Internet Explorer 7 includes a new URL handling architecture known internally as CURI. The new optimized URI functions provide more secure and consistent parsing of URIs to reduce attack surface and mitigate the threat of malicious URIs. When designing our security strategy for IE7 , malicious URIs were near the top of the list because secure handling of URIs throughout IE is critical to the security of the system. Hence, a major architectural investment was made in CURI for IE7. Unlike most...

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...

As developers experiment and begin the transition from writing today’s websites to building HTML5 applications, they will test the limits of browsers. For example, the huge difference between hardware accelerated HTML5 video and plain HTML5 video support in a browser was clear in the demo we showed at MIX . Because some browsers run on many different operating systems, there can be a tendency to use a “least common denominator” approach to implementing HTML5. By using more of...

We’ve noticed questions/comments/confusion about uninstalling IE7 so I wanted to highlight one of our FAQs and add a little more detail. Uninstalling IE7 will leave you with a fully-functional IE6 and allow you to install the latest release, IE7 Beta 3 , which we recommend for all IE7 beta users so they benefit from the latest bug fixes and security updates. To uninstall Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, Beta 2 Preview, or Beta 1: Click "Start", and then click "Control Panel" Click "Add...

The developer community has asked for a long time: Where is the free developer toolbar for IE? We recognized the popularity of free IE tools like Fiddler and we listened to your feedback. I am glad to announce the next addition to our developer tool support: The IE dev toolbar. This tool will help developers to explore their HTML documents and understand everything about it. With the IE Dev Toolbar you have several features at your fingertips to go deep into existing pages or pages that you are...

Hi, I’m Tony Chor, the Group Program Manager for the Internet Explorer team. As you may know, we’ve been working hard on IE for Windows XP Service Pack 2, and we signed off on it last week. You can get a very detailed description of the changes on MSDN. (This is lovingly referred to internally as the Book of Springboard – Springboard was the codename for XP SP2.) However, I thought I’d give a high level description of the kinds of changes we made and why. First, as with any project, we set our goals...

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...

We've already started talking about a few of the CSS changes that are going to be available in IE 7 when we release, but there are a few hanging points that we haven't talked about yet or haven't covered completely. There are 3 specific items I'd like to talk about: Using the root node wild card selector for IE only rules (* HTML) [strict mode only fix] Multi-class selectors as defined by CSS 2.1 (.floral.pastel) [strict mode only fix] Pseudo-element parsing sometimes flags rules as invalid...

When we started looking deeply at HTML5, we saw that it will enable a new class of applications. These applications will stress the browser runtime and underlying hardware in ways today’s websites don’t. We quickly realized that doing HTML5 right – our intent from the start – is more about designing our browser’s subsystems around what these new applications will need than it is about a particular set of features. From the beginning, we approached IE9 with the goal of enabling professional-grade...

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...

A few people have asked why we recommend temporarily disabling anti-virus or anti-spyware applications (which I’ll refer to together as anti-malware) prior to installing IE7, so here’s a little insight to the situation. Along with copying IE7 files to your system, IE7’s setup writes a large number of registry keys. A common way anti-malware applications protect your computer is by preventing writes to certain registry keys used by IE. Any registry key write that fails during setup will cause setup...

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...

We’ve made a few improvements to our extensibility model in IE8 RC1 based on feedback we’ve received both internally and externally. WebBrowser (WebOC) Rendering Mode Changes About a year ago, I posted an entry talking about WebBrowser Control Rendering Modes in IE8 . You may recall that applications using the WebBrowser Control (also known as the WebOC, or Trident hosts) can use a Feature Control Key to select the default rendering mode of webpages they load. Since our release of IE8 Beta...

The last five years have seen a remarkable series of advances in use of JavaScript on the Web. JavaScript has gone from a language for adding interactivity to a key driver for innovation on the Web. A new generation of applications such as Gmail and Office Web Applications use thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of lines of JavaScript to deliver functionality and complexity similar to traditional desktop applications. With the advent of AJAX and script libraries, nearly every new site today makes...

We recently announced IE10 Platform Preview 1 . Aside from some exciting new features , this platform preview also includes the new IE10 user-agent string : Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) Overall this represents a natural evolution of the IE9 user-agent string with only two changes: The value of the “MSIE” token is now “10.0” The value of the “Trident” token is now “6.0” Also, Compatibility View still maps to IE7...

As promised , I want to talk today a little bit more about printing experience in IE7. Printing is after navigation/search one of the most used features but it still lacks the fidelity of like say a photo printing program. Why is that? Content for the Web is in general not designed for printing. If laid out at 100% it generally exceeds the space provided on the paper. In IE6, for example, you end up often with cut-off right margins. Another very common problem when printing for example...

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...

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...

Hello again! If you are already using Internet Explorer 7 you might have noticed our tab settings. Perhaps you already changed one or more of them to better suit your browsing habits. Whenever we create a setting, we always have many discussions about what its default should be, what it should be called, and where it should go. In some cases we have great information (such as usability studies, customer surveys, and instrumentation) to help guide us in our decision making. In other cases we...

We have received scattered reports of users experiencing odd browser behavior after installing our most recent security update . Some of you have reported opening a browser window that promptly hangs IE, others have reported opening links that render blank, and finally we have reports of multiple windows opening when initiating a browser session. After investigating several of these reports, we have traced these issues to a common source. If a user has ever attempted to run IE7 Beta1 in an unsupported...

The feedback and conversation on IE9’s Platform Previews and Beta to date from many different communities has made the IE9 development process, and product, substantially better than previous releases. The discussions around hardware-accelerated HTML5 and same markup with the developer community, for example, have informed many changes to the product. Thank you for using it and providing feedback. In general, we’ve focused this blog on engineering issues. In this post, still continuing...

I recently presented a session at MIX10 covering the topic of cross-browser best practices. The key focus of the session was not on a particular feature, but on how web developers can reliably write code that adapts to cross-browser differences. IE9 reduces these differences and enables developers to use the same markup across browsers. Enabling the same markup means supporting the right features to make the same HTML, JavaScript, and CSS "just work". Yet enabling the same markup on the web is...

Hello again, I hope you have been enjoying the IE7 Beta. Today I want to briefly tell you about one of the cool new features we have developed for IE7: Page Zoom. This feature allows the user to effectively zoom in on a web page to make it easier to see and read. Studies have shown that approximately 1 in 4 people have some sort of vision impairment that makes reading on the web more difficult. I happen to be in that 25% so I am very excited about this feature and how it makes the web easier to read...

From time to time, I've heard the question: "Why can IE only download two files from the same site simultaneously?" Some more savvy users observe that this limitation probably makes sense in dialup cases where bandwidth is constrained or when lots of small files are being downloaded, since the TCP/IP slow start algorithm comes into play. But for those of us lucky enough to be on broadband, this limitation can be annoying. If I want to download a large number of large files, I have to sit around...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 22 August 2012 If you’re a developer, an IT Pro, or just plain interested, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/ to try the IE7 Beta 2 Preview. What’s a beta preview? It’s a release for everyone involved in making the Internet work. Before we release a consumer-focused beta, we want to make sure anyone with a website can look at the changes we’ve made to our layout...