New Zealand IE8 Taskforce : Announcements

Internet Explorer 8 has been released!

nzie8 — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:05:07 GMT

Hi All,

Today Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, the new Web browser that offers the best solution for how people use the Web today. It can be downloaded in 25 languages at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Internet Explorer 8 is easier to use, faster and offers leading-edge security features in direct response to people’s increasing concerns about online safety.

Internet Explorer 8 takes the web experience beyond the page and introduces a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web whether you are a web developer writing to standards or an end-user discovering a new online service integrated into the browser – all with the peace of mind that you are using the safest, most compatible, and reliable browser. We’ve also taken steps to deliver the fastest version of Internet Explorer available, making it easy to launch quickly, find what you want efficiently, and navigate seamlessly.

Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of “write once, run anywhere”, freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers. This commitment also addresses several development and design pain points from previous Internet Explorer releases.

Get where you want to go faster with real world performance. The core activity in the browser is navigating to a website. IE8 makes that faster and easier with its new address bar, new tab experience, favorites bar, and history in search box. IE8 is faster than IE7, and favorable to today’s other browsers on today’s common sites. Script benchmarks measure script; overall browser performance involves many different factors. Looking at a slow motion video of today’s common web sites in the latest browsers, IE is often the fastest at real world sites. Unlike some other browsers, IE isolates misbehaving sites so that only that tab, not the entire browser, crashes.

Use more of the web, easier. With IE8, people can get what they want out of web pages, often with just one-click, in the flow of their regular browsing. Webslices make it easy to stay up to date on the latest information from a web page (like weather, traffic, or status updates). Accelerators make it easy to act on the current page (mapping, sending, sharing, etc.) using another web service without the tedious work of “copy, new tab, navigate, paste.” Visual search results and Quick Pick make it easy to get the search results users want from the search services users choose.

Stay safer from real world threats: IE8 has built-in protections to keep users safe from real threats. These defenses are easy to understand and use, from highlighting the current site’s domain in the address bar to the clear indicator when IE is browsing “InPrivate.” IE provides protection from today’s dangers, like malicious software downloads, as well as tomorrow’s, like cross-site scripting attacks.

Build on real world interoperability, standards, and compatibility. IE8 shows Microsoft’s commitment to an open and interoperable web. IE8 by default shows web pages in its most standards compliant mode. With IE8, we’re delivering the most complete and correct implementation of CSS 2.1 available in any browser. To improve interoperability not just for IE but for all browsers, we’ve contributed over 7,000 test cases to the W3C (and taken feedback along the way). This will make it easier for the people who build the web to develop with standards. We’ve started delivering on HTML5. We’ve also made the specifications for webslices, accelerators, and visual search available to the community (under the appropriate open licenses) for a more open, interoperable, and rich web. IE creates great opportunities for developers and sites to integrate themselves into their users workflow and make their experience stand out.

Download

Internet Explorer 8 is available for download in 25 languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Traditional, Simplified and Hong Kong), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. More information and a download of Internet Explorer 8 can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.

Resources

Internet Explorer 7 Compatibility Tag

In order to maintain backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7, we have provided a compatibility meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level. Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to display content like it did in Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes. Get step-by-step instructions for using this meta-tag on your site.

Internet Explorer 8 Document Compatibility

Internet Explorer 8 introduces the concept of document compatibility, which lets you specify the versions of Internet Explorer that your site is designed to support. Learn more in this overview.

CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer

This article provides an at-a-glance look at CSS compliance across recent versions of Internet Explorer, including support in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and planned support in the final version of Internet Explorer 8.

User-Agent String and Version Vector

Learn the best practices for browser detection to ensure that your site continues to operate as intended when viewed in Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit - testing your websites!

Take a few minutes to learn more about what's new with Internet Explorer 8. This site will help you discover the changes to Internet Explorer and help you find your favourite features.

Windows 7 beta users

Windows 7 Beta already includes a pre-release candidate version of Internet Explorer 8 that is optimized for that release. Windows 7 enables unique features and functionality in Internet Explorer 8 including Windows Touch and Jump Lists which require additional product tests to ensure we are providing the best Windows experience for our customers. We will continue to update the version of Internet Explorer 8 running on Windows 7 as the development cycles of Windows 7 progress and plan to include the final version of Internet Explorer 8 in the release candidate version of Windows 7 later this year. For the latest information on Windows 7, visit the Windows 7 site.

