New Zealand IE8 Taskforce : General IE Information

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.

Group Policy Settings Reference Windows Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1

nzie8 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 03:08:13 GMT

Hi All,

This spreadsheet lists the policy settings for computer and user configurations included in the administrative template files (admx/adml) delivered with Windows Internet Explorer 8. The policy settings included in this spreadsheet cover Internet Explorer 5, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8. These files are used to expose policy settings when you edit Group Policy objects (GPOs) using Group Policy Object Editor (also known as GPEdit).

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 x64 Edition; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ; Windows XP Service Pack 2; Windows XP Service Pack 3

This update applies to Internet Explorer 8 RC1 with the following operating systems:

Windows XP SP2
Windows XP SP3
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 x64 Edition
Windows Server 2008
Windows Vista
Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Click here to download.

Nick.

Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Release Candidate 1

nzie8 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:48:19 GMT

Hi All,

The Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) simplifies the creation, deployment and management of customized Internet Explorer 8 packages. IEAK 8 can be used to configure the out-of-box Internet Explorer 8 experience or to manage user settings after Internet Explorer 8 deployment.

Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 RC1 enables the most efficient way to deploy Internet Explorer 8 and manage Web-based solutions. Learn how to tailor a custom browser to meet your customers' needs. Visit the IEAK 8 RC1 site on TechNet for more information on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 RC1.

Please note: You must have Internet Explorer 8 RC1 installed on your computer in order for IEAK 8 RC1 to run successfully.

To download and understand the system requirements, visit here.

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 and IP Licensing

nzie8 — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:54:08 GMT

When Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 launched in March, we wrote a post describing the permissive intellectual property licensing approaches we took for components of that release, such as Creative Commons licenses for copyrights in selected specs and the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (“OSP”) for implementations of those specs.

Now with the launch of Beta 2, We’re happy to highlight a few ways we’re continuing to make our innovations available to the community. By doing so, we hope to continue to foster the type of collaboration in the community that is so important to the “generativity” of the Internet, to borrow a term from Jonathan Zittrain (whose new book, by the way, is an important and worthwhile read).

Creative Commons License for Copyright in the Search Suggestions Specification

For Search Suggestions, we’re licensing copyright in the XML Search Suggestions Format Specification under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. This license lets others copy, distribute, modify and build upon the specification, even for commercial uses, as long as they give credit to Microsoft and license their own changes under the same terms. Special thanks to DeWitt Clinton and other contributors to the OpenSearch JSON Search Suggestions extension, whose work relates to the XML Search Suggestions Format spec. Visit Creative Commons for more information about their licenses, including how to use Creative Commons licenses on your own work.

Microsoft Open Specification Promise for Implementations of the Search Suggestions Specification

Microsoft has developed the Open Specification Promise (“OSP”) to provide a simple and clear patent promise to reassure the broad audience of developers and customers that a given specification can be used for free, easily, now and forever. The OSP was developed with feedback from customers and the open source community, and we’re happy to make the XML Search Suggestions Format Spec available under the OSP. The use of the OSP confirms that Microsoft patents needed to implement this specification can be used for free. More complete information about the OSP can be found here.

Web Slice Icon Guidelines

Internet Explorer 8 introduces Web Slices as a way for web sites to allow users to subscribe to specific content directly within a Web page. Users can see when content changes and view the updated portion of the Web page directly from the Favorites bar of Internet Explorer. The Web Slice icon provides a common visual cue that a web page supports web slices. Developers may freely use the icon under the Web Slice Icon Guidelines that we have developed, which are intended to promote the integrity of the icon as a common symbol for Web Slice functionality. We made it easier to use the icon in accordance with the Guidelines by making available for download .png and .gif renderings of the icon in various sizes.

