IEBlog : Browsing the Web

Why am I seeing this dialog?

ieblog — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 05:49:00 GMT

Internet Explorer 8 has a new feature that keeps you in control of your search engine default, by informing you when software attempts to change your settings.

If you are using Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 or RC1, you might have seen the following dialog when installing new software:

The default search preference is the search engine Internet Explorer uses when you type a search query into the search box in the top-right corner of the main Internet Explorer window:

(Wikipedia is set as my default.)

Internet Explorer also use the default search preference when you type a question into the address bar – Try typing “How high is Mt Everest” into the address bar.

A lot of toolbars that plug into Internet Explorer modify the user’s search preference in their installer program. Some ask (by way of a checkbox in their install program) if they should change it.

Some don’t ask clearly, and change your setting without you noticing the change before it happens. We believe this is not a good thing – a program should never change a user’s setting without their unambiguous consent.

To counteract this, some applications or toolbars install a ‘search setting protector’ – a small program that monitors your search default preference, and switches it back automatically to their search engine if any other program ever changes the setting. A lot of users have multiple toolbars installed – and this creates a situation where toolbar installers, toolbars and ‘search setting protectors’ are all fighting over your search setting – If you, or another program, ever changes the setting, you will see a variety of prompts from various ‘search setting protectors’, warning you about the change.

All of the squabbling between programs means that you are not in complete control of your search preference – your setting.

Starting in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, any toolbar that wants to change the search setting default (by setting a registry key) will trigger a ‘user consent’ dialog, where the requested change is explained clearly, and you are asked to approve/not approve the change. So, no program can silently change your search setting without you knowing about it.

This change in Internet Explorer does not break any existing toolbar installers or ‘search setting protector’ programs – they can still change the user’s search setting (by changing a registry key in the user’s registry) – but when Internet Explorer starts up, you will be informed of the change, and you can allow or decline the change.

There is also a new API for setting the search default. Any application can call this API, and request that the Internet Explorer Search Default be changed. A dialog box is shown (and the application requesting the change is clearly identified) and the user can allow/not allow the change.

If a ‘search setting protector’ program keeps asking you to change your default, you can clearly indicate your preference (and lock them out of changing your preference in the future) by checking the ‘Prevent programs from suggesting changes to my default search provider’ checkbox. You can still use the Manage Search Providers command in the search box dropdown to change your default search provider at any point – you should be able to set your search default to anything you want, without any programs interfering with it.

And Everest is 8,848 meters (29,029 FT) high, by the way.

Frank Olivier
Program Manager

Personalize IE8 through Services

ieblog — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:04:00 GMT

One of the things that I learned from working on IE is that there are common patterns of how users browse the web, yet what they browse varies person to person. We designed Visual Search Suggestions, Accelerators, and Web Slices to simplify common patterns with the flexibility for you to customize these features with services that you enjoy. I want to explain how IE8 treats services and share how I personalize IE8 with my favorite services in less than 5 minutes.

Out-of-box services

We want to provide an out-of-box experience for you to easily try out the new features to IE8, Accelerators and Web Slices. The first time you install IE8, your browser is loaded with Accelerators and Web Slices for you to get started. You can opt-out of the out-of-box Accelerators and choose your own through the Settings Wizard or Manage Add-ons.

Existing services

IE8 respects your existing services on a version (IE7 to IE8) and build-to-build (Beta 2 to RC 1) upgrade.

Search providers were available in IE7, and IE8 keeps your previous search providers and the default setting. IE8 also checks and updates your search providers with suggestions, so that you can start using suggestions automatically. For instance, if you installed the Amazon search provider on IE7 and upgrade to IE8 you get results from Amazon directly from the search box:

For Accelerators and Web Slices, IE8 keeps your services and default settings on build-to-build upgrades.

Customize IE8 with your own services

The IE8 Add-ons Gallery is a way for you to find the services that you use on a daily basis. After I install IE8 on a new machine, I take a few minutes to install my favorite services before I start browsing. If you’re on IE8, click the add link to try it out!

Search – access search results and suggestions from the search box

Amazon

add

Food Network

add

Live Search

add

NYTimes

add

Wikipedia

add

Accelerators – get contextual services from any webpage by selecting text

AddToAny

add

MSNBC

add

TripAdvisor

add

YouTube Videos

add

Web Slices – get notifications if the site updates from the Favorites Bar

DJI Stock

add

Live Search News

add

OneRiot

add

To further tweak your search provider and Accelerator settings, use Manage Add-ons from the Tools menu.

I’m constantly discovering new services through the gallery, and the gallery inspired me to create my own Accelerator over the holidays (RetailMeNot, an Accelerator to help keep my shopping spree under control). If you’re pretty tech savvy, consider creating your own service and sharing with the community.

Enjoy the RC1 build!

Jane Kim
Program Manager

Update 2:30: Updating OneRiot Webslice link.

Compatibility View Improvements to come in IE8

ieblog — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:34:00 GMT

The next public update of IE8 (for Windows Vista- and Windows XP-based operating systems as well as the Windows 7 Beta) includes improvements to Compatibility View that help end-users when they visit web sites that are not yet ready for IE8’s new, more standards-compliant defaults. This blog post describes the technical background and how this new functionality works.

