Tony Schreiner's Blog

Let's talk about fonts. As somebody who spends far too much time in front of a computer each day, I've become incredibly picky about display quality, and fonts in particular. With Windows XP, ClearType, and a sufficiently high DPI display, onscreen type...

In the IE7 Beta 2 Preview the UI element that hosts menus and 3rd party toolbars is located between the navigation bar and tabs. However, in this release there's a registry key which you can set to move this to the top of the window instead: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER...

See Also: Part 1: Authenticode - No and never again! The Information Bar is a new piece of UI that shows up when potentially dangerous actions on a page have been blocked. It appears between the toolbar and the content window, and looks a bit like...

A comment to one of my other posts asked about how to launch IE and open several additional tabs. IE7 does not support specifying multiple URLs on the command line, but another way to do this is to use IE Automation to launch IE as an out-of-proc COM...

If you have a lot of applications open one thing you might notice is that Windows -- even XP -- will reach a point where no more windows can be opened. For me, IE hits this point after about 40-50 windows. Depending on what else you have running, you...

Let's say you're in a situation where you can't log into your XP machine because you forgot to click that checkbox. psexec to the rescue! psexec \\machinename reg add "hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server" /f /v fDenyTSConnections...

I'm working on some long-overdue posts about tabbed browsing, but before I get too deep into them what I'd like to know most is: what do you want to know about IE7's tabbed browsing implementation? If you have questions, please post them as comments....

Check out these features: Supports MP3 and WMA (and mounts as a hard drive) 4 GB storage 10+ hr removable lithium-ion battery Size is 3" x 2.5" x 0.4" for the one standing up, 2.4" x 3.1" x 0.4" for the one laying down. Around the size...

Scoble and Dudley are having a debate about fonts and I can't help but think the little screenshot isn't enough to go on. For one, it's clear that Japanese fonts are not rendered using ClearType, so that's a topic for a different day. Right now I want...

One of the great things about Windows is how it works on a wide variety of hardware. After reading a few articles and blog postings from people who have installed Windows 8 on the MacBook Pro with Retina display I’m unable to find an accurate recap, so...

On his blog (and in a comment on my 120 DPI post ) Omar points out a super-secret registry tweak make IE do extra scaling in high DPI mode . IE already adjusts for well-written web pages, but if you're using high DPI and still feeling cramped on some...

First, I'll join everybody else in announcing that XP SP2 RC2 is available for download ! If you've put off installing it, now's the time to give it a shot and test all of your favorite applications and web sites. Most of the work recently has been on...

I'm not sure if anybody else has this problem, but after I have used XP for a while the menus seem to revert to an ugly 3D look instead of having the clean, flat border. No amount of tweaking seems to get back the flat menus except going back to the original...

As others have pointed out , Microsoft has made available a free download of Expression 3, apparently acquired from Creature House. My first impression, having only played with it during breakfast and lunch, is that it's a very cool app. It has a standard...

Just before we shipped IE7 we heard sporadic reports of a "Heisenbug" where users would click a tab or click in the address bar, and the IE window would start shaking (or "flickering", or "menus bouncing up and down", depending on how users described...

During the development of IE7, one problem we discovered was that a small number of extensions have unbalanced CoInitialize() or CoUninitialize() calls. On IE6 they sometimes lucked out, but due to architectural changes in IE7 these would cause crashes...

"Wow, that sucks," pretty much sums up my personal experience attempting to sign up for Napster and download music. I just bought the Creative Zen Micro because my iRiver -- which I otherwise like -- does not support DRM protected music. This means...

As you probably know by now, XP SP2 RC1 is publicly available at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/sp2preview.mspx . Over the next week or so I'll give an overview of a few of the security features the browser UI team has been working...

While I'm on the subject of COM and extension compatibility, another issue that affected a small number of extensions in IE7 involved passing an interface to a worker thread without first marshalling the interface using CoMarshalInterface() (or the longer...

I've added some details about the IE7 Tabbed Browsing implementation up on the IE blog . Check it out.

I'm definitely not an artist, but Lightwave 3D ( http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave ) remains one of my favorite applications. I suspect this is because it's one of the (few) types of applications that has escaped the trend of simplification at...

See Also: Authenticode - No, and never again! and Information Bar - Stopping the modal dialog madness Microsoft cares a lot about application compatibility. So does the IE team, but we have an additional burden: web site compatibility. I think I can...

In a future post I will talk about some of the challenges relating to building Tabbed Browsing as an add-on to IE. The MSN team has taken on this challenge, and their latest toolbar adds tabbed browsing to "older" versions of IE. I haven't used this...

Or: When is 5296 > 5299? Many people who managed to get a hold of the leaked IE7 7.0.5299.0 build may be wondering whether they should uninstall it and switch to the official IE7 Beta2 Preview, which is version 7.0.5296.0. On the surface it seems...

Back in college, in 1996 (I believe) I frequently played the pre-release version of SubSpace , a massively multiplayer online game that was originally designed as a project to test the affects of lag over a modem. If I recall correctly, I first played...