PeteL's Blog : Internet Explorer 7

IE VPC's - Which Ones Next?

PeteL — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:58:00 GMT

Apologies for going dark the last little while, I'm going to do my best to change that again. Lots of stuff going on here that I'm really excited about, but before I get into that, I want to do an unscientific survey.

We currently offer developers and designers the following VPC images:

XP + SP2 with IE6
XP + SP2 with IE7

We're looking at the next batch now, and I'm curious, if we were to add one more, which of the following would you prefer?

Vista with IE7
Vista + SP1 with IE7

Also, if you're a Mac user, and want to see either VPC images compressed with ZIP, or Parallels users, a comment would be appreciated. No promises on these, I just want to understand what is more important to you.

Thanks!
PEte

Web Tools Or Tools For Web People

PeteL — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 01:22:16 GMT

A couple of days ago, I got an email from the guys at DebugBar letting me know that they had just released their Beta1 for Debug Bar 5.0. They've got a pretty good tool bar for doing web design and web development in IE. Their DebugBar adds features like a DOM Inspector, an HTTP Inspector, a JavaScript Console and Inspector, an HTML Validator among other things. It's free for personal use, and the commercial license is easy to obtain.

There are a couple of other tools worth pointing out as well

Fiddler2 a web debugging proxy written by one of the PM's on the IE team
IE Developer Tool Bar the Microsoft IE Developer Toolbar. There's lots of info on it here
IE6 and IE7 Virtual PC images
Visual Web Developer Express 2008 has great JavaScript debugging features
AjaxView a great tool from MS Research for remotely monitoring web2.0 applications for doing perf work
Nikhil's Web Development Helper is an add-on that helps AJAX and ASP.NET developers see what is going on with their code

Hope this helps!

PEte

I'm not going to Click To Activate anymore (soon)

PeteL — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:04:26 GMT

Phew. I've been pretty heads down the last month on a couple of different projects, and one of the biggers ones just went live today! This morning, I posted an item to the IE blog announcing that we're removing click to activate from Internet Explorer! The first "preview" patch will be available in early December, and then it will be included in the April 2008 Cumulitive Update for IE.

I saw one person on the IE blog comment and ask why we're taking so long to just up and remove this. The simple answer is many customers don't like it when we make big changes to IE. It's that whole breaking the web thing that Chris keeps talking about. We do not expect any changes to the way web pages operate, but we want to give time for you to play with it and see for yourself.

For web developers and designers, this doesn't change anything. Your pages will still work in the same way that they did before. If you've been using the JS insertion method, great. If not, no worries there either.

And don't forget, MIX registration opened this morning!

UPS Package Tracking In Your IE7 Search Bar

PeteL — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:13:41 GMT

Confession time, I'm an online shopping addict. Amazon and I get along really well. Well, Amazon and my bank account don't get along well, but Amazon and I do. Along with many other online stores, I tend to do a good bit of shopping online. This morning, I got a tracking notification for a package that is being shipped to me, and it occurred to me this morning that you could easily create a search provider for UPS (or most other shippers for that matter) and have it appear in your IE7 Inline Search box really easily.

The easiest way to add it is to go to Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7 and in the "Create Your Own" box, add http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/processInputRequest?sort_by=status&error_carried=true&tracknums_displayed=1&TypeOfInquiryNumber=T&loc=en-us&InquiryNumber1=TEST&AgreeToTermsAndConditions=yes to the URL text box, then give it a name. Finally, click on the INSTALL button, and it'll add the UPS package tracking to your search provider.

Now, all you have to do is put a tracking number in your search box, and hit enter. Bingo, you've got results!

IE7 Installation Update

PeteL — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 19:40:46 GMT

It's crazy to me that I've been in this new role for just over a year now, in fact, it's just about 13 months. In that time, I've seen IE7 ship, taken on new products like Expression Web and Visual Web Developer, met so many fantastic developers and designers and have had the awesome opportunity to travel all over the place for work.

Today, we updated the installation experience to make IE7 available to as many Windows users as possible. As of today, IE7 will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation, and will be available to all Windows XP users. If you're not already running IE7, you can get it from the Internet Explorer home page on Microsoft.com. We've made a few other small tweaks to the UI, including enabling the menu bar by default, and created a new MSI installer that simplifies deployment for IT administrators in the enterprise environment.

But what changes did we make for developers? In short, none. The IE7 Installation and Availability Update is all about changing the packaging and setup. The binaries didn't change, so pages will render and behave exactly as they did with the version of IE7 many people already have today. We decided that rather than releasing a new build with a few small fixes now, we would put our major efforts into the next version of Internet Explorer. Keeping the browser text matrix small is important to most of the developers we talk to. This means that you don't need to retest your website if you've already tested it with IE7.