We are pleased to continue to contribute to the web community and, as always, look forward to your feedback.

source

IE8 Tab Grouping

nzie8 — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:29:02 GMT

EVOLUTION OF THE DESIGN AND ALGORITHM

After shipping Internet Explorer 7, the IE team collected data from user reviews, from IE Feedback on MS Connect, and from other Microsoft product teams. We formed a list of top user requests which included the new Reopen Closed Tab feature, the new tab Crash Recovery feature, work to ensure that a bad tab would not hang the other tabs, the new Duplicate Tab feature, and many others. That list also includes the following two observation: Today, a tab that is opened from another tab is always put at the end of the tab row. Since it is related to the first tab, it is odd that one has to go searching all the way at the end of the tabs to find it.

Based on this feedback, we decided to rework the tab close algorithm so that tab selection is not always placed to the right when a tab is closed, but it is placed on a tab related to the recently closed tab, to get the following behavior:

In addition to listening to different IE Feedback channels, we worked with user researchers here at Microsoft to hold Usability Studies in which users came in, browsed the web, and explained why and how they were accomplishing their browsing tasks.

During these usability studies, we found a few interesting trends:

Users queue up a set of tabs. In other words, users will search for something and open up a handful of the search results to read later. This trend also happens with online news sites; users queue up a set of articles they’d like to read later.
Users use one window to handle multiple tasks (i.e. I have 4 tabs open on work-related sites, 3 tabs for news articles I want to read later, and 3 tabs for restaurants I’d like to take my mother to when she visits)
After switching from another application, users frequently spend a lot of time looking for a specific tab

In the trends described above, the related tabs (whether they are search results or news articles opened from the same website) would ideally not only be placed adjacent to one another but would also have some visual indication of being grouped together so that different tasks could be more easily identifiable. This is when colors came in to play.

The idea behind tab grouping is that tabs originating from the same source are grouped together. The image below shows MSNBC with two articles from it opened in green, and a Windows Live search on Seattle restaurants with two search results from it opened in blue:

Now with visual indicators on my tabs, I can quickly identify the groups of tabs that are related to different tasks. So if I am switching back to Internet Explorer after using another application, I will quickly identify the blue-colored tabs as information related to the hunt for a good restaurant.

Another important aspect of designing this feature was deciding upon the visual indicators for groups. A common question we get is “How do color blind users use tab grouping?” We made sure to include these users in our design. The difference between the colors below is great enough that many color blind users can differentiate between the different groups:

In addition, for users who have a screen reader running, we include names of the tab groups (i.e. Tab Group 1, Tab Group 2) on each of the tabs after the title. The picture below shows the two tab groups and the tooltip on the fourth tab containing the tab group information:

Now that you know a little bit about the design of tab groups, I will explain how tab groups are created and what you can do with them.

HOW IS A TAB GROUP CREATED?

If, for example, you're viewing a newspaper website, and would like to queue up some articles to read, there are a few ways in which you can open these articles (links to articles) in new tabs and keep them grouped:

Right-click on a link and select the “Open in New Tab” option
Ctrl-click on a link
Middle-click on a link (The middle-click can be done by either by pressing the mouse scroll-wheel, or if your mouse does not have a middle button/scroll-wheel, simply right and left-click at the same time)

In addition, if you right-click on a specific tab and select the “Open a New Tab” option, a new tab will open up and will be grouped with the aforementioned source tab.

If you do any of the above in IE8, the original tab and all tabs opened up from it will be grouped.

WHAT CAN I DO WITH TAB GROUPS?

If you accidentally close a tab within a group, using the new “Reopen Closed Tab” option in the menu will not only restore that recently closed tab, but will also restore that tab into the right group.

Also, when you have completed a task, tab grouping now makes it easier to close everything related to that task by allowing a one click “Close this Tab Group” option in the tab context menu.

If you would rather have a tab not be associated with the other tabs in the group, you can easily “Ungroup This Tab”.

All of these options are available in the context menu that appears if you right-click on a tab:

In addition to the right-click context menu options, users can drag and drop tabs. Although the main appeal of this feature is that it works seamlessly in the background (there is no work on the user’s side to get this enhanced tab functionality), there are a couple of us who like to over-organize. For the over-organizers out there, dragging tabs into an existing group will make them part of that group. In addition, you can ungroup a tab by dragging it between two un-grouped tabs.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why does the tab stay in the group if I navigate to another page on that tab?