A Brief History of Standards, Interoperability, Compatibility, and IE8

As we improve the interoperability of Internet Explorer by delivering better implementations of web standards, some users may face compatibility issues with sites that rely on the behavior of previous versions of Internet Explorer.

With IE8’s Beta 1 release, Microsoft demonstrated its commitment to interoperability by making the most standards-compliant default view for web pages IE’s default. This is a good thing for the next billion web pages. We think that developers will have an easier time building interoperable sites on top of IE8’s strong platform work (like CSS 2.1, a better Document Object Model, ARIA, and cross-domain requests (XDR) and cross document messaging (XDM) and our start on HTML5 support).

The problem is that some of today’s web pages might expect the old, less interoperable behavior from IE. These web pages might not function correctly, in ways ranging from just looking a bit misaligned to not working at all.

This scenario is exactly why we’re committed to interoperability and doing the standards work we’re doing in IE8. People who develop web sites and people who use sites want them to just work. Previously, some versions of IE released while some key standards were still under construction and before standards efforts had started for other key technologies. The most important thing we can do now is deliver better interoperability for a better web, with as few compatibility issues as possible so that end-users adopt it.

We really want the new more standards compliant default to be a great experience. We have many, many people engaged in reaching out to hundreds and hundreds of websites. Our goal with IE8 was to make it easy for sites to deliver a great experience, either by testing with IE8’s new standards-compliant functionality or by adding a tag or HTTP header to their site to instruct IE8 to use IE7-compatible mode.

With IE8’s Beta 2 release, we introduced the Compatibility View button. This button enables savvy end-users to resolve compatibility problems they encounter with sites that rely on legacy IE behavior. Specifically, the button enables users to treat specific websites in a non-default way so that they work in the browser. This is a good thing – with Beta 2, a site that relies on IE7 behavior from IE8 but has not specified it explicitly can still work for someone visiting it in IE8.

Despite all the outreach to sites, we saw from the telemetry data that IE8 Beta 2 users still have to use Compatibility View a lot. Looking at our instrumentation, there were high-volume sites like facebook.com, myspace.com, bbc.co.uk, and cnn.com with pages that weren’t working for end-users with IE’s new standards compliant default. We could also see from our instrumentation that not all IE8 visitors to those sites were clicking the Compatibility View button. So, large groups of people were having a less than great experience because they weren’t aware of the manual steps required to make certain sites work.

Community to the Rescue (or, applying telemetry and customer feedback to make this experience better)

We wanted to make the experience of defaulting to standards mode better for the end user.

The IE8 approach here focuses on using customer feedback to make the compatibility experience better. In addition to listening to the end-user community, we’re also engaging the site development community as well.

When users install Windows 7 Beta or the next IE8 update, they get a choice about opting-in to a list of sites that should be displayed in Compatibility View. Sites are on this list based on feedback from other IE8 customers: specifically, for what high-volume sites did other users click the Compatibility View button? This list updates automatically, and helps users who aren’t web-savvy have a better experience with web sites that aren’t yet IE8-ready. Some details:

The sites on the list are based on objective criteria applied to telemetry data as well as product support channels. For example, in addition to the top sites worldwide, we determine high-volume on a market-by-market basis; the top 50 sites in one region of the world might be very low on the world-wide list of top sites, but are important to include for those customers.
The data we collect from IE8 beta users is the top level domain of the website and whether the user chose Compatibility View while visiting that site (please see the IE8 Privacy Policy for more information).
We will regularly revisit the need to offer this list to users at all.

We reach out to those sites (beyond all the other outreach we’ve already done!) to make sure they know the experience their IE8 visitors have by default and what steps they (the sites) can take to make it better. We also tell them that in the meantime, we’re adding their site to this compatibility list and provide instructions on how the site can opt-out. (If a domain notifies Microsoft that it’s choosing to opt-out, we remove it from the list at the next scheduled list update.)

IE8 is not the first browser to consider making website compatibility fixes for specific highly trafficked sites. Opera has “a feature that allows Opera to automatically fix incompatible Web pages.” It’s “automatically distributed by Opera Software ASA, and can be used to apply fixes to specific Web sites.”

User Choice: Some Details and Screenshots

Users can make a choice about the list during IE’s first run experience as well as in Compatibility View Settings dialog. During the first run experience, neither ‘Express’ nor ‘Custom’ is selected by default. The user must choose one:

The Compatibility View Settings dialog box reflects the user’s choice, and the user can turn updates to the list on or off at any time:

Users who choose to get the list receive it via Windows Update packages, just like IE security updates. The list package is separate from, but on the same schedule as, security updates (typically, every 2 months). Our goal here is to provide predictability by following a regular, known update cadence.

Enterprise customers running WSUS and other management software can control the download and installation of these packages. Enterprises can also use group policy to provide their users an additional list of sites that should be displayed in Compatibility View. Other customers can control the download and installation of these packages as well by choosing to install only Internet Explorer updates marked as ‘Critical’.

When the user browses to a web site and this list is active, IE checks the list to determine if the site should be shown in Compatibility View. If the site is on the list, IE uses Compatibility View, as if the user had clicked the Compatibility View button. If the site isn’t on the list, IE uses whatever setting the site indicates in its content. And, just as with websites on the user-populated Compatibility View list, the presence of a <META> tag / HTTP header “wins” over whatever mode Compatibility View on the client would have resulted in. So, if a site starts on this list but does great work to take advantage of IE8 and now wants IE8 to use the most standards-compliant mode, then the site can specify it and override this list.