There is a KB article on the changes that we made available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940767

I'm excited about what Internet Explorer has in store for the future, we're busy working on the next version of Internet Explorer; and I am looking forward to sharing it with you!

VWD Beta2, Web Developer Tools, IE VPC

PeteL — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 02:34:42 GMT

So as it turns out, it's been a while since I last posted. Things have been a little nutty around here. We just finished our fiscal year, and have started planning for our next fiscal year. It's been really exciting, lots of cool stuff happening around the next version of IE, planning for Expression Web 2, and getting ready for the launch of Visual Web Developer.

Visual Web Developer Beta 2

In fact, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, including Visual Web Developer Express Beta 2 is now available! I'm really excited that they're now available as they've come a long way since Beta 1.

If I had to name my top three fav features of VWD 2008, I guess I would say that they are:

JavaScript enhancements, including intellisense, and debugging
CSS and HTML enhancements
Data Access Improvements with LINQ

I'm really excited to see these guys get to Beta2. This is the team that I was on before I moved to my current role, and I've got a special place in my heart for them. They've done some awesome work here, and I'd recommend checking out VWD or VS Pro.

Web Developer Tools

At TechEd this year, John Hrvatin presented a chalk talk about developer tools for Internet Explorer. It was fantastically well attended, the room was overflowing! We're looking at ways we can rebroadcast the session online to share with all involved. But he did post a blog post a couple of weeks after TechEd with a summary of all the tools. It's certainly worth checking out.

I think my top three tools are:

IE Developer Toolbar
Fiddler
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (okay, so it's not a add-on, but it works great with IE or any other web browser for web development)

IE VPCs

I've had a few emails the last week or two asking if we're going to update the IE VPCs that are available, as the time-bomb expiry is approaching. I've already started working on them, and should have them online in the next couple of weeks. I'm aiming to get them up by the 10th of August.

This round, instead of building them myself, I'm working with someone else to get them built, so it's a bit of a different process. I've given them all the instructions that I have, and once I get the images from them, I'll do a few tests on them to make sure everything works correctly, and then roll them out.

We'll release an IE6 and an IE7 VPC image again this time both based on Windows XP SP2 + the latest patches.

Web Blunders: The Top 5 Biggest Mistakes On The Web

PeteL — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:45:00 GMT

At TechEd this year, I presented a session where I presented my top five pet peeves on the web, the biggest and easiest problems to avoid on the web. With how easy it is to share content on the web, I felt that these top five things were the best and easiest to get rid of.

In order, I felt they were:

5. Unprofessional Site Design
4. Lousy Content
3. Poorly coded HTML/CSS/JavaScript
2. Inappropriate use of Rich Content
1. Not Being POSH

I've attached my slides below, so check them out, and let me know what your pet peeves are!

MIX07 Recap (It's Over)

PeteL — Sat, 05 May 2007 00:24:51 GMT

Wow, just wow, that's all I really need to say. MIX07 was insane, an absolute great time, and some fantastic new stuff coming out from Microsoft for the web. So what were the highlights, for me it came down to three things, first the announcements around Silverlight, second was all the great sharing we got to do about IE, and third, was meeting some fantastic people.

I didn't really get a chance to blog while I was at MIX this year, which I wish I had, but we were all so busy, attending sessions, hanging out, hearing what you had to say, eating drinking and being merry.

IE

As Chris mentioned on the IE Blog, we didn't have anything to announce this year at MIX, we were there to listen, and provide some information. Chris's IE session was standing room only, and it went over well. He talked about some of the great features of IE7, but then moved into the things that we've learned about shipping IE, and what we need to deal with with future versions of IE.

The point Chris brought up as one of the hardest things to balance is application compatibility. Almost every time we change IE, the rendering engine or the DOM we cause an application to break. So how do we balance existing applications vs handling standards better? Chris brought up the idea that there may need to be some kind of new switch that makes IE behave in a specific way. If it's not there, you get one thing, if it is, you get something else.

Silverlight

Silverlight is awesome, to put it mildly. Imagine building super sweet, rich web applications using technology you already knew, like maybe C#. That's the whole idea behind Silverlight. It's a cross-browser(!), cross-platform(!) plug in for delivering the next generation of media experience and rich interactive applications. The beta that is out today doesn't have support for the C# yet, but there is an alpha out that does. The demo's that they showed just awed me.

