The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 Although most of the team does not spell favourite like this, I originally hail from England and occasionally enjoy antagonizing my colleagues with the British spelling. Here are a few sites that we believe are valuable to web developers. http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ Dynamic Drive has lots of useful widgets to add to web pages from menus to games. www.webreference.com Web Reference has lots of resources...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 The great thing about Windows is all the software that runs on it. Every day, there’s new software released for Windows. Today, with Firefox’s release, is no different. As someone who has worked on many big software projects over the last few years, I’m happy for the developers who worked on it. Signing off on your work and letting the rest of the world use it feels good...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 We’re working on improving our documentation for web developers on MSDN . Here are a few changes we’ve made over the last month or so. A Simplified Table of Contents This can be seen in the panel on the left under Web Development. The previous table of contents was a bit confused and often made it a struggle to find topics that were relevant. Removal of “new” tags As a...

Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox, the 2004 World Series Champions! It is amazing to think that they not only won the World Series for the first time since 1918, but they did it in extraordinary fashion, winning 8 straight games against two of the best teams in baseball. Before I started working with a VIC-20 or a Commodore 64, I was a baseball fanatic. I grew up in New England (Vermont to be exact) living and dying with the fate of the Red Sox. I was fortunate enough to see them play a number...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 I got an email thread the other day that started out with the question of how to add a trusted site into "LocalSystem"'s IE setting via command line or script (which is good question, but more on that later). As part of this thread it also talked about a power toy called Tweakomatic. Named to follow along in the great TweakUI power toy tradition, Tweakomatic is a tool...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 I thought I’d take a couple minutes to talk about Script Debugging and Internet Explorer. Script debugging is turned off by default you can enable it by going to: Tools->Internet Options…->Advanced->Disable Script Debugging Prior to XPSP2 the above will turn script debugging on for all applications that host the WebBrowser control (Outlook for example). On XPSP2...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 Slashdot picked up a story from Bugtraq entitled Web browsers - a mini-farce in which Michael Zalewski talks about feeding a variety of browsers a healthy dose of bad content over 2 hours and seeing what happened. The story also includes pointers to the tools he used for hammering the browsers. Here is a bit of his report: 6) Pointless rants It appears that the overall...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 We’ve had more than a few comments suggesting that IE works too hard at backwards compatibility, and we cater to those people who “don’t code their pages correctly”, or people who otherwise “didn’t do things the right way”. These comments frequently go on to suggest that we (the IE team) should use our market position to “force people to fix their broken stuff”. I’d like...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 Earlier this week we released the latest security update for IE, MS04-038 . We’ve been working on this since XPSP2 shipped, and it’s nice to see it made available to customers on Windows Update . This update addresses, among other issues, the drag & drop vulnerability that’s been in the news & security circles lately. This is also the first IE update to use the our latest installation technology...

Like any piece of software I have worked on, I have intense affection for the resultant software we ship (warts and all). However, there are usually a number of things you wish you had had more time to make better and every time you run across it in the product it drives you crazy. One thing that bothers me with IE in XPSP2 is the amount of hoops you need to click through to set Google or some other search engine as your autosearch provider. A quick way to set Google is to use the reg file up on...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 So this is my first post on this blog, my name is Phil Nachreiner, I’m a developer on the IE team. I’ll post more about myself in another time, but I’d like to talk briefly about opting into the security features we added in XPSP2. For example, we’ve made it extremely easy to opt existing applications that use the WebBrowser Control into the XPSP2 Information Bar without...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 If you’re a developer hosting the WebBrowser control, you’ll want to read Compatibility in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows XP Service Pack 2 . This article has details about changes such as: Local Machine Zone Lockdown Object Caching MIME Handling MIME Sniffing Network Protocol Lockdown Window Restrictions File Download Restrictions ActiveX Restrictions Pop-up Blocker...

In earlier posts, Christopher mentioned that for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 the UA string was getting a new ‘SV1’ decorator. This has stirred up a flurry of questions and comments about our reasoning behind this decision. Why did we add ‘SV1’ instead of update the IE version number? Well, we know from past experience that changing the version number can have a huge impact on site and application compatibility. We felt that since IE for XPSP2 and WS03SP1 does not have significant changes...