Also, the Compatibility View Settings dialog shows only the entries in the user-populated list. Users interested in seeing the contents of the active list can navigate to res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml from IE’s address bar.

Some Closing Thoughts

Life as one of the people who builds the web is hard. Developers have a lot of things competing for their scarce time: making their sites more secure, or faster, or richer using some of the new functionality that new browsers like IE8 are starting to support. In some cases, for a new browser, developers have to spend time to add a tag or header to make their sites compatible. Starting back in March 2008 with IE8 Beta 1, Microsoft has been actively engaging site developers about how they can make sure that users continue to have a good experience on their sites.

Whether developers get around to doing this work or not, the people who use the web expect that the web will keep working. They want the benefits of interoperability and standards. They don’t want to deal with compatibility issues.

To that end, IE8 Beta 1 offered end-users a large compatibility toolbar button that required a browser restart. In Beta 2, IE8 offered a more discreet button that didn’t require a browser restart for a more end-user friendly compatibility experience. This latest compatibility view update refines the experience by offering users the choice to have a community-driven list that reduces the amount of manual work involved in browsing the web with compatibility.

Scott Dickens
Program Manager

The IE8 Smart Address Bar Part 1: Navigate Easier and Faster

ieblog — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:48:00 GMT

For Beta 1, we discussed some of the technical improvements (like domain highlighting, multi-line paste, and improved click behavior) we made to IE8’s address bar. For Beta 2, we took the covers off of even bigger changes which fit in with our goal of making navigation easier and faster with IE8.

Starting with Beta 2, when you type in the Address Bar, IE8 returns results not just based on the URL of the sites you’ve visited, but the title and other properties as well. It has an updated look that shows you both the title and address (URL) of each match and we also highlight the matches so they’re easy to see. Here’s a screenshot:

The new dropdown is easy to scan visually, displays the results by group (more on that below), sorts based on our relevancy algorithm (more on that later too), and subtly highlights matches based on what you’ve typed.

The difference between this and IE7 is quite noticeable. For instance, I, Christopher, watch and play a lot of soccer (or futbol if you prefer), and IE7 unfortunately didn’t help me get to my soccer sites very easily. Only sites that begin with the word ‘soccer’ in their domain appear (with one possible exception), and without titles, it’s hard to tell which page is which:

With IE8, not only do I get more results, but it’s easier to see what’s what. I can tell much more about the sites I’m viewing with an at-a-glance compared to IE7 (I expanded the History section in this screenshot):

As Paul pointed out , this means you’ll spend less time looking for the sites you’re interested in, and more time using them, and do so with fewer steps.

Find What You’re Looking For More Easily With IE8

The IE8 Smart Address bar Autocomplete also supports multiple word searches. Results will match all the words you type, so the more you type, the more refined your results will be.

You can search across a site’s page title or address, and for RSS Feeds and Favorites, you can also search for them by local name and folder name as well. For Feed Items, you can also search by Item Title. IE does a prefix word breaking by default, meaning “Be” will match “Beijing” but “jing” would not (prefix means we search starting at the beginning of every word). The word breaking engine splits words at common delimiters like spaces, hyphens, and slashes.

Folders: The Tags You’re Already Using

Most people organize their Favorites into folders, so think of your Favorites and Feeds folder hierarchy as your tagging system. Type a subfolder name from your Favorites or RSS folder, and all the Favorites or Feeds under that node will be among the set of results returned to you to choose from. In this case, we searched for ‘restaurants’ and all the Favorites under the Restaurants folder were returned as possible results, even those that didn’t have that word in their title, local name, or URL:

Using The New Dropdown To Go Where You Want

You’ll note we group the results into 6 sections: Typed Addresses, Autocomplete Suggestion, History, Favorites, Feeds, and Keyboard Shortcuts. IE will show all available matches in each section (with the exception of the keyboard shortcut section, which shows what will happen if you enter certain keystrokes). This way you can easily tell what’s what, and won’t have to remember any control characters to filter results. Unlike other browsers, IE8 will show both read and unread items from RSS Feeds and Feed Items downloaded by those feeds. This helps for times when you know you read something, but can’t remember where. IE8 makes it easy to tell where everything came from:

Typed Addresses

The top section (which shows msnbc.com but no title) is an address I’ve typed (or pasted) manually into the address bar. This section appears directly below the Address Bar, and does not have a header section (for consistency with the OS). IE shows up to 5 typed addresses that match what you’ve typed, and the results are sorted alphabetically.

Autocomplete Suggestion

The Autocomplete Suggestion is the ‘best’ match based on what you typed, and is always available with the SHIFT+ENTER shortcut. Autocomplete Suggestion takes the place of Inline Autocomplete which was available in Beta 1. The presentation may be different, but it is essentially doing the same function, only a little smarter thanks to our relevancy engine which helps determine the best match. We’ll discuss more about the Autocomplete Suggestion in a future post.