Nick

IE8 Reliability Update for Windows 7 Beta Now Available

nzie8 — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 02:16:46 GMT

Hi All,

I wanted to let you know that an update was released earlier today that will improve Internet Explorer’s reliability for users running the Windows 7 Beta. The update is now available via Windows Update, and can also be downloaded via Microsoft Update.

Most of the issues that we discovered through the Beta are fixed in the Release Candidate 1 which is now available for Windows Vista and Windows XP. We also wanted some of these fixes to reach our Windows 7 Beta users now. We decided to piggyback onto this first update for the Windows 7 Beta.

This update will address many of the top crashes and hangs from the Windows 7 Beta, which includes those caused by Internet Explorer as well as 3^rd party components like Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat, and several others. We have also included fixes to enable printing PDF files and an architectural change which improves cookie management. This update does not contain other changes introduced between the Windows 7 Beta and Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1.

For the full details, checkout the IE Team Blog.

Nick.

Internet Explorer 8 - Release Candidate 1 Released

nzie8 — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:30:00 GMT

We're excited to make the IE8 Release Candidate available today for public download today in 25 languages for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server customers. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please download it now and try it out.

Downloads

(NB: Windows 7 users will get an updated IE8 with the next update of Windows 7)

Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of the familiar web browser you are most comfortable using, helping you get everything you want from the web faster, easier, more privately and securely than ever before.

Faster Internet Explorer 8 is more responsive with new pages and tabs, opening up fast and reliably. You can now get to the information you care about most, in fewer steps; one click access to your webmail, favourite news sites or other online services.
Easier Reduce the steps to accomplish many common tasks, and automate your access to real time information updates. You can keep track of your favorite sports team, news, weather with a single click.
More Private Helps protect your privacy and confidential information where ever you go on the web.
More Secure Helps protect and stop malicious software from reaching your PC, and makes it easier to detect when a website is an imposter.

IE8 is focused on how people really use the web. Consumers want a browser that makes the tasks they do every day faster and easier. The activities people spend their time on define real-world performance: navigating to websites, working with tabs, searching, keeping track of changing information (like traffic or an auction), and using the information from one site with another (as in getting a map). Everyone wants a trustworthy browser that keeps them in control and protects their safety. Developers want great developer tools, great interoperability, and a powerful platform that enables them innovate. For some people, accessibility is crucial; for some organizations, policy, administration, and deployment are essential.

Support for IE8 RC1 can be received by visiting the Internet Explorer Beta Newsgroup to discuss issues, or by contacting Customer Support Services.
If you use a screen reader, please consult the Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 release notes before downloading.

Nick

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available

nzie8 — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:30:34 GMT

We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!

You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.

We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).

Everyday Browsing

We looked very hard at how people really browse the web. We looked at a lot of data about how people browse and tried a lot of different designs in front of many kinds of people, not just technologists. As tempting as it is to list here all the changes both big and small in IE8, we’ll take a more holistic approach. That’s how we built the product and how we’d like to talk about it.

From our customer research, we saw that the bulk of user activity outside of web pages involved tabs and “navigation” – the act of getting to the site the user wants to get to. We also knew that adding features has an impact only if they’re “in the flow” of how people actually use the product. Another menu item might matter in a checklist on a blog somewhere, but won’t matter to real people browsing. That’s why IE8’s New Tab experience is so remarkable: it’s obvious – after you see it:

IE8 makes bringing back tabs (and entire IE sessions) users have closed a lot easier; it’s in the natural flow of how users work. IE8 also takes into account that there are often relationships between new tabs that users open, and the browser can make it a lot easier to figure out which tabs go with which. Below, the tabs that came from the links in the search results page are grouped together and colored differently from the headlines the user followed off another page, which are different from links the user followed off other pages:

Navigation – or getting to where you want to – is a lot faster and easier too. Typing in the Smart Address Bar not only searches across Favorites, History, and RSS feeds, but provides a great experience:

We put a lot of different designs in front of users in order to find one that was this effective. It’s easy to scan, with the different sections marked off and one line for each item, and the highlighting is easy on the eye. Deleting typos (or other unwanted suggestions) from this list is also easy – notice the red "x" above appears when a user places his mouse over an item.