The best place to check out is http://www.Silverlight.net. There are plenty of demos, samples and other stuff there that just kicks butt. The fact that you can get high def video streaming easily, is amazing. One of the keynote partners was Netflix, who showed their streaming video service in Silverlight. The player they use today is great, it works, but why install that when the only application that is going to use it is their player? I'd love the idea of multi-use applications, not something that is only used for one purpose. And because it's a dot net application, they were able to add a whole bunch of super cool features, like video sharing, so you can synchronize watching movies with your friends anywhere in the world.

Meeting Great Folks

One of the things I love most about conferences is getting the opportunity to meet developers and designers. The guys from Microsoft Canada planned a small party at Tao on Monday night, and a whole bunch of us (21 or so) ended up at Postrio for dinner. It was a fun dinner, and a good way to hear about the stuff they were working on. My friend Adam passed his camera around the table and there are a bunch of his photos are on Flickr

Interesting Links from MIX07

If you didn't make it to MIX, there are other ways you can participate! You can watch the sessions online, or if you're outside North America, there are going to be several ReMix events around the world coming up. I'll be at a few of them in June, so keep an eye here for more info!

Favorite Web Development And Design References

PeteL — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:51:28 GMT

While at lunch today, we got on to the conversation of web design and web development resources. I have sitting on my desk at all times, well, unless I'm using them at home:

I've got a few other books that I keep handy, though I'm noticeably missing an HTML book, and a copy of the W3C CSS 2.1 spec.

I've got a few websites that I like to keep an eye on for resources, for example, color charts, HTML escape sequences, and such.

What about you, what are your favorite sites/books? What's sitting on your desk?

IE7 VPC Image and IE6 VPC Image Refresh

PeteL — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:56:00 GMT

Cross posted from the IE Blog

Hello! Just wanted to give you a quick update that we’ve dropped two new VPC images that you can use with the free copy of Virtual PC 2007.

The first is a refresh of the Windows XP SP2 + IE6 image. A few people were encountering a non-genuine Windows warning from the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notification Tool. We did not install the WGA Notification tool on the image this time around. As we’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, these images have had their product keys deactivated, thus they don’t pass the WGA tests.

The second VPC image is Windows XP SP2 + IE7. You asked, we listened, and here it is. It’s built identically to the IE6 VPC, except just before packaging up the image, I installed IE7 on the machine. You can now test the features of IE7 on XP.

Just a reminder that both images expire on August 17^th, 2007.

One Way to Level the Layout Playing Field

PeteL — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:02:13 GMT

One of my pet peeves about CSS and HTML standards is sometimes, they aren't overly explicit, and browser vendors pick arbitrary values for things like line height, or margin or padding and the like. Eric Meyer has talked about a reset.css stylesheet that would effectively eliminate those differences and override the browsers value with the ones that you know and you specify.

I'm excited to see that he posted a version of it (though reading the comments, it sounds like there will be a few revisions coming) on his blog today. I'd highly recommend checking it out. He based it on the one from the guys at Yahoo! UI, added a few things and tweaked a few others. It's certainly one way to help eliminate those frustrating hair pulling "why isn't this working" kinds of questions!

IE Public Bug Database - Connect

PeteL — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 07:10:27 GMT

I've been following the comments over on the IE blog about Molly's post, particularly the comments of Chris Beall, thacker and steve_web, and I figured I'd post a bit of a follow up to what they were saying and ask for feedback from the community.

In the IE7 timeframe, with the connect database open, we took in close to 10,000 bugs. I don't remember the exact number, but it was closer to 10,000 than 5,000. Yes, you read that right. The problem is that realistically, the number of real customer bugs out of that 10,000 submitted was tiny. I'm talking fractionally tiny.

So what makes a bad bug. We got bugs that basically said "IE sucks". That was it. No more detail than that. Every bug like that, takes time for someone to look at, triage, resolve, close, and so forth. It's not a short process. For each bug that we outright close, it's probably about 3 minutes work.

Then there are the bugs that say something like "x does not work." Great, so the bug gets handed off to a developer or a tester and asked to see if they can repro the problem. They'll likely spend 10-15 minutes on it. If they can get a good repro back to triage it goes with comments. If they can't, it still goes back to triage, where someone will end up closing it.

Then there are the diamonds. The great bug reports. Someone who includes a HTML and CSS snippet, an screen shot from IE and a screen shot from another browser. In cases like these, triage looks at the bug, makes a decision on how serious the problem is, how many users it will affect to fix it, what the implications are to fix it, and then either assign it to a developer, or reject it.

