IEBlog

We believe IE8 helps make browsing the web faster, easier, safer and more reliable. To help our users be more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE8 via Automatic Update (AU) and the Windows Update (WU) and Microsoft Update (MU) sites much like we did for IE7. We know that in a corporate environment, the IT organization will often want to delay the introduction of a new browser until they have tested compatibility with internal applications and sites.  We’ve done a lot of work in IE8 to maintain compatibility with sites designed for Internet Explorer 7, for example compatibility view and the compatibility meta tag.  However we know many IT organizations will still want to test the browser before it is deployed.  To help prevent users from installing IE8 through Automatic Update before compatibility testing has been completed, we are providing the IE8 Blocker Toolkit. This toolkit has no expiration date and can be configured either by running the registry file on the client machines or via Group Policy in domain joined environments. The Blocker Toolkit is available today from the Microsoft Download Center.

IE8 will be available for users on the following platforms:

• Windows Vista 32bit and 64bit,
• Windows XP SP2 and above,
• Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 SP2 and above

The IE8 update will be released as the highest priority update for each operating system. For Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, it will be listed as Important. For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the update will be listed as High Priority. Delivery of IE8 via AU will begin after we make IE8 available from the Microsoft Download Center. Of course, users can always decline to install IE8 through AU when it is offered. More information for IT Professionals about IE8 delivery via AU is available here.

If you previously used the IE7 Blocker toolkit to block IE7 from being offered as a high-priority update, you will need to run the IE8 version of the Blocker Toolkit to block IE8 from being offered via AU. There are different registry keys used to block or unblock automatic delivery of IE7 and IE8. If you configure the IE8 Blocker Toolkit setting to prevent users from installing IE8 via WU/AU, IE8 will not appear in the list of available high priority or important updates.  We believe this approach strikes a good balance by helping customers become more secure and letting organizations control when they are ready to deploy IE8 to their users.  Note: The IE8 Blocker toolkit will not block the final version of IE8 being offered to users who already have pre-released versions of IE8 installed on their machine.  Also, the IE8 Blocker toolkit will not prevent users from manually installing IE8 from the Microsoft Download Center.

Organizations that use an update management solution such as Windows Server Update Services or Systems Management Server 2003 do not need to deploy the Blocker Toolkit.  Windows Server Update Services and Systems Management Server 2003 allow organizations to fully manage deployment of updates released through WU and MU, including IE8.  For more information about the IE8 Blocker Toolkit, check out this link.

For those who are interested, here is what the AU experience will look like for IE8.

How the AU delivery will work

For Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 users

• AU will notify you when IE8 is ready to install. You will also be able to visit Windows Update or Microsoft Update sites and manually install IE8 update by performing an “Express” scan for high-priority updates.

• When Windows Update starts installing IE8, you will see the IE8 welcome screen as such:

To proceed with the installation, decide on whether or not you’d like to participate in our Customer Improvement Program and click Install. If you choose Ask me later, WU will re-offer IE8 to you during the next update scan. If you choose Don’t Install, WU will not offer IE8 to you again, and IE8 will appear as an optional item on Windows Update.

For Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 Users

• AU will notify you when IE8 is ready to install. You can click on the bubble to launch IE8 installation. You can also install IE8 from Windows Update manually by typing Windows Update in the command prompt and checking for updates.

• When Windows Update starts installing IE8, you will see the IE8 welcome screen:

To proceed with the installation, click Install. If you choose Ask me later, WU will re-offer IE8 to you during the next update scan. If you choose Don’t Install, WU will not offer IE8 to you again, and IE8 will appear as an optional item on Windows Update.

Note: The IE8 Welcome screens are still in draft form and are subject to change by the time IE8 is distributed via WU/AU.

If you configure the IE8 Blocker Toolkit setting to prevent users from installing IE8 via WU/AU, IE8 will not appear in the list of available high priority or important updates. We believe this approach strikes a good balance by helping customers become more secure and letting organizations control when they are ready to deploy IE8 to their users.

Thanks,
Jane Maliouta
Program Manager

Cheers!
The IE Team

After a great turnout this year, we are continuing our monthly online Expert Zone chats with the IE Team in 2009. Here is our schedule for the first half of next year:

January 22^nd

February 19^th

March 19^th

April 23^rd

May 21^st

June 18^th

 

All our chats start at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC.  These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered and hear from members of the IE product team.  In case you miss the chat, a transcript will be published afterward and available online. Previous chat transcripts can be found here.