Beyond tabs and navigation, people use services all the time. When you have an address but want a map, or want to just select some text and make a blog post out of it, IE8’s Accelerators (formerly known as ‘Activities’) are handy. For Beta 2, we’ve worked with a lot of great partners to deliver a bunch of choices for users. They’re much faster and easier than the “select, copy, new tab, navigate, paste, repeat” process in today’s other browsers. We think users will enjoy the consistent experience they’ll get from service to service, and appreciate being in complete control of which are installed and are the default. We hope that websites (and enthusiasts!) write more of them and give us feedback. Staying up to date with the latest information is a lot easier with Web Slices, that put information directly in your Favorites bar where you can get at it quickly.

This is a good moment to talk about performance. We think about two kinds of performance: real world and lab. In a lab, we measure performance in milliseconds. That’s important work, and we did a lot of it since Beta 1. You’ll find IE8 is a lot faster than IE7 on many sites. We can go through and detail, for example, exactly which Gmail operations are faster in IE8 than other browsers and vice versa.

Real world performance is about how people get their tasks done, and that’s something you don’t measure in milliseconds. We think you’ll enjoy the impact of IE8’s new tabs, Smart Address Bar, Favorites bar, Search box, Accelerators, and Web Slices on your daily browsing.

Visual Search in IE8 speaks for itself. Websites can offer rich search results as you type in the Search box:

After installing IE8, try out Visual Search from the New York Times, Wikipedia, Amazon, or eBay. (Many other sites offer regular text suggestions as well.)

Safety

Safety isn’t about technologies and features, but two words: in control. We think users should be in control… of their settings, their information, what code runs on their machine, of their browser overall.

Previous posts have described what you’ll find in IE8 Beta 2 with respect to the SmartScreen Filter and protection from phishing and malware as well as many other defenses. The XSS Filter is particularly exciting because it offers real people a real defense from a real threat, by default and out of the box. We’ve blogged about InPrivate previously as well. Taken together, these features do a great job putting the user in control of their information.

The reliability improvements in IE8 Beta 2 are big. Crash recovery is nice, but not crashing is even better. Because in IE8 Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE) separates the frame (the address bar, back button, etc.) from the tabs, and the tabs (mostly) from each other, crashes are more contained and affect fewer tabs than before. We think users will also appreciate having close boxes on all their toolbars so that disabling ones they don’t want – while leaving the ones they do – is easier.

Platform

IE8 is more interoperable with other web browsers and web standards. The contribution of CSS 2.1 test cases to the W3C is an important in order to really establish a standard way to assess standards support. We think that CSS 2.1 remains the most important place to deliver excellent interoperability between browsers. We think developers will enjoy the improvements to the built-in tools, as well as the other opportunities to integrate their sites in the user’s daily life with Accelerators and Web Slices. You can find more information at the IE Development Center, http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie.

After deciding to default IE8 to the most standards-compliant mode available, we wanted to be sure to address compatibility concerns for organizations and individuals. Would websites that expect IE8 to behave the way IE7 does create a problem for end-users? Since March, we’ve been telling developers about a small change they can make to their sites to tell IE8 to show their sites as IE7 does. Many have – but there are a lot of sites that may have not yet addressed this. The Compatibility View button (new to IE8 Beta 2) is a good solution to provide end-users a good experience as the web transitions.

Some Important Details

Anyone interested in customizing and redistributing IE8 (the way others have IE7) can find information about the IEAK here. (We’ll have a more detailed post about IEAK and group policy soon.) One important aspect of a beta release is getting feedback; we’re using the same channels as described in this Beta 1 post (for example, this IE Beta newsgroup).

Read more about guidelines for upgrading to IE8 Beta 2 today. Also, If you are currently using IE8 Beta 1 on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 with Automatic Updates turned on, you will receive IE8 Beta 2 through Windows Update.

Download IE8 Beta 2, use it – the browser itself, the developer tools, writing an Accelerator, marking part of your page as a Web Slice – and let us know what you think.

Thank you,

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

Source

Privacy Beyond Blocking Cookies: Bringing Awareness to Third-Party Content

nzie8 — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:51:45 GMT

Previous posts on the IE Blog have covered trustworthy principles in general and some product specifics as well. Privacy is an important part of trustworthy computing. This post discusses one aspect of privacy on the web: third-party content.