History

Every time you browse to a web page (unless you’re in InPrivate Browsing mode), IE writes out the page to its internal ‘History’ storage, part of the collection of pages you’ve been to. This section in the dropdown will display the top matches from that collection. Every page you visit will end up here, whether it’s a Favorite or Feed you click on, or a website you browse past. That means that most of the time (unless you’ve just cleared your browsing history), you’ll have several options in your History to choose from, and the top History item is the one IE8 will choose as its Autocomplete Suggestion. IE shows the top 5 History matches by default, and up to 20 matches if you expand the section.

Favorites

This is where Favorites that match what you’ve typed will appear. If you’ve visited a Favorite recently, then it will probably also have a matching History entry. Remember, when you type in the Address Bar, we search for Favorites based on their Local Name, their URL, and the Folder they’re in. IE shows up to 5 matching Favorites by default, and up to 20 if you expand the section.

Feeds

Internet Explorer shows both Feeds & Feed Items in this section. Feeds are what you subscribe to, and Feed Items are the stories that get downloaded by those Feeds. Both read & unread items can be shown in this list. For Feeds, IE searches the local name (whatever you called it when you subscribed to it), the URL it points to, the name the Feed owner gave it, and the folder it’s in. For Feed Items, it also searches the title of each Feed Item. This means that the Feeds section can be a rich source of information, especially if you’ve subscribed to a lot of active feeds. IE will show up to 5 matching Feeds and/or Feed Items by default, and up to 20 if you expand the section. (IE does not distinguish between read and unread items in this view.)

Keyboard shortcuts

This is where IE will show you handy shortcuts you can use to modify what you’ve typed – just expand the section to see what they are by clicking the down arrow at the bottom of the section. We’ll blog more about the keyboard section in a future post.

If any section has no matches for what you typed, it will be hidden completely. If any section has more than 5 results to show you, IE will show you only the first 5 – but just click the header row to show up to the top 20 matches. Click it again to collapse that group. Groups don’t stick open – they’ll default to show the top 5 each time the dropdown closes and reopens.

Relevancy Sorting

Prior to IE8 Beta 2, IE would simply sort the list of URLs that match what you typed alphabetically. Starting with Beta 2, IE8 will sort your History, Favorites, and Feeds/Feed Items by relevancy. As you type, IE is not only querying across all the data types for string matches, but also sorting them based on how often you’ve selected them from the list before, how well what you’ve typed matches each item, and how often you go there.

Simplistically, this means that the sites you interact with the most will be the ones most likely to be offered to you when you type. Based on the data we got back from IE8 Beta 2 (from both internal development and immediately following the release of Beta 2), the result that people selected from the dropdown was in the top5 of a given section over 90% of the time. We’ll blog more on relevancy in a future post.

Delete Unwanted Items Directly From the Dropdown

IE8 includes the ability to delete anything you see in the dropdown. You can delete typed addresses (like typos), History entries, Favorites, Feeds, and Feed Items from the list. Deleting anything from the list performs an actual deletion (as opposed to merely hiding it from the list), so you’ll be asked to confirm the operation, just like if you deleted it from the Favorites Center. One note on that - if you’ve set your Recycle Bin to not prompt on delete, the dropdown (and the Favorites Center) won’t ask you to confirm deleting a Favorite. This also means you can recover deleted Favorites from your Recycle Bin if you mistakenly delete one. If you delete a Feed item, IE marks that item internally so it won’t be downloaded by the RSS engine again (although there’s nothing stopping the publisher from re-publishing that item later).

IE8: Better With Windows Search

Much of IE8’s new functionality that I’ve described here is made possible by Windows Search, which it uses as its search engine to quickly search for and display results back to you. IE8 users don’t have to run Windows Search to get the new look, but for the best experience in the dropdown we recommend you do. Windows Vista users are already running Windows Search 3, but anyone running at least Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2008, or Windows Vista Service Pack 1 can update to Windows Search 4 for free by visiting the Windows Search download website.

We’ll talk more about IE8 with and without Windows Search, provide answers to common questions, and reveal other interesting things you can do with the new dropdown in future posts.

Thanks, and enjoy browsing with IE8!

Christopher Vaughan
Program Manager

Seth McLaughlin
Program Manager

Part II: Better Everyday Browsing

ieblog — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:02:00 GMT

As Paul mentioned in Part 1 of this post, we’ve really focused on making your everyday browsing experience better. In addition to the useful changes he talked about, we’ve made IE8 even more useful with integrated services so that you can easily accomplish the common things you do on the web – search for a product, check the weather, map an address, and more)

In Beta 1, we showed how IE8 could be better with services with features like Accelerators and Web Slices (BTW, Accelerators are the same as the Beta 1 Activities with an updated name and icon). For Beta 2 we have even more features that help you use your favorite sites in new ways. Check out these features as you explore the product!

Search Box Suggestions

New to IE8 beta 2 are Search (text) Suggestions and Visual Search Suggestions which are wired into the Search box. As you type in the Search box, the selected search provider can offer query suggestions and display search results right in place! Not only can the search provider provide text suggestions, they can include images as well. This way you can dynamically narrow down your search results quickly and get single-click access to the web page without having to leave the Search box. Also, check out our new Quick Pick menu which puts your search providers at your fingertips.