If you are using a specific tab to navigate, the algorithm assumes that your new destination is somehow related to the group. If you don’t want the new navigation to be part of the group, you can either ungroup the tab, or open a new tab to navigate.

Why does duplicating a tab not group the two identical tabs together?

The new duplicate tab feature (found in the right click context menu for tabs) allows you to take the same tab down a completely different path. So although the tabs are identical, the idea is that the user wants to take them in two different directions.

Why are my home pages not grouped together?

Similar to the response above for duplicating a tab, the home pages usually consist of your mail client, your online newspaper, etc. They are not usually related (except that you’d like them all to open when you start the browser).

How can I turn Tab Grouping off?

From the “Tools” button in the Command Bar select “Internet Options”. Select the “Settings” button under Tabs. Uncheck the “Enable Tab Groups” setting.

I hope the content above not only provides a bit of background into the evolution of this feature but also is informative in explaining what you can do with tab grouping.

source

What’s New for IE8 Search

nzie8 — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:08:03 GMT

If you’re already using IE8 Beta 2, you’ve probably already seen the new search features available in IE8, perhaps you’ve even tried them out. Today I’d like to show you these features in greater detail and fill you in on some of the things we were thinking about when we created them.

Our goal for IE8 is to make searching for what you need faster and easier. We want you to search for the right term on the right provider and get the right information as quickly as possible. Here’s how we make that happen in IE8:

Search Suggestions present you with suggested queries as you type which help you compose and research your query.
Visual Search Suggestions are suggestions which include an image and additional text. These can help you visualize what you are searching for and sometimes even get you the information you need without even leaving the search box.
The QuickPick menu enables you to easily switch to your secondary, non-default, Search providers allowing you to search with the right provider every time.
History results, directly accessible from the search box, show you pages you’ve already visited and save you a click or two.
Automatic Search Accelerators allow you to send selected text on a webpage to any of your search providers skipping the cumbersome copy and paste step.
Search query synchronization keeps the search box up to date with your most recent query term even if you search within a webpage instead of the search box. You can quickly edit or redirect your searches.

Search and Visual Search Suggestions

Search Suggestions allow your installed search providers to suggest different queries to you while you are typing. This is great when you aren’t sure of how to spell someone’s name or you can’t quite remember if the movie was called “The Birdcage” or “The Bird’s Nest”. You might already be familiar with textual search suggestions as they are already in use on some popular websites and in some toolbars. (IE8 supports JSON suggestions which some of these use.)

In IE8, we expanded the notion of a suggestion. In addition to providing text suggestions, search providers can now deliver visual suggestions, suggestions which include an image. The picture below shows text suggestions from Live Search and visual suggestions from Amazon.

Check out how Amazon customized the title of their suggestions section allowing them to indicate how many product matches are available for a given search term. You’ll also notice below how search providers can add additional separators to their suggestions. Both eBay and The New York Times have included separators which distinguish query suggestions from product or article results.

Above, you can see that some of the suggestions include some additional gray italic text. This text is simply a description, and provides some additional information about the suggestion or result. These allow you to make an informed decision about which selection might be most useful to you.

To try out these, and other search providers, head over to the new IE Gallery site.

If you own a website and are interested in supporting search suggestions, you can read more about how it works and how to implement suggestions on MSDN. Also, stay tuned to the IE blog for more info on this topic.

QuickPick Menu

Searching on the right provider, at the right time, is a key factor in helping you find the right information. Searching on Live Search for “The Office” returns good results for sites about the show or NBC, but if what you are really interested in is DVDs of The Office then you probably want to be searching on Amazon or eBay. With the QuickPick, searching on your secondary providers is just two clicks away.

As soon as you click in the Search box, the QuickPick menu will appear. This menu shows the icons of your installed search providers. When you hover over them, you will see a tooltip with the provider’s name.