When most people browse the web, they think what they see in the address bar and the site they are visiting are the same thing. However, web sites today typically incorporate content from many different web sites. For the sake of clear terminology, the site the user browses to directly (seen in the address bar) is the first-party site; the other sites that the first-party site incorporates in its site experience (but that the user hasn’t navigated to directly) are third-party sites.

When you browse to a first-party site, you know that it can collect information about how you use the site. What many users don’t realize is that technically, third-party sites can collect information about users as well. Users aren’t typically well-informed about which third-party sites are collecting what information, how the sites use this information today, or how the sites could use the information in the future.

Identifying Third-party Sites

Most websites today are actually mosaics, or mash-ups, of several different sites. To see this, you can bring up the Privacy Report in Internet Explorer (from IE7’s Page menu or IE6’s View menu, choose the Web Page Privacy Policy menu item) for any site you visit. Here’s part of the report for a news site, and another from a credit card site:

While the address bar shows the address of the current, first-party, site, this dialog shows the addresses of all the different web sites (including third-party sites) that the current web page includes content from. The browser visits every one of these sites in order to show the current web page’s content.

The way that sites can pull content in from other sites is useful and powerful and typical on the web today. It’s part of the underlying design and structure of the web, and enables functionality (like an interactive map in the middle of a restaurant’s website, or a “share this” link in the middle a news article) that people value.

Third-Party Sites and Privacy

At the same time, bringing information together from different websites has privacy implications. A good example of this issue that most people have experienced involves email. Many email systems treat email messages that come from unknown senders in a special way, blocking images in them and displaying a warning like this one:

The message body typically has some missing images (“red X’s”) with text nearby, like “Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet.”

Why do email systems block these external images? The sender may have programmed some information in the external image that is unique to the recipient – for example, having the image’s file name or location include the recipient’s email address. When the sender sees that a particular image was downloaded, then the sender knows which email message arrived in a valid account and was opened. By not downloading the content, the email recipient prevents his email system from disclosing information and protects his privacy from the unknown sender. Potentially, the recipient protects himself from more unsolicited email.

In general, every piece of web content that a computer requests from a website discloses information to that website. This basic technique enables a third-party site to track visitors across different first-party websites that include content from the same third-party. When several websites show content (like a syndicated photo or article) from the same third-party website, that third-party site can determine which of the websites a particular visitor has browsed to.

For example, say two totally unrelated sites, Site1.com and Site2.com, both include images from MySyndicatedPhotos.com. The user browses to both Site1.com and Site2.com, and the user’s browser calls MySyndicatedPhotos.com in order to get the images these sites include. MySyndicatedPhotos.com can figure out (by various means) that the same machine visited these two different sites.

As the user visits additional sites that show content from this same third-party site, this third-party site is in position to build a profile of the user’s activity across the different sites that include its content.

While cookies can definitely contribute here, and there’s been long-standing concern and confusion about “tracking cookies,” the fact is that any content coming from a third-party site can function like a tracking cookie. The intent of the content (a photo, article, logo, or site-specific analytics; image, text, or script) is technologically irrelevant to its potential use as a tracking mechanism. Note that even if the user had blocked all cookies, other content on third-party websites could still be used to build a profile. Third-party content isn’t inherently good or bad; it’s just technically possible to use it this way.

Actually Happening or Just Technically Possible, and Other Questions

To be clear, this post is about what a website can do when several other websites use content from it. It’s not what all third-party sites actually do when other sites refer to content on them. What is actually done with the available information is up to the third-party site, and in some ways very hard for anyone else to figure out. The third-party site could have a clear, well-written, and prominently posted privacy policy that guides its operations. It might not. The site could have an employee who loses a laptop with the data collected, or has malware on his machine and discloses collected information against policy. The site could have business arrangements with other sites that involve pooling data.

Also, this blog post isn’t meant as a technical deep-dive on the techniques sites can use to track users, or the different counter-measures technically-savvy users might take to avoid being tracked. The common technical theme here (as described above in the email case and here) involves ways that first-party sites enable information that can uniquely identify site visitors to flow to third-party sites. For example, many of the web addresses you’ll find in the Web Page Privacy Policy dialog are often quite long and contain unique identifiers. There are better discussions of this topic elsewhere. For example, a recent IRC discussion about developing new standards for rich websites covered aspects of this topic. While it’s quite long, some parts are very relevant, like this one (that people “are being tracked whether they send cookies or not”) and this one (“anyone who wants to track people across the web can trivially do so at this point, even without cookies…. you can pretty easily ‘fingerprint’ people through things like their user-agent string, ip address, screen size, other js- and http- accessible prefs, etc and then with a simple set of analysis scripts you can easily work out who is who just look at the ‘anonymised’ search query string data aol released”).