To make it easier to take advantage of the enhanced Search box, we automatically update many of your existing search providers to versions that support suggestions. If you want more providers use the IE8 Gallery.

Accelerators

Copy-navigate-paste is old. Accelerators are services that you access directly from the webpage in the context of what you’re doing, letting you bookmark, define, email, map and more with a simple selection. Even your search providers are available as Accelerators. Some Accelerators provide previews so that you can view the result without having to leave the current webpage. Clicking on an Accelerator opens a new tab with the full result.

We’ve given you more control in IE8 beta 2 by adding custom categories to an Accelerator so that you can control how your Accelerators are organized. Just select an Accelerator from the Manage Add-ons dialog.

Find out if your favorite site has an Accelerator available from the IE8 Gallery.

Web Slices

As we showed in Beta 1, Web Slices give you updates directly from the Favorites bar, helping you keep track of your important information. A Web Slice is a subscription to part of a web page; when an update is available, IE8 bolds the title of the Web Slice so you know there’s something new to see. I have several Web Slices that make it easy to keep track of my favorites – the weather, friend updates on Facebook, popular links from Digg, and current auction items on eBay. When there’s something new to see, you can preview the update and click through to the full web page for more details. We’ve also added a refresh button from the preview for Beta 2 so that you can get the latest content without having to navigate.

When a site supports Web Slices a Web Slice icon appears in the command bar. Try out Web Slices with eBay, Digg, Live Search (type in your city + weather like “Seattle weather”), and more from the IE8 Gallery.

Feeds on the Favorites bar

In IE7 we added feed reading to the browser. For the IE8 Beta 2 release, we’ve made it even easier to reach your feeds by allowing them to be added to the Favorites bar. You’ll get updates just like you did before where unread headlines are marked in bold. Selecting a headline opens the full web page.

Feeds are available for most websites today – select the feed icon in the command bar and use the new add button on the Favorites bar.

Suggested Sites

It’s easy to get stuck in a bit of a rut, browsing the same sites all the time. In IE8 we make it easier to find sites you might like. Once you turn on Suggested Sites, IE looks at what sites you visit and then offers recommendations of other similar or related sites, right from the Favorites Bar.

If you don’t have Suggested Sites on already, try it out by going to the Favorites Center and clicking on the “Turn on Suggested Sites” button at the bottom of the menu.

These features give you quick access to your services without having to leave the current webpage, making it faster and easier to browse the web. We’ll be blogging about the details of these features as well as how sites can enable these services in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, we hope you try out Beta 2 and check out the IE8 Gallery to customize your browser with the services you use all of the time.

Enjoy!

Jane Kim
Program Manager

Beta 3 UX Improvements

ieblog — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:00:00 GMT

Hi everybody, Max here. I posted before about "A New Look for IE” back when we released the beta 2 preview, and with the launch of beta 3, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about some of the new functionality we have added and changes we have made specifically related to your feedback.

First and foremost, let me thank everybody who has put the time and effort towards giving us feedback, whether it’s through our connect site, participating in our monthly online chats, talking with us at the conferences we attend, or even just commenting here on our blog; this helps us make the product better for you. Since beta 2, we’ve fixed many issues, and we continue to drive to releasing a more secure, reliable, easy to use browser with IE7.

New Icons

In response to feedback especially here on the blog and on Channel 9, we want to show you some new icons for beta 3.

We’ve lightened up the stop, refresh, and search icons, and we’ve changed the icons for the favourites center and add to favourites to give you back the good old favourites star.

Tab Reordering

The next big change we have made, which I’m super excited about as this was one of the more highly voted for issues on the connect site, is that in beta 3 you’re now able to reorder tabs via dragging!

Just drag the tab where you want it to go. This is a super convenient way to keep your tabs organized within your window.

Authenticated FTP

We also heard lots of feedback about FTP not working in IE7. In beta 2, anonymous FTP sites worked, however if the site required authentication, then one needed to either use windows explorer to get the familiar folder view of the FTP site, or use the somewhat arcane ftp://username:password@ftp.site/ URL format in order to make it work in IE7. In beta 3, IE7 now prompts for credentials and gives an html view of the FTP site. If you’re interested in the folder view for the FTP site, simply choose the “Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer” menu entry from the Page menu.

Easy Access to Email

Earlier in the IE7 development cycle, we decided to remove the command bar icon that provided access directly to one’s email. Through our Customer Support Services division, we learned that the lack of this icon was in fact one of the top call generators for IE7 beta 2, and hence we’ve added this icon back. It’s now available to be put into your command bar through the customization menu. Right click on the command bar and select Customize Command Bar -> Add or Remove Commands.

A smaller change

There’s one more change I want to tell you about, first because I think it’s a great example of a small detail that makes a big difference in how much people enjoy using the browser, and secondly because it was expertly done by one of our new summer interns, Michael Ritche.

IE6 featured auto scaling of large images to fit the browser window, and it had this weird button that would show up over the top of the image after some indeterminate amount of time. It felt a little odd to use, and was somewhat unpredictable. In IE7, thanks to Michael, we’ve replaced this with a simple magnification cursor. Now, you can click to zoom the image to full size, and the image will be centered on where you clicked.

This was a great first change by Michael, and we’re sure there will be many more.