Click on the search provider you want to switch to and you’ll be off and searching on that new provider. Find on Page is also accessible from the QuickPick menu when you click on the “Find…” button. The QuickPick will drop below search suggestions after you start typing so you can access it at all times.

The QuickPick always remains a single line regardless of how many search providers you have installed, and in the default search box size, will hold up to eight providers on the QuickPick menu. To allow more providers on the menu, simply increase the size of the search box by hovering your mouse between the search box and address bar; you will see a horizontal arrow appear at which point you can click to drag the search box to your preferred size.

Additionally, the order of your search providers can be changed, so you can choose to place your most frequently used providers upfront for quick access. To change the search providers order from Manage Add-ons; click the search box dropdown arrow and select Manage Search Providers.

History Results

The last section that you’ll notice in the search box dropdown contains results from your local History. Imagine you’ve already visited a site, you just can’t remember exactly what it was. This is where history results can be helpful, they show you where you’ve already been. The results are searched on by the URL and the title of the page. They are the same results you’ll see when you type in the address bar. Christopher and Seth posted some details earlier this week about how the address bar uses Windows Search to give you great results.

Search Accelerators

By now, hopefully you’ve read about and tried out Accelerators (“Activities” in Beta 1). We hope you’ve noticed that all your search providers are now available as Accelerators. Your default search provider will always be your default search Accelerator and your secondary providers will always be available in the Accelerator overflow menu.

If you own a website, you may be thinking “well that’s great… but I want my search provider to support Accelerator Previews. Does that mean that I need to build both an Accelerator and a search provider?” Actually, no, you don’t need both of these! If you want to build a search provider which supports an Accelerator preview, you can do that by adding the Accelerator preview URL to your OpenSearch description file. Details can be found here.

Search Query Synchronization

One last cool feature you may not have noticed yet is search query synchronization. As you search on your installed search providers, IE will track queries done from within the websites of those providers. For example, if Live Search is one of your installed search providers, try this:

Navigate to www.live.com
Search for something from within the webpage
Check out your search box

The term that you searched for is now populated in the search box. (Note that this may not work on all search providers due to redirections or changes in the URL that IE isn’t able to recognize and correlate to one of your installed providers.)

With this nifty little feature, if you ever need to switch search providers, your latest search query term is already waiting for you up in the search box.

Source

Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8 Beta

nzie8 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 06:40:19 GMT

The Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta simplifies the creation, deployment and management of customized Internet Explorer 8 packages. IEAK 8 can be used to configure the out-of-box Internet Explorer 8 experience or to manage user settings after Internet Explorer 8 deployment.

Overview

Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta enables the most efficient way to deploy Internet Explorer 8 and manage Web-based solutions. Learn how to tailor a custom browser to meet your customers' needs. Visit the IEAK 8 Beta site on TechNet for more information on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta.
Please note: You must have Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 installed on your computer in order for IEAK 8 Beta to run successfully.

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 x64 Edition; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ; Windows XP Service Pack 2; Windows XP Service Pack 3

Refer Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 System Requirements

Visit the IEAK 8 Beta site on TechNet for more information on the Internet Explorer Administration Kit (IEAK) 8 Beta.

You can download the IE Administration Kit here.

Introducing the IE8 Developer Tools JScript Profiler

nzie8 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:37:55 GMT

The recently released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 contains a lot of improvements which are aimed at making developing web applications on Internet Explorer 8 easier and more productive. One of these improvements is the JScript Profiler in Developer Tools, which provides critical JScript related performance data to a web developer that helps identify and fix performance related issues. We believe the Profiler is going to be a very helpful tool to fine tune the performance of the scripts in a web application. It is lightweight, easy-to-use and provides the following features:

Provides performance data for JScript functions in two views:
- Functions View – a flat listing of all the functions
- Call Tree view – a hierarchical listing of the functions based on the call flow
Supports exporting the data to a file
Provides an inferred name for anonymous functions
Profiles built-in JScript functions
Supports multiple profile reports
Supports profiling across page navigation and refreshes

This post gives an overview of the Profiler and highlights some of its features. We hope you will try it out and give us your feedback.