See you in the new year!

Allison Burnett
Program Manager

Internet Explorer is releasing an out-of-band update available via Windows Update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update. I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already to ensure that you receive the latest updates for all Microsoft products.

This update addresses one remote code execution vulnerability. The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer validates data binding parameters and handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition.  For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078
• Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 960714

This security update is rated Critical for all released versions of Internet Explorer.

I encourage everybody to download this security update and other non-IE security updates via Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Windows users are also strongly encouraged to configure their systems for automatic updates to keep their systems current with the latest updates from Microsoft.

Terry McCoy
Program Manager
Internet Explorer Security

As publishing and layout standards for web documents, HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 define relatively few user experience requirements for browsers. One of them, however, mandates the ability for end users to switch among a set of mutually exclusive document styles defined by the author.  This feature is known as alternate style sheets. Significantly, the end user must also be able to turn off all styling.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer did not expose this feature in the user interface until IE8 Beta 2.

The Style Menu

If you navigate to the W3C’s alternate style sheets example page, your Page-Style menu will look like the following:

This new menu lets you turn off all CSS in the page through the No Style option, but you can also select any of the styles defined by the author of this page. 

Under The Hood

If we look at the page source, the content of the head element specifies the relationship between the style names in the menu and the URIs of the corresponding external style sheets:

         <link rel="alternate stylesheet" title="Gold (left, fixed) + navbar" href="../../threepart-left-f.css">
         <link rel="alternate stylesheet"title="Gold (right, fixed)" href="../../threepart-nobanner-f.css">
         <link rel="alternate stylesheet"title="Gold (left, fixed)" href="../../threepart-left-nobanner-f.css">

Note that a style name can map to as many style sheets as necessary. The browser will then present the specified style names to the user, allowing him to switch to his preferred style. Markup details for web authors are available in section 14.3.1 of HTML 4.01. The DOM reflects the current user selection through the disabled property of the styleSheet objects in document.styleSheets, while the isAlternate and isPrefAlternate properties reflect the author’s style definitions in the document head.

Supporting User Choice

In part due to IE’s historical lack of user interface for alternate stylesheets, this feature has seen very limited use on the web even as continued interest led to the design of many workarounds, both client-side and server-side. A few corporate sites use it e.g. Citibank Japan to select top-level menu fonts. The standard design itself remains incomplete: for instance, the state and persistence of the user’s style selection as he navigates around a web site is undefined.

While the ability to switch or turn off styling is a logical outcome of the separation of style and content, end-user style control has been in practice limited to those sufficiently CSS-savvy to edit their favorite browser’s user style sheet. With alternate style sheets now supported by all major browsers, web site designers can let users customize their web experience further.

Sylvain Galineau
Program Manager

Hi, my name is JP Gonzalez-Castellan and I’m the Accessibility Program Manager for IE8. The IE team has been working towards making IE8 the most accessible browser possible, and we wanted to detail some of the work we’ve done toward this end. In this post I will provide you with some background on Accessibility, I’ll cover new UI features (Caret Browsing, Find on Page, Adaptive Zoom, High DPI, etc) and also platform features (support for ARIA, support for IAccessibleEx, and support for additional WinEvents) that improve the Accessibility of the browser.

Q: What percentage of users benefit when you make software accessible?

A: One hundred percent.

When you improve the Accessibility of software, or any product for that matter, you are also improving the Usability of the product. Usability is defined by the International Organization for Standards as the:

“extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals effectively, efficiently and with satisfaction”

This is ultimately what we all want for the things we create. Accessibility ensures that a webpage is effective, efficient, and satisfying for user with disabilities. This allows for all users to reap the benefits. My favorite example to illustrate this is access ramps for wheelchairs. After the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, public gathering places like airports added wheelchair ramps. Airports soon noticed that mothers with baby strollers and passengers with rolling suitcases were using the ramps too, since it was easier than picking up a stroller or a suitcase over the ledge. In much the same way, when you make software more accessible, everybody wins.

An example closer to the software realm is keyboard usage. Some users can’t use a mouse, and the keyboard is their sole input device. However, being able to perform common mouse tasks entirely with a keyboard not only benefits users who can’t use a mouse, but also users who can use a mouse but choose not to; users may find keyboard shortcuts to be a much faster or more efficient way to interact with software.