Jane has posted details of some UX improvements in the RSS experience on the RSS team blog. Check them out.

As we look towards finishing IE7 and starting in our next release, please keep the feedback coming! With your help we’ll continue to improve Internet Explorer.

Thanks,
Max Stevens
Lead Program Manager

Clear my Tracks: yes please!!!!

ieblog — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 21:17:00 GMT

First let me introduce myself. My name is Uche Enuha and I am a recent college graduate hire to the Internet Explorer team. I am a Program Manager working on the User Experience team.
Now to the main point. There is a new feature in IE7 called ‘Delete Browsing History’ that gives users an easy way to control the data stored by the browser.I am going to answer the three main questions that I think are going through your heads right now, I’ll let you meditate on the information and allow the excitement to naturally evolve.

Why would I use this feature?
I am glad you asked this question. Let’s look at an example of how this feature can be used. So you’re trying to buy a gift for your loved one and you know how important it is to keep this mission secret. You’re aware of every site you visit but your machine is aware of even more; the stuff you type, the information you read, even the cookies requested by the site where you eventually buy the gift. You realize how important it is that your loved one never gets hold of any of this information. So you do what we all would, you try and cover your tracks. Now back in IE6, you would have to spend a lot of time looking through various places on your computer to get rid of all the relevant information and possibly still miss some critical information. Now with the ‘Delete Browsing History’ feature, we are giving every person the ability to clear all their browsing information from one location with a click of a button and, the peace of mind that the job was done right.

What does this feature really do?
It deletes the following items which are split into five categories, listed below:

Temporary Internet Files: Downloaded files cached on the client for quick access
- Temporary Internet Files cached for quick access
- Cached files containing Offline favorites
- Information stored by other applications in the Temporary Internet Files folder (e.g. attachment files stored by Outlook)
Cookies: Information persisted by the client on behalf of the server
- Cookies
- XML Userdata cache
History: website addresses (URLs) stored to enable History/most recently used website addresses
- Typed website addresses used for Addressbar Autocomplete
- The list of most recently used website addresses in the Run… dialog
- URL History entries (excluding ones marked as Offline Favorites)
- Stored value for Encoding (Code Page)
Form Data: User-entered personal data stored by the client
- AutoComplete form data
Passwords: User-entered personal data stored by the client
- AutoComplete password data

(Please note, if you’re part of a domain in a corporate environment, an administrator has the ability to disable certain aspects of this feature.)

The User Interface for this feature provides information about what exactly these types of information are and gives the user the ability to individually delete each type of information or delete all information at once. Here’s what the main dialog looks like:

As an added bonus, if cleaning up is taking a while, a cancellable progress dialog is shown. You can ignore the dialog and go back to the browser (or even close it) – the process will continue in the background until it’s done. No more sitting around waiting for your 200MB cache to be emptied!

Where can we find this great feature?
Just go to the Tools menu and you’ll see ‘Delete Browsing History…’. Or whilst you’re in the internet options dialog, you can find this feature under the General tab in the Browsing history section cleverly disguised as the ‘Delete…’ button.

So there you have it. ‘Delete Browsing History…’ will be coming to a computer near you very shortly. Use it and enjoy it. Think of it as your friend that has your back and covers your tracks.

-Uche

Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers

ieblog — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 00:56:00 GMT

Today I want to tell you about both our established plan to highlight secure sites in IE7 but also to tell you about some early thinking in the industry about creating stronger standards for identity on the internet.

IE7 will join other browsers like Firefox, Opera and Konqueror in making the experience for secure (HTTPS) sites more visible by moving the lock icon into the address bar. We think the address bar is also important for users to see in pop-up windows. A missing address bar creates a chance for a fraudster to forge an address of their own. To help thwart that, IE7 will show the address bar on all internet windows to help users see where they are. IE7 will also help users avoid fraudulent sites if users choose to use the Phishing Filter to check a site for known phishing activity.

Today the lock icon in your browser window fundamentally means that your traffic with the website is encrypted, and that a trusted third party, known as a Certification Authority, has identified the website. Certification Authorities offer certificates with broadly different levels of background checking for the website. Unfortunately, there is no industry standard method for anyone to tell what level of background checking was performed for a given site.

On Wednesday, we met with folks from other browser vendors including Mozilla (which is the basis of Firefox), Opera and Konqueror to discuss this situation (other browser vendors were invited but weren’t able to attend). George Staikos from Konqueror was good enough to host all of us in Toronto. Along with picking up the tab for lunch, George brewed coffee strong enough to bring weary travelers from Oslo and Redmond into the same time zone. Microsoft and others in the group think our users should have a better experience when they visit a website that passed a more rigorous identification process.

As a counter-example to how we might handle highly-identified sites, I presented the IE7 Anti-Phishing User Experience for known phishing and suspected phishing sites. The Phishing Filter shows warnings to users when it detects a site that might be trying to misrepresent its identity.

When the Phishing Filter is in use, IE will fill the address bar with red for known phishing sites (Fig 1) and with yellow for suspected phishing sites (Fig 2). In both cases, the address bar will include text that explains that the user should effectively either “stop” or proceed with “caution”. In IE7, most normal sites including those with “the lock” today will not have a color-filled address bar.