Web browsing isn’t anonymous or perfectly private even without third-party sites. For example, the provider of Internet access (to a person’s home, hotel room, café table, or desk at school or work) can observe where the computer goes on the Internet. These providers typically provide terms of use, so users have clear notice and can choose to accept or decline connectivity under the stated terms. Any software running on the user’s machine can determine the websites the machine has visited; this is the basis of features like History, or toolbars that copy a user’s browser history up to the web so users can get at it from different machines. Again, terms of use and privacy policies are important tools here for users. The websites a user visits can determine information about the user (for example, the user’s likely location). Also, users give the sites they visit information directly in terms of what they click on and choose to do.

Third-Party Sites and Trust Issues

Given that web browsing isn’t anonymous and in some ways this is “how things work” on the web, what exactly is the trust issue? For many people, trust begins with security. The security risk here is plain: visiting one website exposes the user to potentially malicious content from other websites. The user visits one site and sees content on it that seems trustworthy (it’s on the site!) but actually comes from a different source. Finding examples of this problem on the web isn’t hard; it’s happened to visitors of several top tier websites.

Trust includes privacy as well. The privacy concern involves users having a choice, and being able to exercise control about what information they share. Today, users are not in control of which websites can get information about their browsing activities. As a result, web sites that users aren’t aware that they’ve visited and don’t have a well-defined relationship with are in position to build a profile of the users’ browsing patterns.

A guiding principle for Internet Explorer (and Microsoft overall, as part of Trustworthy Computing) is that the user should be in control. Consumers have come to expect security protections from their browsers, and are starting to have higher expectations about privacy protections as well. Control here means that users have clear notice and can tell what sites they may be disclosing information to and under what terms. Control also means that users can exercise choice about what information they disclose to whom. Preventing information disclosure means blocking content; blocking content creates a possible impact to the appearance and functionality of the page.

Beyond these issues, accountability is a question here as well. When a user visits one site after another, and each one includes some third-party content, who is accountable and who takes responsibility for the information collected about the user? On today’s web, that’s not at all clear.

The privacy and trust issues around third-party content are complex and important. As discussed in this blog before, trustworthy browsing involves many industry challenges, and, like many other efforts (e.g. interoperability), requires cooperation and trade-offs. Web privacy involves more than just blocking cookies. Enabling users to be in control starts with making users aware of the issues. In another post, we’ll cover IE8 functionality that helps users stay in control of their information.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

Source

IE8 and Privacy

nzie8 — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:31:50 GMT

IE 8 Beta 2: Privacy is about more than cookies

As others have written here before, users should be in control of their information. That’s at the core of privacy. Privacy has two aspects: disclosure and choice. Disclosure means informing users in plain language about the data collected about them and how it’s used. Choice means putting users in control of their data and giving them tools to protect it.

Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing “off the record”? Perhaps you’re using someone else’s computer and you don’t want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you’re at an Internet kiosk and don’t want the next person using it to know at which website you bank.

What if you want to delete your browsing history after the fact, but you don’t want to lose your preferences at websites that you use frequently?

When we began planning IE8, we took a hard look at our customers’ concerns about privacy on the web. As evidenced by some of the comments on the IE blog during the IE7 days, many users are concerned about so-called “over-the-shoulder privacy”, or the ability to control what their spouses, friends, kids, and co-workers might see.

What about your privacy as you browse the web? As Dean outlined is his post earlier today, there is so-called “3^rd-party” content on websites, some of which can gather data about how you browse the web. How do you know what that is, or how to control it?

With respect to privacy, IE8 gives users more choice about controlling what information they keep and exchange. In the first part of this post I’ll describe two Internet Explorer 8 features that help you control your history, cookies, and other information that Internet Explorer stores on your behalf. In the latter part, I’ll describe two more features that can help you control how your browsing history is shared by websites. By default, IE8 browses the web the same way IE7 does.

InPrivate™ Browsing lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data
Delete Browsing History helps you control your browsing history after you’ve visited websites.
InPrivate™ Blocking informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it

InPrivate Subscriptions allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of websites to block or allow.