With XPSP2 out the door, we’re turning our attention to bringing our latest security enhancements to upcoming Windows releases. Next up: Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP 64-bit edition v2003, which are both currently in Beta. Both these platforms will receive the same treatment as XPSP2 did for IE: they’ll get all our security improvements, the pop-up blocker, the information bar, etc. See Tony’s blog entry about IE in XPSP2 for more info & links about the changes we made in XPSP2. Customers...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 Hi, I’m Gary Schare and I run the product management team for IE. This includes defining and communicating the IE value proposition for all customer segments and helping the product team with long-term product strategy. I posted a comment last week about Windows Marketplace on the Community Site entry and wanted to follow up with more info. Windows Marketplace went live...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 Hi, I’m Christopher Vaughan, and I’m the lead project manager for the Internet Explorer team. I’ve worked on IE on and off since the IE 3.0 days, and have been involved in every major Windows release since Windows 95. I work with Dean, Scott, Tony, Dave, and the others who have or will be posting here to make sure that the IE team is working on the right things and at...

US-CERT published an advisory on XPSP2 the other day. Main statement – “Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) significantly improves your computer's defenses against attacks and vulnerabilities.” They specifically talked about IE changes, including local machine zone lockdown. Full advisory is at http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/alerts/SA04-243A.html . Thanks. Scott

We’ve just launched a new Community site for Internet Explorer to help support end users. This is linked from the main Internet Explorer page on www.microsoft.com . It includes links to other Internet Explorer sites, downloads and hints and tips. This site is focused on providing resources to end users but we also have sites with information for other parts of the wide audience for Internet Explorer: Resources for developers at the Internet Explorer Developers Center on MSDN Resources for the IT...

There have been some questions about how pop-up blocking works in XPSP2 in the comments. Jeff Davis , one of the IE developers who worked on this feature in XPSP2, has put together a post ( http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2004/08/25/220737.aspx ) that gives more details on what we consider a user initiated click. If you want to get better sense for how it works, please take a read through his latest entry - mouseDown + mouseUp = click . Thanks. Scott

I have noticed going through the comments for our entries, that some people have started posting comments that are specific asks for help with IE issues. This blog is not focused on being a support forum, but we will try to help people as we can. If you are looking for more expedient and focused help please see the Microsoft Internet Explorer Support page - http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/support/default.mspx . Also please use the Contact link ( http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/contact.aspx ) as mechanism...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 My name is Bruce Morgan, and I am another one of the development managers on the IE team. I manage the developers who work on the User Experience of IE – the UI and related infrastructure. I spend most of my time focused on the features “outside the rectangle” of the page the user is browsing, such as Favorites, History, the “Internet Options” dialog, and the like. Essentially...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 As we recently shipped security update MS04-025, I thought it would be good to talk about the testing coverage that we do for each security update. Testing is about risk management, and we have to make judgments about where to invest heavily in testing and where to invest less in testing to achieve the highest quality IE when we release. Code change is one main driver of this (test where the code is changing...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 As we’ve been posting we’ve been mentioning our titles, but we haven’t really explained what those titles mean or what we do on the IE team, so I thought I’d explain. Like many Microsoft product teams, there are three primary job functions that are dedicated to IE: Development, Test, and Program Management. In addition to these roles, we have key members of our virtual team who are shared with other parts...

The information published in this post is now out-of-date. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 The comments system for blogs.msdn.com was recently upgraded and the default was changed to block automatic posting of comments. I have changed it back, which means all comments should show up without having to be published and I also published any comments that were pending. Scott

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid. —IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012 Channel 9 has just released a video where Dean discusses the exciting challenge of leading the Internet Explorer team. It’s well worth watching this and all the other videos on Channel 9 which often give an understanding into the motivation behind the projects we undertake. For those of you who aren’t aware, Channel 9 was established by five guys at Microsoft to allow...