New UI features that improve the experience for low mobility and low vision users

IE8 adds a number of new features that are particularly helpful to low mobility users - those users who prefer to use the keyboard, or devices that interact with the keyboard, over the mouse or other pointing devices. Features like the new Caret Browsing feature, Accelerators, Web Slices and revamped Find on Page help these users particularly, who also benefit when we reduce the number of steps to complete specific tasks. Low vision users will find the new Adaptive Zoom and High DPI support especially useful.

Caret Browsing

Caret Browsing is a new feature that allows users to navigate a webpage using a moveable cursor on the screen and the keyboard. Users can select and copy text down to a single character using only the keyboard. Other content types, like tables or images, can also be selected and copied.

Moving the cursor within the text of a webpage is similar to moving the cursor within the text of a Word document. Holding the shift key down and pressing the arrow keys selects text. Pressing F7 turns Caret Browsing on or off. It can be enabled on a per tab basis or for all tabs and windows.

Many users use the keyboard instead of the mouse because they find it to be faster for certain tasks. Users are now able to select a word, bring up Accelerators through the context menu key on their keyboards ; (which sits between the right Alt and right Ctrl keys), select Translate with Windows Live (or any other Accelerator), and see its meaning in Spanish without ever taking their hands off the keyboard.

Accelerators, Web Slices and Find on Page

You are probably already familiar with IE8’s Accelerators, Web Slices and the improved Find on Page feature. I’m not going to cover them again in detail, but it’s important to note how they each make the browser more accessible.

Accelerators simplify the common task of copying, navigating, and pasting into a single action. Keyboard only users can save a lot of time and keystrokes.

Web Slices bring your favorite pieces of the web with you. Web Slices are portions of a webpage that you can subscribe to and view updates directly from the Favorites Bar. This means that instead of having to open a new tab and having to navigate to the same page every so often to see if it has been updated, you can stick to your regular browsing until you get notified via your Favorites Bar that the page has been updated. This also saves a lot of time and keystrokes for blind users who can only use the keyboard.

With the revamped Find on Page feature you no longer get a dialog hovering over your page. Now you get the Find on Page toolbar below your tabs. As soon as you start typing in the Find textbox, IE starts highlighting the matches on the page with a yellow background and scrolls the page to your first match. This saves a lot of keystrokes since you do not have to click search to see if your term is on the page. IE also displays on the toolbar the number of matches found. The new yellow background highlighting makes it easier for low vision users to quickly find the term on the page; while having a docked toolbar below the tabs takes up less screen real estate than a floating dialog. Screen real estate becomes more important when you start increasing the zoom factor of your monitor, which many low vision users do.

The key takeaway is that features that can be simplified for everyday tasks are beneficial for keyboard users, and as an added bonus, beneficial for the Accessibility community.

Adaptive Zoom and High DPI

The new support for Adaptive Zoom and High DPI has already been covered in depth on the IE blog and on MSDN, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Most low vision users benefit from an enlarged UI (user interface). In Windows Vista the Windows DPI Scaling feature only scales up the operating system’s fonts and UI elements (menus, toolbars, buttons, etc) but now it will also scale up IE8’s fonts and UI elements. When scaling IE8 we use UI elements that are drawn with more pixels, resulting in a higher fidelity experience. Sometimes the size of the menus and toolbars of the browser is big enough, but the displayed content on the webpage is too small. By using the Adaptive Zoom control webpages can look bigger. Compared to IE 7, in IE8 we do not just make all the content in the page bigger, but we actually redraw the page and adjust the content to avoid displaying horizontal scroll bars. This makes it easier to browse zoomed pages since you only need to scroll up and down, and not also left and right.

From the beginning the target audience for this feature was low vision users; however this feature is also a great example of how making something more accessible also makes it more usable. I find myself using this feature all the time at home. I have my PC connected to my TV. I can normally sit 10 feet from the TV and enjoy all my shows without a problem. However when I try to use my TV as a PC monitor, I find that I can’t read much of the content when I’m 10 feet away. It is then that I use the Adaptive Zoom to make all the pages look bigger, so I can read them from my couch. Even though I might not be considered a low vision user, I find this feature extremely useful. In previous releases the horizontal scrollbar would show up all the time and I had to use my mouse to move the horizontal scroll bar left and right, besides the usual vertical scrolling. Now I’m able to do all my browsing just with vertical scrolling.

For more information, especially for developers who want to take advantage of High DPI in their webpages and WebOCs, please see: Making the Web Bigger

New Platform features that improve the experience for low vision and visually impaired users

In this section I’m going to cover the new support for ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications), the IAccessibleEx interface, and the support for additional WinEvents for DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and how each of them affect the end-user experience.