InPrivate Browsing

If you are using a shared PC, a borrowed laptop from a friend, or a public PC, sometimes you don’t want other people to know where you’ve been on the web. Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing makes that “over the shoulder” privacy easy by not storing history, cookies, temporary Internet files, or other data.

Using InPrivate Browsing is as easy as launching a new InPrivate Browsing window. When you’re done, just close the window and IE will take care of the rest.

While InPrivate Browsing is active, the following takes place:

New cookies are not stored
- All new cookies become “session” cookies
- Existing cookies can still be read
- The new DOM storage feature behaves the same way
New history entries will not be recorded
New temporary Internet files will be deleted after the Private Browsing window is closed
Form data is not stored
Passwords are not stored
Addresses typed into the address bar are not stored
Queries entered into the search box are not stored
Visited links will not be stored

Delete Browsing History

In Internet Explorer 7, we added a feature called Delete Browsing History that lets you delete in one click all of the information that IE saves. This is a necessary tool that is a standard feature in all modern web browsers. If there are things in your web browsing past that you want to erase, you can do that easily.

The problem is that usually you don’t want to delete everything! Cookies, in particular, are really useful for storing preferences on websites that you use frequently. Many sites have a “remember me” option, which stores a cookie on your PC and identifies your user account. Other sites, particularly financial websites, will store a cookie on each computer that you use to eliminate extra challenge questions (i.e. “What was your high school mascot?”).

IE8 solves this problem by adding an option that lets you keep cookies and temporary Internet files from websites saved in your Favorites list:

To avoid having your favorite sites “forget you”, simply add them to your Favorites, and make sure the “Preserve Favorites website data” checkbox is selected. IE will preserve any cookies or cache files that were created by websites in your favorites.

Oh – and by the way – we heard your feedback about checkboxes! Now Delete Browsing History will remember your preferences. We also added a “Delete Browsing History on Exit” feature if you really want to keep your history squeaky-clean! To do so, click Tools->Internet Options:

In his post earlier today, Dean outlined some of the privacy issues surrounding third-party content, which powers some of the rich experiences you get on the web today, such as interactive maps and social networking shortcuts (“add to Digg”).

Some third-party content is shared by multiple websites. If you happen to browse to sites that refer to the same third-party resource, i.e. a script, image, stylesheet, information is sent to that third-party. Over time, the third-party can create a profile of which websites you go to, what links you click on, etc. It’s hard to know exactly how your data will be used and with whom it will be shared without reading and understanding the privacy policy of each third-party site providing content to the website you visit,.

Consider this hypothetical example. You walk into a shopping mall. In the middle of the shopping mall, there is someone in front of a kiosk who asks you if he can record what stores you visit while you’re there as part of a survey. In order to do so, he writes down a description of what you look like – not your name – but what you’re wearing, your height, etc. In several of the stores throughout the mall, there are people who identify you based on this data, and record whether or not you visit a particular store. When the mall closes, the surveyors in the store report their tallies back to the kiosk. What the surveyor ends up with is a list of some of the stores you visit while you’re at the mall.

This is analogous to how some third-party content works on the web today. Again, without reading specific privacy policies, it’s hard to say in general what third-parties do with the data (or whether or not they record it at all).

The first difference between this mall example and the real world is that the mall survey is hypothetical. Again, different third-party sites do different things with the data they can collect, and the best way to understand what they actually do is reading their privacy policy. The other major difference between this example and the web is how explicitly users are presented with a choice about sharing their information. Clearly there are benefits to sharing your information, starting with richer experiences. Many web sites rely on third-parties to provide content and services like interactive maps and financial data, or analytics and advertising in order to operate effectively. These third-party services often collect information in order to do their jobs. There are also potential drawbacks, such as privacy risks (who has what information?) and increased exposure to malicious content. Put simply, the web relies on a trade, or value exchange, between users and sites. Information goes back and forth: in exchange for “free” services and content, users “pay” with information, not money. There is nothing wrong with such a trade, as long as users are informed and are in control of the choice.

InPrivate Blocking

InPrivate Blocking is a feature designed to help give you information about third-party content that has a line of sight into your web browsing, and gives you a choice about what information you share with these sites. As Dean mentioned in his post, it’s possible for sites to track users without cookies. The only way to ensure that your data is not disclosed is to block content and prevent communication to sites.

