Recently, there’s been some interest in how to control the use of Java within Internet Explorer. Java is a unique form of extensibility because it can be invoked in two ways: Using an APPLET element Using an OBJECT element with a CLSID of a JVM These two invocation methods are subject...

An amusing April Fool’s satire I ran across yesterday reminded me of a Connect bug that was reported back in the IE9 Beta. The HTML <video> control’s default context menu includes a “Save Video As…” menu option that allows saving the video to disk: The...

In today’s post, I’ll provide a high-level overview of features in Internet Explorer that impact the loading of ActiveX controls. Internet Explorer 6 and later allow the user to enable or disable ActiveX controls on an individual basis using the Manage Add-ons screen. Internet...

Internet Explorer offers an extremely rich set of options for controlling cookies . The default settings are fairly well-balanced, but some users may want to introduce more restrictive or specialized controls. To configure cookie settings in IE, click Tools > Internet Options . Click the Privacy...

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 off without any action on his part. He was...

As browser users go, I’m pretty savvy. I’ve been on the IE team for nearly half a decade, and I’ve been writing browser extensions for twice as long. I read networking source code for entertainment, I spend my free time writing a web debugger , and I maintain an IE troubleshooting guide for folks who...

By default, when starting a new session using IE8's InPrivate Browsing feature, toolbars and Browser Helper Objects are disabled. This is done to help protect the user's privacy: many toolbars and extensions maintain their own navigation/search/etc history lists, and such lists could violate the user...

Applications which host the WebOC (Web Browser control) may choose to support popups and new windows by hooking the NewWindow3 event and returning in ppDisp a pointer to a new, hidden, non-navigated WebBrowser object or InternetExplorer object. If such an interface is returned, the browser so provided...

We've had a few folks write to the IEBlog asking " How can I disable the little blue accelerator icon that appears when text is selected in a HTML page? " For end users, the answer is straightforward: Click Tools > Internet Options > Advanced , and untick Display Accelerator button on selection...