Fig 1, IE7 address bar for a known phishing website detected by the Phishing Filter

Fig 2, IE7 address bar for a suspected phishing website detected by the Phishing Filter

If the browsers and the Certification Authority industry can generate better guidelines to identify web sites, we want to take the experience in the address bar a step further to help create a positive experience for rigorously identified HTTPS sites. We have implemented a green-filled address bar in IE7 for sites that meet future guidelines for better identity validation. Along with the green fill, our current design for the address bar includes the name of the business (Fig 3.1) alternating with the name of the third party Certification Authority who identified the business (Fig 3.2). We think this alternating presentation of business name with Certification Authority name is the right balance of user notification and simplicity.

Fig 3.1, IE7 address bar for a site with a high-assurance SSL certificate
(showing the identity of the site from the SSL certificate)

Fig 3.2, IE7 address bar for a site with a high-assurance SSL certificate
(alternating in the name of the Certification Authority who identified the site)

I know that Frank and Gerv from Mozilla, George from Konqueror and Yngve and Carsten from Opera have their own thoughts for an improved certificate standard and how they would handle that in the user experience.

I wish we could promise you that you will see this experience in IE7 and its equivalent in other browsers but there are a lot of details to work out before browsers can differentiate SSL sites based on how well vetted they are. For this to work, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror, amongst others, think there should be some common validation guidelines for rigorous website identification. There is a lot of preliminary agreement but also a lot of work to do. The American Bar Association Information Security Committee is providing a forum to pursue this. You can check back with us and other browsers to see how the process moves along.

- Rob Franco (with lots of help from Kelvin Yiu and Tom Albertson who work on PKI for Windows)

November 23 Update: You can read more about our meeting in posts from other browser developers who attended:

George from Konqueror posted "Web Browser Developers Work Together on Security",
Carsten and Yngve from Opera posted “A Truce in the Browser Wars: Toronto Ideas Create Common Ground”
Frank Hecker from the Mozilla Foundation posted “CAs, certificates, and the SSL/TLS UI”

Genuine Windows and Browsers

ieblog — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 01:31:00 GMT

The core of my team’s job is to make IE7 and Windows Vista so compelling so that people choose our products. The people who work on Windows want you to have a good experience, whether you use IE or not - for example, Windows Media Player has a Firefox plugin. I also recently got a chance to play with a new Firefox plugin that simplifies and improves the Windows validation process on that browser – since, as I said to Scoble a long time ago, it would be arrogant for the people working on a product not to use other products in that category.

I talked with Brad Graziadio, the guy who runs the Windows Genuine Advantage team, and he walked me through customer feedback. Basically, customers said “We want to make sure our PCs are running genuine Windows and have access to all the content on the Microsoft Download Center; the experience when we’re running a Mozilla browser is not great. Do something about it.” Brad’s team did. I think that’s a good thing for customers.

Microsoft wants to provide a good user experience to all Windows customers who are validating their systems. If you choose to run Firefox, I know Brad and his team want to hear feedback on this plugin. This can be given here.

- Dean

Toolbars in IE7 Beta 1

ieblog — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 15:45:00 GMT

Yesterday, rumors were circulating stating that the IE 7 beta 1 release causes the Google and Yahoo! toolbars to vanish. As Dean stated in Scoble’s blog, we support Google’s and Yahoo’s (and anyone else’s) toolbar in Beta 1 and will do so in the final release.

In our internal testing, we have not encountered these problems in the released version of IE 7 tech beta. (There was a bug like this in earlier builds, so it’s possible that the report came from someone who had access to our pre-beta builds.) In addition to our own testing, we’re working with Yahoo!, Google, and others to make sure their solutions continue to work with IE 7. It’s our intent that all toolbars should continue to work well, whether the toolbar was present before the upgrade from IE 6 to IE 7 or if it was installed after IE 7 was installed. It’s possible that some people are having problems with IE 7 and their toolbars; this was not our intent and we want to know about these issues quickly so we can resolve them before final release. This is why we have a technical beta program before releasing the software broadly.

Another rumor was that we were setting MSN to be the default (and only) search provider. This is not true. The drop down list in the search box has five search providers: AOL, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. For clean installations who do not have a search provider already set (Windows Vista users primarily), MSN is the default search provider. For upgrades, we respect the user’s address bar auto search setting and set the default accordingly. If it’s one of the providers in our list, we set the default to that provider; if the search provider is not on the list, we add it to our list.

The user can then change default search providers easily via Search Settings dialog (available from the search drop down). This also changes the user’s auto search provider (we keep them synched). In addition, users can remove search providers via this dialog. In Beta 2 users will also be able to add new search providers as well.

We are absolutely committed to working with third parties building on top of Internet Explorer’s functionality, whether it is toolbars or search providers (or anything else for that matter). If you’ve found bugs with anything in Beta 1 (whether or not it’s toolbar related), please let us know! Additionally, we’d love to hear your feedback about about the browser as a whole, whether you love it or hate it. We really appreciate all the comments we receive and we’ll continue to make changes based on what we hear.

Thanks!

Tony Chor

IE7 Has Tabs

ieblog — Mon, 16 May 2005 07:31:00 GMT

Yes, IE7 has tabs.