Depending on the level of low vision some users require specialized 3^rd party assistive technologies (ATs) to interact with computers, such as screen magnifiers; while others can get along with features and tools shipped with the product and the operating system (Adaptive Zoom, High DPI support). Visually impaired users also use a type of AT called screen readers. A screen reader is a software assistive technology that ‘reads the screen out’ to the user. As we all know a webpage is more than a string of words and pictures. The way those words and pictures are laid out on the page, the way they interact with the controls around them, is not as easily read out loud as the text in a book. The HTML on a webpage is useful data for screen readers, but sometimes the HTML is not enough to programmatically convey to ATs all the information and interactions a webpage has. Here is where the new support for ARIA comes into place to markup the page with additional information, while, as we will see later, the IAccessibleEx implementation exposes this information to ATs. To complement it all ATs can now subscribe to 4 new WinEvents that get triggered by dynamic changing pages.

ARIA Support

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) defines ARIA as a syntax for making dynamic web content and custom UI (user interface) accessible. IE8 recognizes the ARIA role, state, and property information and exposes it to ATs, which in turn can use the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) and/or Microsoft UI Automation implementations to retrieve the information. Instead of building separate simplified Web pages for Accessibility, you can use ARIA to mark up your rich Web applications with roles, states and properties. For example, to match the behavior you created through a script, you can define a div element as a button, checkbox, or another ARIA role.

ARIA syntax is a great mechanism to use to unlock your dynamic, rich Web applications for everyone. Today Web pages with dynamic content and custom UI controls (such as TreeView controls) do the best they can to be accessible by reusing existing HTML controls. For example, custom TreeView controls are made accessible by defining each item as an HTML list element. This approach can add complexity to the code, make it more difficult to implement, and prevent all users from getting the same rich behavior. With ARIA you can markup your custom TreeView control with tree and treeitem ARIA roles.

From the early stages of IE8 we’ve worked closely with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative group and Assistive Technology Vendors (ATVs). During the last year we were happy to hear that more browsers have pledged support for ARIA in their future releases; while at the same time screen readers continue to expand their support for ARIA. Here you can find the list of ARIA roles, states and properties supported in IE8.

Support for IAccessibleEx

When IE8 recognizes ARIA information on elements, it exposes more information for these elements through the MSAA implementations, than HTML alone. However not all ARIA roles, states and properties can be mapped directly to MSAA’s Accessibility roles and properties. This is because ARIA definitions are different from MSAA definitions, and the ARIA scope is bigger than MSAA’s. The UI Automation Community Promise Specification will provide you with more background on the IAccessibleEx interface. This interface extends IE8’s MSAA implementation and allows richer information to be exposed and retrieved using Microsoft UI Automation properties and control patterns. This guarantees that all of the ARIA information can be made available to ATs (Assistive Technologies) through Accessibility APIs. Here you can find IE8’s mappings for ARIA to MSAA and to UI Automation.

ATs have supported the MSAA APIs for many years now, but they are starting to add support for UI Automation, including the IAccessibleEx interface. If an AT doesn’t support UI Automation, then it won’t be able to get some of the ARIA information from the Accessibility tree; since the tree exposes through UI Automation what it can’t expose through MSAA. As a fallback, ATs are able to parse the DOM (Document Object Model) directly and extract the ARIA information themselves. This is a practice we are discouraging, since ATs constantly accessing the DOM causes performance and security issues. This tutorial will get you started with code samples to retrieve information from IE8’ Accessibility tree through UI Automation.

New supported WinEvents for DHTML

Due to the ever increasing dynamic nature of webpages, we’ve added support for new WinEvents to notify ATs when the content of a page changes dynamically. This way ATs can keep their users more in sync with the state of the page they are browsing. For example, a webmail client provides potential contact names when the user starts typing the first letters of an email address. As soon as those contact names are exposed we fire EVENT_OBJECT_REORDER so the AT becomes aware of the new options and can inform the user that those names are available for selection. The work item for ATs is to listen for these events and decide how they want to relay the information to their users.