Using the Profiler

Launch the Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 either by pressing F12 or selecting ‘Developer Tools’ from the Tools dropdown on the command bar. Switch to the Profiler Tab, and you can see the new Script Profiler. Click the ‘Start Profiling’ button to begin a new profiling session.

Now, you can perform the scenario you want to profile, and JScript performance data will be collected by the profiler automatically in the background. Note that the text of the button changes to ‘Stop Profiling’ to indicate profiling is going on. To stop profiling, click the ‘Stop Profiling’ button. The profiler will process the collected performance data and display a profile report for the session just concluded.

Viewing the Profile Report

The report presents the data in two views which can be selected from the Current View dropdown:

Functions view: This is a flat listing of all the functions with the corresponding performance data.
Call Tree view: This is a hierarchical listing of the functions based on the call execution sequence. Each node corresponds to a function and lists all the functions it called and the performance data for those calls. The Call Tree view is useful in finding the call stack trace that has the greatest performance impact in your script.

In both views, each row corresponds to a JScript function, with the various performance data in different columns. The view can be customized to show different columns. Right-click a column header and select ‘Add / Remove Columns’ to select the columns you want to view.

You can sort on any of the columns by clicking the corresponding column headers or by selecting the column from the ‘Sort By’ menu items in the right-click context menu.

The available columns are:

Function: The name of the function
Count: The total number of calls made to this function
Inclusive Time (ms): The time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
Inclusive Time %: The percentage of time spent in this function and its children
Exclusive Time (ms): The time spent in this function in milliseconds
Exclusive Time %: The percentage of time spent in this function
Avg Time (ms): The average time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
Max Time (ms): The maximum time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
Min Time (ms): The minimum time spent in this function and its children in milliseconds
URL: The URL of the source file where this function is defined
Line Number: The line number of the beginning of this function in the source file

Double-click a row to view the source code definition of the corresponding function in the Script Tab. This is available only if the performance data collects the URL information and the source file is currently loaded in the Script Tab. You need to enable script debugging in Internet Explorer for the profiler to collect the URL information. [Note: You can enable script debugging from the Tools > Internet Options > Advanced Tab.]

Exporting Data

Sometimes, we may want to analyze the profile report further, create graphs, or share it with another application. To facilitate this, the Profiler allows the data to be exported to a file in a Comma Separated Values (CSV) format. The data can then be opened in other applications (like Microsoft® Office Excel®) and can be shared. Simply click the ‘Export Data’ button and give a filename to save the profile data of the current report to a file. Note that presently only the Functions view is exported and not the Call Tree view.

Inferred name

In Javascript, the function name is optional. You can define a function (called anonymous function) with no name. In practice, this is quite common. Many real-world Javascript functions are defined in the context of an object literal, and more often than not, these are anonymous. This presents a problem in the profile report. When we have multiple anonymous entries, the only way to differentiate the anonymous functions is to look up the actual source definition of the functions from the URL and Line number information. This is far from being convenient and makes the profile report hard to read and confusing.

To overcome this problem, the JScript profiler tries to infer a name for each anonymous function based on the context where the function is defined. Let me illustrate how this works with the following example:

var Shape = {
Area : function () { . . . } // anonymous function 1
};
Foo = function () { . . . } // anonymous function 2

When we profile this code, these functions will show up in the report as “Area” and “Foo” respectively, instead of both being listed as anonymous functions. This way, you can quickly identify which function is being referred to in the profile report without having to open the source code. The heuristic logic used to infer the name is simple enough to limit the performance overhead. In some cases, this might fail to infer a name, in which case, the function is listed with the special name “[Anonymous]”.

We hope the profiler comes handy when improving Javascript performance of your web applications in Internet Explorer.

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

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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

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