But wait, there is still another category, and this one is the most trouble some. Duplicate bugs. Say Chris Beall files a bug, and then thacker files another bug that but because of the way Chris filed his bug, and thacker filed his bug, don't find each other. Well, now, we've got two bugs filed for the same issue. Now triage looks at those two bugs, and tries to figure out if they're the same. Most likely, they'll assign them to a tester or developer to see if they are or not.

So what is the solution for today and the next version of IE? There are people on the IE team who are very much opposed to opening connect again. Primarily because we can't handle the volume of feedback that you have to give. Outside of Windows, I'd be willing to guess we've got the largest user base of ANY application. I think to not reopen it is not the best decision, but I completely understand the cost involved in reopening it.

I'm about to present a proposal to the IE management team (shh, don't tell them, I haven't told them yet ;)). Instead of opening Connect to every single web developer and web designer in the world, we open it to a select group of people. Those who have proven themselves to file good bugs and understand the problems that we've faced in the past. They need to be completely connected to the web world, and know and understand that the bugs we're looking at can't just be "IE SUCKZ!!!!111OMGBBQ!!!!111!!!1!" (and yes, we did get a bug similar to that). We need to find a way to make them accessible to you, so that you can tell them about your bugs, and they can look at it.

And finally, and I think more importantly, we need to find a way to make our bug tracking system more transparent to you. Let you know if we know about a particular bug, and if we're going to fix it in the next version, if we're punting it, or what not. I don't know today how we do this, but this is the thing that I'm trying to find the answer to today.

This post turned into one MUCH longer than I was expecting. Hopefully I'm coherent enough to have made some things clear and explained the difficulties faced by the IE team, and why the Connect database isn't open today. We need to find a good solution that works for all of us soon, and I'm working on it.

IE6 VPC & IE7 VPC

PeteL — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 23:44:00 GMT

We've seen a few reports of people having problems with the recently released IE6 VPC image. At first I thought it was because people were running the image on non-Microsoft virtualization software, which causes the image to be invalidated. But, I got a report internally from someone who confirmed they were running the VPC on Virual PC 2007, and sure enough.

Obviously, that's not the problem, and I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm going to spend a few hours this week trying to track it down, but the short answer I think it that I'll end up having to release a new image. Sucky, I know. But, I do have one peice of good news. I'm going to build two Windows XP images in parallel. One for IE6, and we're going to release an IE7 on Windows XP virutal PC image as well!

I suspect it'll take about 2 weeks to get it done. It takes me about 2 full days to build the image, shrink it down as much as possible and get it to a place where we can apply the time bombing, and then the time bombing process takes about 48-72 hours. After that, there is about another hour to two worth of work to do, and the upload process starts.

I'll get a post up here and on the IE blog once it's done, but look for something mid to late next week.

IE6 VPC Refresh

PeteL — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:20:21 GMT

Cross-posted from the IE Blog

In my original blog post about releasing the IE6 Virtual PC Image, we mentioned that it would expire on April 1st, 2007 (no, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke), and that we’d be releasing a new VPC image to replace it sometime in March. Well, I’m happy to report that I propped the new VHD up on Monday morning. You can download the image here. Take note that a free download of Virtual PC 2007 is now available, replacing VPC2004.

I didn’t make any major changes to the image other than adding the latest security updates. I also managed to reduce the download size to just under 400 megs, shaving off almost 100 megs from the previous image size. This image is time-bombed to July 23^rd , but we will continue to release these images as long as they are needed. They are time-bombed because you get them for free. If you want images without time-bombs, an MSDN subscription is the way to go.

We have learned some interesting things about the distribution process in a virtual machine environment. One is that we currently don't have a way for WGA to work inside this evaluation virtual machine because the process used to create a virtual machine involves de-activation of the key used in the VM. We are thinking about ways to fix this in the future but it's not as easy to do with Windows XP as it wasn't designed to support distribution like this. If there are specific applications or things you cannot install, follow up in the comments, and we'll see how we can address that for future versions.

We did do some investigation of shipping VHD’s with IE5.5, or earlier, but decided that due to the low browser usage share (less than 1% total usage for all IE versions before 6), it wasn’t going to be beneficial for enough developers and designers.

Keep an eye open in July for the next image drop!

IE7 Slow To Load Site Sometimes? A Fix!

PeteL — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:58:28 GMT

Every once in a while, when I've typed "blogs.msdn.com/petel" into my address bar, I find IE7 a little slow to load the site. Especially after I've gotten home and am no longer on the corporate network. As it turns out, Vista (and Windows XP), is actually checking my local network connections (mapped drives, etc) for a machine named blogs.msdn.com before it goes out to the internet to find the site.

The easy work around for this, always type http:// before your web request, and it'll always use http instead of checking for local file system, networked file systems and such!