The following are the 4 new events we want to encourage ATs to start listening for, with links to more information on what triggers each of these events:

• EVENT_OBJECT_REORDER
• EVENT_OBJECT_STATECHANGE
• EVENT_OBJECT_LOCATIONCHANGE
• EVENT_OBJECT_VALUECHANGE

Conclusion

We’ve made key Accessibility investments both in the UI and the platform during the IE8 development cycle. If you are an end-user that doesn’t use ATs, you probably discovered a couple of new features that will come handy. You can now try those features you had heard about but didn’t know you could benefit from using them - like browsing the web from your couch using the Adaptive Zoom at 150%, or browsing in High Contrast mode to keep your eyes more relaxed, or using Caret Browsing to access Accelerators entirely through the keyboard. If you use ATs to browse the web, then we also encourage you to try IE8 out and share your experiences with us.

If you are a web developer we encourage you to mark up your pages with ARIA and let us know how it improves your web applications’ Accessibility. (Also let us know how the learning process went based on the documentation available on the internet.) Try out our new Adaptive Zoom on your web sites; to further improve your site’s user experience with Zoom, try Saloni’s suggestions in the Adaptive Zoom blog post. If you are an assistive technology vendor let us know if the four new WinEvents worked the way you expected them to. Let us know if you were able to expose Accelerator and Web Slices to your users. Last but not least, let us know if you were able to get started with your support for UI Automation through the tutorial and the UI Automation Community Promise Specification previously provided.

JP Gonzalez-Castellan
Program Manager

The IE Cumulative Security Update for December 2008 is now available via Windows Update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update. I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already to ensure that you receive the latest updates for all Microsoft products.

This update addresses four remote code execution vulnerabilities. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer validates parameters, handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition, and handles extra data when embedding objects in Web pages.  For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-073
• Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 9582158

This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01 and Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, running on Microsoft Windows 2000; Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP; and Internet Explorer 7. For Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows Server 2003, this security update is rated Moderate.  Beta versions of Internet Explorer are not vulnerable. 

IE security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released updates for each version of Internet Explorer.

I encourage everybody to download this security update and other non-IE security updates via Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Windows users are also strongly encouraged to configure their systems for automatic updates to keep their systems current with the latest updates from Microsoft.

Terry McCoy
Program Manager
Internet Explorer Security

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User Choice: Some Details and Screenshots

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Closing Thoughts

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

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

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

Scott Dickens
Program Manager

A few of the startups building browser Add-Ons have organized the first ever Add-On Con, to take place in Mountain View on Dec 11, 2008.  We thought it was such a cool idea that we decided to co-sponsor the event (Mozilla is the other sponsor).  We will be giving some sessions about extending Internet Explorer, and Mozilla and Google will be presenting about their respective web browsers.  Many companies with successful Add-Ons will be sharing their stories and experiences, so it’s a great education and networking event. 

Matt Crowley, Program Manager for Extensibility, will cover all of the extensibility options available in IE8.  I will be discussing the lessons learned porting Firefox extensions to IE.  

Come say hi to us if you’re attending!

If you can’t make it to Mountain View, or even if you can, be sure to check out Christian’s blog post, the IE developer center, and the IE forums for other great info about building add-ons.

Joshua Allen
Technical Evangelist

The announcement of IE8 Beta 2 started an important and public phase of the product development cycle getting broad public feedback. The team is providing detailed information and answering questions about the product in many different places. Now’s a good time to talk about what comes next.

Since the release of Beta 2, the team has been absorbed in the data we get from real people about the product. We have combed through instrumentation of over 20 million IE sessions and hundreds of hours of usability lab sessions. Together with IE MVPs, we have scrutinized thousands of threads from user forums and examined the issues that people are raising (not to mention all the times users opt to “Report a Webpage Problem…”). We have also spent hundreds of hours listening and answering questions in meetings with partners and other important organizations. We simply could not deliver IE8 the way our customers and developers want us to without all this information. We also received a lot of feedback about how we transitioned from the IE7 beta releases to the IE7 final release, and as a result, we want to be clear about the plan for IE8.

We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release. Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period. We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done. They should expect the final product to behave as this update does. We want them to test their sites and services with IE8, make any changes they feel are necessary for the best possible customer experience using IE8, and report any critical issues (e.g., issues impacting robustness, security, backwards compatibility, or completeness with respect to planned standards work). Our plan is to deliver the final product after listening for feedback about critical issues.

We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release. We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.

The call to action now for the technical community is to download beta 2 (if you haven’t already) and let us know about your experience. Next, please prepare for final testing with public update so you can let us know – quickly, loudly, and clearly – if you find absolutely critical issues with it before the release of the final product.

