Web browsers use domain names for a variety of purposes, but how they’re used is much more complicated than most developers realize. In this post, I’ll attempt to cover the most important aspects of this topic. Definitions When talking...

Yesterday, IE Team alumnus Jeremy Dallman posted over on the Security Development Lifecycle team’s blog, announcing the release of BinScope and MiniFuzz . These two tools are part of the toolset that the Internet Explorer team uses to help verify the...

Today, a question from the mail bag… Q: Is there a way to stop IE from “auto-magically” recognizing and creating hyperlinks inside HTML? First, a bit of context. Web developers can use the ContentEditable property to allow users to edit part of...

A friend recently wrote to me, alarmed that the SmartScreen Filter feature was constantly turning off on his laptop with IE8. Despite manually re-enabling the feature using the Safety menu multiple times per hour, it was mysteriously and repeatedly turned...

IE8 introduced support for some of the more stable features in the HTML5 spec. However, web developers have reported some problematic scenarios in IE8's support for these features, as described below. 1. postMessage only works for IFRAMES/FRAMES ...

From the things that make you go hmm.... department: http://personal.fidelity.com/misc/buffers/coming-soon-identity.shtml.cvsr Choose a question like “In what city was your high school?” then enter the answer. This kind of information gives us a...

Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time dealing with problems users encounter when using Internet Explorer. As a result, when I write about add-ons, I’m usually talking about misbehaving code that is wrecking the browser. However, it’s not all...

Over on the Microsoft Answers forum , some folks have reported that Internet Explorer doesn’t remember their login details. This is a tricky problem to troubleshoot because there are a number of different problems which get lumped together under...

Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman of Microsoft Research have released the Doloto performance-optimization tool . This cool tool enables web developers to optimize page-load time by ensuring that pages only pull in the JavaScript functions they need. Mentioned...

Nine is a number that’s been on my mind quite a lot lately, so it’s fitting that it’s now 09:09:09 on 09/09/09. I’m eager to write more about Nine here in the future, and I know from the comments that this is a subject of interest to many. For now...

The HTTPS protocol allows a secure server to request that the client verify their identity with a client certificate during the initial secure handshake. By presenting a client certificate, the browser helps further defeat man-in-the-middle attacks and...