I gave a glimpse of what to come in IE7 and printing. Now that the Beta 2 Preview build is publicly available I like to walk you through all the additions we added to printing and print preview. Internal studies showed that printing is the second most used feature after navigation in a browser and traditionally has not seen the respect it deserves. To address this IE7 focuses around 3 experiences: Having a great default print experience Intuitive UI, putting you...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 22 August 2012 Hi, I'm Al Billings. I'm a project manager on the Internet Explorer team. I haven't posted before but you have probably seen comments from me from time to time on the blog. I'm involved in the regular work with it. Today, we have been getting a lot of questions in comments on our blog posts in response to the release of the IE7 Beta 2 Preview. I wanted to try to wrap most...