Thanks –

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

P.S. If you’re a developer, or service provider, or IT professional, how do you prepare for the final release of new software? Leave a comment – we’d like to know.

Join members of the Internet Explorer team for the last  Expert Zone chat  of 2008 this Thursday, November 13^th at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered by members of the IE product team.

Thank you to all who have attended the chats through the year! Look for us to start these chats up again in January 2009. If you can’t join us online, all chat transcripts are published here.

Kristen Kibble
Program Manager

P.S. Upcoming IE chat dates are posted here.

Edit: Refreshed the links in the post and adjusted the UTC time.

In preparation for the Professional Developers Conference, the IE team recently authored some articles for a special issue of Code Focus magazine.  The articles cover everything from cross-version compatibility to performance, and include new sample code. You can read the articles online at the following locations: Welcome to CoDe Focus for Internet Explorer 8! What’s New in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2? Making Your Web site Compatible Across Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer Introducing Compatibility View Create Your Own Web Slices Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 New Search Features in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Better AJAX Development with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 AJAX Performance Measurement Methodology for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Performance Improvements in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Reliability and Privacy with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Secure Coding with Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Internet Explorer 8 New Accessibility Features Or, if you’d prefer, you can also download the entire issue as a single PDF file.  Enjoy! Eric Lawrence Program Manager

Update 11:50 am - fixing a formating issue.

When Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 launched in March, I 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, I’m 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.

Tom Rubin
Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy

Design criteria such as standard compliance, performance, reliability and security framed the design of IE8 as whole, for new as well as existing features. As a result, CSS expressions are no longer supported in IE8 standards mode. This change was announced previously on the IE blog, however, this post will provide a few more details about that decision. The following FAQ will give a quick overview of the feature, the rationale behind our design decision and what it may mean for your own site.

What is a CSS expression ?

Also known as ‘Dynamic Properties’, this proprietary CSS extension was introduced in Internet Explorer 5. Long before JavaScript libraries such as jQuery or Dojo were conceived, it allowed web developers to dynamically bind script to the page through CSS selectors. As an example, the following CSS declaration updates the background color of certain page blocks depending on the time of day :

div.title { background-color: expression( (new Date()).getHours()%2 ? "#B8D4FF" : "#F08A00" ); }

Why end support for expressions ?

• To comply with standards
  • Expressions are proprietary to Internet Explorer and as such not interoperable.
  • A common use-case for expressions was to fix IE bugs or to emulate those CSS 2.1 features not yet supported by the browser, for example, min-width and max-width. We have not only worked hard to fix these bugs in IE8 but our new layout engine supports the missing features natively.
• To improve performance
  • Expressions evaluation has a high runtime cost; web performance experts like Steve Souders recommend avoiding them to improve front-end performance
• To reduce the browser attack surface
  • Because they expose a script execution context, CSS expressions constitute a possible script injection attack vector.

Are expressions still available in IE7 and Quirks mode ?

Yes. For backward compatibility, CSS expressions are still executed in Quirks and IE7 Strict modes. But starting with IE8 Beta 2, they are ignored in IE8 Standards mode.

Pages on my web site depend on CSS expressions.  How does this affect me ?

Thanks to IE8’s new layout engine, most expressions written to work around CSS 2.1 bugs and shortcomings should no longer be needed; we expect unsupported or incorrectly interpreted properties to work in a standard, interoperable way. For those expressions supporting more specific purposes, anything they do is inherently achievable using standard JavaScript, usually interoperably and at lower runtime costs. The specifics will of course depend on your application. Based on your feedback to this post, we may visit examples in future installments.

Ending support for expressions - a feature often used to fix the very issues we have worked hard to address in this release – helps make IE8 more standard, faster and more secure for our users.

Sylvain Galineau
Program Manager

The IE Cumulative Security Update for October 2008 is now available via Windows Update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update. I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already to ensure that you receive the latest updates for all Microsoft products.

This update addresses six vulnerabilities. The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition. For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

• Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-058
• Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 956390

This security update is rated Critical for all supported versions of Internet Explorer 6 and earlier. The security update is rated Important on Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista.  Beta versions of Internet Explorer are not vulnerable. 

IE security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released updates for each version of Internet Explorer.

I encourage everybody to download this security update and other non-IE security updates via Windows Update or Microsoft Update. Windows users are also strongly encouraged to configure their systems for automatic updates to keep their systems current with the latest updates from Microsoft.

Terry McCoy
Program Manager
Internet Explorer Security