While you browse the web, your IE keeps a local record of which third-party items your browser accesses, and where they were accessed from. For example, if you visit http://www.contoso.com/index.html, which contains the following snippet:

<html>
<head> <title> Contoso.com Homepage </head>
…
<script src=http://www.woodgrove-int.com/tracking.js>
…
</html>

and then visit http://www.wingtiptoys.com/, which contains the same snippet:

<html>
<head> <title> Great deals at Wingtiptoys.com </head>
…
<script src=http://www.woodgrove-int.com/tracking.js>
…
</html>

Woodgrove-int.com is now in a position to know that you’ve been to both contoso.com and wingtiptoys.com.

InPrivate Blocking keeps a record of third-party items like the one above as you browse. When you choose to browse with InPrivate, IE automatically blocks sites that have “seen” you across more than ten sites.

You can also manually choose items to block or allow, or obtain information about the third-party content directly from the site by clicking the “More information from this website” link. Note that Internet Explorer will only record data for InPrivate Blocking when you are in “regular” browsing mode, as no browsing history is retained while browsing InPrivate. An easy way to think of it is that your normal browsing determines which items to block when you browse InPrivate.

InPrivate Subscriptions

Users can augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking with InPrivate Subscriptions. Some users want to protect their privacy, but don’t want to make granular decisions about content to block or allow. Users can delegate these decisions to publishers of InPrivate Subscriptions. Users can subscribe to a list the same way they add an Accelerator, Web Slice, or search provider to IE: by clicking a link on a web page and confirming that they want this functionality:

Under the covers, InPrivate Subscriptions are simply RSS feeds of Regular Expressions that specify sub-downloads to block or allow. Anyone can publish an InPrivate Subscription on their website, just as they can offer an Accelerator or Web Slice on their website. We’ll post details about the file format as part of the updated IE8 Developer’s Guide with Beta 2.

Conclusion

IE8 helps put you in control of your data, both on your PC and on the Web. IE8 Beta 2 is coming soon, and I encourage you to download it and give us feedback.

Andy Zeigler
Program Manager

Source

Internet Explorer 8 Roadshow in New Zealand!

nzie8 — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:06:00 GMT

Hi All,

Come and have an overview of the new features and capabilities of Internet Explorer 8 straight from a senior member of the US based Internet Explorer team.

Jefferson Fletcher is a Senior Product Manager working on Internet Explorer. Since joining Microsoft in 1996, Jefferson has spent the bulk of his career in engineering and has helped to deliver end-user features in multiple versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. A Seattle native, he left life as a poor Political Science major at the University of Washington 12 years ago because earning some extra cash as a software tester sounded like a good idea. (He has yet to find his way back...)

Christchurch

Monday 8^th September

Register

1.45pm: registrations/refreshments

2pm: Session begins

3pm: Session concludes

Wellington

Wednesday 10^th September

Register

1.45pm: registrations/refreshments

2pm: Session begins

3pm: Session concludes

Auckland

Friday 12^th September

Register

10.45pm: registrations/refreshments

11am: Session begins

12pm: Session concludes

Nick.

Internet Explorer 8 – are YOU ready?

nzie8 — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:44:00 GMT

Hi All,

Internet Explorer 8 takes the web experience beyond the page and introduces a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web whether you are a web developer writing to standards or an end-user discovering a new online service integrated into the browser. We’ve also taken steps to deliver the fastest version of Internet Explorer available, making it easy to launch quickly, find what you want efficiently, and navigate seamlessly.

Consistent with our efforts to promote further interoperability across the Web, Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 8 to render content in its most standards-compliant way by default. Giving top priority to Web standards interoperability allows us to help web developers and designers drive toward the ideal of “write once, run anywhere”, freeing up more time to innovate rather than modify content for different browsers. This commitment also addresses several development and design pain points from previous Internet Explorer releases.

However, browsing with this default setting may cause content written for previous versions of Internet Explorer to display differently than intended. This creates a call to action for site owners to ensure their content will continue to display seamlessly in Internet Explorer 8. As such, we have provided a meta-tag usable on a per-page or per-site level to maintain compatibility for sites designed for Internet Explorer 7. Adding this tag instructs Internet Explorer 8 to render content like Internet Explorer 7, without requiring any additional changes.

We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers. To learn more and get started, please follow the step-by-step instructions located at the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120024.

Nick.