In general, I think tabs are a great idea. I liked them a lot in Office dialogs and in Excel in the early 90's. (I used to work on Office, and I admit we almost added tabs to Word at one point.) I like them in Visual Studio. I think, as an industry, we have a ways to go in refining the experience, consistency, and value of tabs.

The main goal for tabs in our beta release is to make sure our implementation delivers on compatibility and security. The variety of IE configurations and add-ins across the Internet is tremendous. We want feedback on how it works with add-ins that you run (or have written), with the sites that you visit, and with the line of business applications, accessibility tools, management and development tools that you run. We’ve also looked closely at reported vulnerabilities in other implementations of tabbed browsing. We’re looking forward to feedback from the security community as well.

The tabbed browsing experience in the upcoming IE7 beta is pretty basic. Expect additional end-user functionality to come in after the beta.

You can browse with tabs with IE6 (and some earlier IE versions) today in a few different ways. Several third parties, like Maxthon, have built browser experiences with tabs on top of the IE platform. Several third parties have built toolbars to provide tabs within IE as well. MSN’s recently released toolbar will also be providing support for tabs within IE when they update it in the coming months.

I think all of these are great! They demonstrate how extensible the IE platform is. They also provide tabbed browsing in IE on top of Windows versions (like Win98) that IE7 will not support.

Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner. Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency… will it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs? I think we made the wrong decision here initially, and we’re making the right one now. I’d like to ask you to post a comment with your favorite or most critical IE add-ins… we want to make sure IE7 works great with them.

Dean

Security is an Industry Problem

ieblog — Mon, 09 May 2005 20:29:00 GMT

I've received enough questions in email from different people about a recent vulnerability in another browser that I wanted to post something here.

I think the best place for the facts is with the people responsible for the browser. I say this based on the number of articles I read that misrepresent issues in Windows and IE.

I also think that security is an industry-wide problem. It's not limited or unique to operating systems or applications, or client or server software. It's not limited or unique to commercial software or open source.

The only us versus them distinction I want to make around security is to put responsible software developers, security researchers, and customers together as "us" and malicious (whether it's intentionally or not) software developers, security researchers, and their customers together as "them."

Today, I see a tremendous amount of talent and intelligence applied to breaking or repurposing software. Some of that is positive and responsible. I've listened to and worked with security researchers I would describe as brilliant with no mitigating clauses. They are also responsible. They've worked with us to point out how we can build better software.

I don't know what to say or do about "them." I think some of what we can do is help legislators and law enforcement understand what's at stake in a constructive way. I want to know what else you think we can do about the malicious behavior we find on the Internet.

Dean

Netscape 8 Beta, the IE Platform, and the IE Browser

ieblog — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 22:29:00 GMT

I haven’t tried the Netscape beta yet, but I have read that it allows users to switch between the Gecko rendering engine (the one used in Firefox) and Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. I think this a good opportunity to write about the Windows Web Browsing Platform (the IE Platform) and its counterpart, the IE Browser.

The Browser is easy to explain. It’s the blue e. It’s a nice presentation (with toolbars, a Favorites menu, etc.) of the IE Platform. The Browser is meant for end-users; the Platform, for developers.

The Platform is the stuff “under the hood” that every Windows application can rely on to (among other things) navigate to and render web pages. One of the goals of the Platform part is to make using the Internet with Windows applications easy for software developers.

The Platform offers a lot of power. Applications can host the rendering engine in order to display rich web content as an integrated part of the application. When I read HTML email in Outlook, or see pages in Windows Media Player or MSN Explorer or the AOL client (among many, many other clients), or read RSS feeds in RSS Bandit (or many other aggregators) that’s the IE platform at work.

The Platform also allows developers of client applications to use the rich HTML rendering capabilities even when full Web browsing capabilities are not needed. For example, many software developers who want to offer their customers an attractive “web-like” first experience after inserting the CD choose to author HTML Applications (HTAs) rather than write a more traditional Windows application. I’ve seen many product tutorials and the like written with this approach.

Another great thing is that about the platform is that when we deliver an IE security update, all of the experiences that build on the platform are updated as well. This makes life easier for both developers and end users.

Applications on Windows have been able to use the IE platform components since IE3. Here’s some sample documentation from 1997 that shows how easy it is to write a web browser in Visual Basic that uses the IE Platform. Of course, many different languages and technologies can host IE platform components. Here’s a sample application from 2004 that uses C# and Visual Studio Express to create a simple tabbed browser.

I look forward to trying the Netscape beta and having pages work the way they do in IE. I’m happy to see another browser built on top of the IE platform to go along with NetCaptor, Maxthon, and these other ones. I’m also looking forward to what Blake and Joe say about the beta.

(The Platform has a lot more to it that I won’t get into here, but it is extraordinarily flexible and extensible. I gave some examples back here. Expect Chris Wilson and Dave Massy will post more about the platform.)

Dean

(edit: editing error removed)

A fresh IE security update

ieblog — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 17:50:00 GMT

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, so corporations who deploy Microsoft products and updates will have a more uniform experience doing so.

Phil, some of the other IE team members, and I participated in a web chat yesterday morning to discuss this release with our corporate and end-user customers – it was great to hear their feedback, concerns, and questions. Looks like the slides were just posted for people to take a look at in case you missed the chat.

Surf safely!
-Christopher

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