March, 2011

Hotmail just got even better when run on IE9. Today, Hotmail added email notifications to its pinned site that displays the number of new messages directly in the taskbar . It’s an easy way to keep an eye on new updates with a glance. Pin Hotmail to your taskbar to start seeing this in action! Hotmail also gives you quick access to mail tasks from the jumplist. Right-click on the Hotmail icon to jump to a task like send mail: Now when you pin Hotmail to the taskbar...

Power consumption is an important consideration in building a modern browser and one objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to responsibly lead the industry in power requirements. The more efficiently a browser uses power the longer the battery will last in a mobile device, the lower the electricity costs, and the smaller the environment impact. While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are...

Internet Explorer 9 standards document mode enables the same markup and same script to work across browsers. You should use Internet Explorer 9 standards document mode to take advantage of new features in the ECMAScript, Fifth Edition standard (ES5) and IE9’s enhanced DOM programmability . However, to maintain fidelity with older versions of IE, the JavaScript functionality supported in IE9’s Quirks mode, IE7 standards mode, and IE8 standards mode differs somewhat from IE9 standards...

The Add-on Performance Advisor helps you stay in control of your browsing experience with add-ons. Since we introduced this feature in IE9 Beta, the positive and constructive feedback you provided enabled us to adjust the functionality while maintaining its original goals. You can experience these changes in action with the final release of IE9 . In this post, we review the issues users face today with add-on performance and the benefits offered with this feature. We describe...

With the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) beta in September we introduced IE9's new application reputation feature and more recently we provided a summary of how this fits into the overall layered approach to security . With the final release of IE9 now available, we want to share some additional information about application reputation, clarify how code signing impacts the IE experience, and reiterate industry best practices that application developers should consider. SmartScreen...

We wrote about the critical role your feedback plays in helping us refine Internet Explorer. We also described some of the user experience changes in IE9 Release Candidate that were inspired by that feedback. With this post, we provide a deeper insight into our design process by looking at a tab pinning improvement we shipped in the IE9 Release Candidate. Pin Sites via Tab Drag The ability to pin a site is a new feature in IE9. People can get quick access to their ...

Sometimes Web standards can converge quickly . The W3C standard for Navigation Timing started about six months ago in the newly chartered Web Performance Working Group . The working group’s objective is to provide interoperable features that enable developers to measure and improve performance of their Web applications. Navigation Timing is the first specification from this this W3C working group, and in only six months went from a Working Draft to Candidate Recommendation . The community and...

As we have blogged about many times , one of our top goals for IE9 is enabling developers to utilize the same markup and code (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) across all modern browsers. Part of enabling the same markup means changing existing Web platform behavior for standards-compliance and interoperability. We have published and updated the list of changes to the platform in the IE9 Guide for Developers along with platform previews so that developers have an opportunity to try new...

The browser’s networking subsystem is a crucial component for delivering a high-performance Web experience. In today’s post, I’ll demonstrate this using some real-world measurements, showing that even in a “fast” network environment, the network time dominates the time spent in other subsystems that affect page load time. Next, I’ll provide a brief tutorial of how Web browsers use the network, and outline the improvements we’ve made in Internet Explorer 9...

Today IE9 can play HTML5 video in both the industry-standard H.264 format and the newer WebM format. With the WebM Project ’s release of WebM Components for IE9 (Preview) , Windows customers running IE9 can play WebM videos in Web pages. IE9 is the only browser today committed to supporting both formats directly. In the newly published Video Format Support demo at the IE Test Drive site, you can try out for yourself Web pages with both video formats on them in different browsers...

The final, consumer-ready Internet Explorer 9 is available for download starting at 9:00 PM PDT at www.BeautyOfTheWeb.com in 39 languages. With this set of browser releases, the best experience of the Web is on Windows. IE9 shows how your Web experience and browser are only as good as the operating system they run on: Fast . With IE9, the Web delivers a new level of performance by unlocking the power of the PC hardware through Windows. Clean . With IE9, consumers can keep...

In this blog post, we discuss why Microsoft strongly supports self-regulation, how the final version of IE9 will implement the Do Not Track User Preference as a secondary method, and why we will continue to provide features well beyond the minimum standards to keep consumers in control of their safety and privacy. Industry Complexity and Self-Regulation Microsoft has worked diligently in the area of online privacy and Web tracking protection to propose industry solutions and...

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a key aspect of HTML5, bringing W3C-standard DOM-based vector graphics to the Web. IE9 implements the core modules of SVG 1.1 (Second Edition) and does so in a fully hardware-accelerated manner, like the rest of IE9’s fully hardware-accelerated HTML5. We blogged about SVG in IE9 ( here and here ), our involvement in the W3C SVG Working Group ( here , here , here , and here ), and our attendance at SVG Open 2010 ( here and here ). ...

The Pinned Sites feature introduced in IE9 Beta is a great way to integrate your favorite sites into the Windows 7 user experience. Better still, there are five significant security benefits in creating and using Pinned Sites for secure applications like online banking. First , when you pin a site you trust to your taskbar, and get in the habit of using that pinned icon to launch your secure experience, you can avoid clicking on links in emails, reducing the likelihood of a phishing attack luring...

IE9’s download notification bar helps you focus on your browsing and keeps downloads out of your way. It streamlines the “quick download” scenarios which account for a majority of downloads. Overall, the IE9 file download experience offers: a streamlined end-to-end download flow, the ability to pause and resume downloads, improved trust and confidence using the SmartScreen Application Reputation service, and easy management of downloaded files with a simple history view. Responding to Feedback Over...

As Eric introduced in his post earlier this week, Internet Explorer offers layered defenses to protect against and mitigate each of three major classes of threats that browser users face when surfing the sometimes-hostile Web: Technological attacks designed to exploit the browser or operating system Web attacks designed to exploit vulnerabilities in Web sites Social engineering attacks against the user’s trust Today’s post discusses how IE8 and IE9 can help protect users from the third class of attacks...

With the IE9 final release just ahead , we want to recap the last year or so of blogging with an index to our posts. We’re organizing this index around the themes in the IE9 product as well as the blog posts: Releases & Updates: IE9 from an Early Look to Release Candidate Feedback & Voice: Engaging the Community Performance and Measurement: Building a Faster Browser to Enable a Faster Web The Platform, Web Standards, and Developers Safety & Privacy, and the Sometimes Hostile Web Consumer...

Internet Explorer 9 fully hardware-accelerates the entire Web platform. Different browsers take different approaches to hardware acceleration. These differences result in different levels of performance. Today we look at Santa’s Workshop , one of the entertaining Test Drive demos we released during the holiday season, and see how the different approaches to hardware acceleration benefit consumers and developers. Pack as Many Presents as Possible The goal of Santa’s Workshop is to pack as many presents...

Internet Explorer offers layered defenses to protect against and mitigate each of three major classes of threats that browser users face when surfing the sometimes-hostile Web: Technological attacks designed to exploit the browser or operating system Web attacks designed to exploit vulnerabilities in Web sites Social engineering attacks against the user’s trust Today’s post covers how browsers’ memory protections mitigate threats in the first class. Preventing Reliable Exploitation The goal of these...

Last week the jQuery team announced the release of jQuery 1.5.1 . This is a bug fix release to jQuery 1.5 that includes a particularly exciting note: “jQuery now supports Internet Explorer 9 as a top level browser.” This means all known issues with IE9 have been resolved and new issues will be resolved before future versions of jQuery are released. On behalf of the IE team, I want to thank the jQuery team and contributors for their efforts to support IE9 and for their continued work on an awesome...