April, 2011

With IE9 now released , we want you to serve IE the same markup as you do for other browsers, and make sure your site works great running in IE9 standards mode. We recently blogged about preparing your site for IE9 , and you can check out the Internet Explorer 9 Compatibility Cookbook for lists of changes that may impact your site or the Internet Explorer 9 Guide for Developers for a more complete list of what's changed. Today we are introducing a new resource that can help...

While most modern browsers now support hardware acceleration, the quality of implementations varies greatly between browsers. Hardware acceleration is more than just a checkmark. How a browser chooses to enable hardware acceleration has a direct impact on the performance and user experience of Web applications. To highlight the quality and performance differences in hardware acceleration, let's look closely at the Paintball test drive, released with IE 10 Platform Preview 1 . Paintball...

The final Internet Explorer 9 is now available for download in Japanese at www.beautyoftheweb.jp . With this release, IE9 is now available to download in 40 languages worldwide. Please visit our worldwide sites page to download Internet Explorer 9 in a language of your choice. —Swathi Ganapathi, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

Third-party software (such as add-ons ) causes many of the crashes you experience in IE. From an analysis of the error reports submitted during IE9 Beta, third-party code accounts for around 70% of all the crashes in IE. While we work hard to improve IE9’s reliability in-house, it’s equally important to ensure that the add-on ecosystem is compatible with IE9. This is a challenge faced by other browser vendors as well. Throughout the IE9 development cycle, we addressed the top...

HTML5 Canvas and SVG are two exciting graphics features introduced in IE9. Both were covered in sessions at last week’s MIX11 conference in Las Vegas (see Deep Dive Into HTML5 <canvas> and Modernizing Your Website: SVG Meets HTML5 ). These technologies can be used to address a range of graphic scenarios on the modern Web. With a lot of excitement around Canvas, there has been a tendency to ignore SVG, which, in many cases, is the better choice. Here I offer some thoughts on when to choose Canvas...

Over the past year, the structured feedback you provided while using the IE9 Platform Previews, Beta , and Release Candidate has been invaluable to helping us build the most reliable version of IE ever. The error reports that you send us via Windows Error Reporting and other methods help us fix the most impactful issues experienced by users. Your real-world browsing enables us to identify reliability problems in ways that cannot be matched by internal testing. In this post...

IE9 users significantly impacted the engineering process and product with high quality, high value feedback. It is for this reason that we are pleased to announce that the Internet Explorer Feedback Program will remain open on an ongoing basis. Users continue to be able to search, reactivate, or log new bugs on Connect , and the IE team will continue to investigate and resolve them. We would like to reiterate our deep appreciation and thanks for the time and effort our users invested...

IE9 is the most reliable browser available today in terms of hang resistance. In this post on IE reliability, we show how we engineered IE9’s hang resistance so that an unresponsive tab no longer affects the rest of the browser, similar to how IE is resistant to a crashing tab with Tab Isolation . We highlight new user experiences that help you recover from hangs caused by Web pages, long- running scripts or slow add-ons so that you can browse continuously without interruption. We also perform...

Support for ECMAScript 5, the updated standard of the language commonly known as JavaScript, is part of our promise to ensure that the same markup and same script works across browsers. Over the past few months we’ve devoted more than a few blog posts to the topic including: ECMAScript 5: Reusable code ECMAScript 5: Arrays Extras IE9’s Document Modes and JavaScript With the IE9 RC, we released another Test Drive demo to explore the full benefits of ECMAScript 5 available in IE9. This game of Texas...

We recently announced IE10 Platform Preview 1 . Aside from some exciting new features , this platform preview also includes the new IE10 user-agent string : Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) Overall this represents a natural evolution of the IE9 user-agent string with only two changes: The value of the “MSIE” token is now “10.0” The value of the “Trident” token is now “6.0” Also, Compatibility View still maps to IE7...

The first platform preview of IE10 contains many new CSS3 features all developed as implementations of evolving Web standards. In this post, we’ll look at three of those CSS features— CSS3 Grid Layout , Flexible Box Layout , and Multi-column Layout . CSS Grid Layout and Flexible Box Layout both help developers create layouts for complex Web applications and Web sites. Multi-column is designed to help developers create advanced text layouts for improved readability on the Web. These three...

The April 2011 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves four privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on Windows clients; and Moderate for Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on Windows servers. Internet Explorer 9 is not affected...

IE10 Platform Preview 1, available for download today is the first step in delivering the next wave of progress in native HTML5 support. Web sites and HTML5 run best when they run natively, on a browser optimized for the operating system on your device. We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best Web experience on Windows. IE10 continues on IE9’s path, directly using what Windows provides and avoiding abstractions, layers...

Over the past year, Internet Explorer 9 went from a technology platform preview to final release for millions of users. Before IE9 beta, our opt-in telemetry data showed IE9 running on a relatively small number of high-end GPUs. Within two weeks after beta release, IE9 was running on nearly every kind of GPU in the world—from expensive and fast desktop GPUs to power-sipping netbook GPUs. In this post we talk about our approach to ensuring IE9 is using the GPU across a broad range of PCs, and what...

Throughout IE9, we have written about how users and developers expect browsers to be compatible with the sites they use every day. This blog post covers a few ways we measure and ensure compatibility with the Web and how your feedback made a difference . Measuring compatibility with the Web We measure Web compatibility through many different mechanisms. These include: Customer feedback: Most important, we listen and act on feedback from the community. With 33...