IEBlog

Give Beta Feedback Link

ieblog — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 14:47:00 GMT

Hi all,

I just wanted to point out that we have also included an entry called 'Give Beta Feedback' under the Tools menu in the command bar that directs you to a webpage with the list of all the ways mentioned in Al’s feedback post of getting information back to us about Beta 2.

Check it out!!

- Uche

A New IE Add-on Site

ieblog — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 15:25:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Tina Duff one of the IE Program Managers focused on improving the customer experience around IE - including the IE add-on web site. It sounds simple, but this means ensuring that wherever IE is talked about on Microsoft.com, it’s technically correct, easy to navigate, and provides the information customers want. We quickly realized that we should do a better job making all the great add-ons to IE that developers have created easier to find and download. Thus the new IE add-on site was born…

We’re excited to announce our new site at www.ieaddons.com. The site has two objectives: to make it easier for users to find valuable add-ons and to promote our partners who develop add-ons. On the new site we partnered with CNET to compile an extensive list of add-ons that make browsing with IE more productive, fun and safe. At the same time, we’ve worked to streamline the search and download process, added web feeds for the most popular and newest add-ons, and included editorial and user reviews to provide as much feedback to you as possible before you install an add-on. Customers can access the add-on site from the “Tools” menu and from the “Manage Add-ons” interface.

Products on the site either work directly with Internet Explorer 6 or 7, or use the IE platform, and have to meet the CNET Software Submission Requirements and Adware and Spyware Policy before being posted. We also welcome users, editors and industry specialists to write and post reviews for each add-on, and report problem software.

If you’re a developer it’s really easy to submit your Add-on, just follow the instructions below:

How to Submit an Add-on

You can have your add-on included by submitting it through the Internet Explorer Add-on site and you no longer have to be a member of the Microsoft Partner program to be included. You’ll also have the ability to get feedback from users that you can use to gain insight on what is working and what can be improved with your product. Here is the information you need to submit your add-on for review.

Getting Started:

Learn more about the options available for listing your package. Read the Product Information Requirements, Software Submission Requirements and Adware and Spyware Policy for information on the types of products that are eligible for inclusion on the IE Add-on site.
Go to http://ieaddons.upload.com to begin the submission process. If you already have an account with upload.com you can log in with that information.

We think the add-on site is pretty cool whether you’re a user or a developer - it’s a lot easier to use. Let us know what you think and which add-ons you think are priceless.

- Tina

Feedback and Support for IE7 Beta 2

ieblog — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 01:10:00 GMT

Hi, this is Al and I wanted to talk about feedback and support for Beta 2 of IE7 now that it is available.

There are two main avenues for feedback for Beta 2, which are newsgroups and the Internet Explorer Feedback site.

Internet Explorer Feedback

As I posted about on March 24, we have a site live to collect bug reports and product suggestions for future versions of IE. I'll have a blog post soon about how that is going and top issues but the site is especially important for Beta 2. The issues that are logged there are triaged (mostly by me) and sent over to the main groups of IE developers, program managers, and testers to work on as bugs. This is less immediately interactive than the newsgroups since it isn't focused on discussion but other users can comment on bugs, validate that they have seen them as well, and offer workarounds for issues if they have found one.

If you have a bug to report, this is the preferred method of letting the IE team know about it. Depending on how many bugs are entered for Beta 2, it may take a little while to work our way through issues but everything that is reported on the site is reviewed by me or someone working with me. Feedback is given to the IE feature teams who own features in IE as bugs to work on if it passes the most basic of criteria (i.e. it has reproduction steps, is actually a bug and not just a general comment, and has specific information to identify the issue).

In order to take part in the Internet Explorer Feedback site, if you are new, you need to visit the Microsoft Connect site directly and sign up for Internet Explorer Feedback in the list of available programs. This requires a Passport account but once you have joined the program, you can go directly to the program page at https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=136.

I encourage people to read the "Best Practices for Bug Reporting in Internet Explorer" document that I wrote for the site. This will help your issues get addressed more quickly and helps make sure that logged bugs have all of the information that we need. There have been some issues with bugs that are difficult to reproduce or narrow down and the best practices help address that.

Previously, we had an e-mail address as well to gather feedback as well. This was IETell@microsoft.com. This has been retired in favor of the Feedback site because bugs entered on the site go into our general bug system which allows team members to work on them as we would do for any bug. The process of turning e-mail into bug reports takes a bit more time and work so we want to encourage people to use the IE Feedback site. The e-mail address is not going to be deleted before we release IE7 but we won't be highlighting it anymore and will be focusing on the incoming bugs from the site.

Newsgroups

If you want to chat with other users of Beta 2, see what kinds of issues that people have run into and how they worked around them, the microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general newsgroup is probably the best place to do so. This is much more interactive then other options since any and everyone can post and reply to anything brought up on the site. You can go to it via either through a newsgroup reader or through the Microsoft Discussion Groups site for web access.

In addition to these two options for feedback, IE7 Beta 2 will also have support available. I've brought Bryan Chee over from our support group to tell us about it.

Hi, this is Bryan and I’m the Supportability Program Manager for the IE team. Starting with Beta 2, we’ll be having beta phone support for consumer IE7 Beta users. Basically, support will be limited to help out our customers in a non-domain environment with their IE7 beta issues. So if you have questions or issues that are more developer, enterprise, or business related such as IEAK issues, group policy changes, or coding CSS pages for IE7, then it’ll be out of scope for the help we can provide on this support line.

It’s going to be a best effort level of support which means we’ll help you as best we can. We may not be able to solve every problem that comes through. So please, don’t try to play “stump the tech” if you don’t really need help. Try to leverage the existing online resources (newsgroups, FAQ, and release notes) when you can, so we can keep the phones open to help out those people who really need it.

Phone support will start at 5am PST on Tuesday April 25^th.

Support number: 1-866-876-4926

Hours of operation:
Monday-Friday 5 am - 9 pm Pacific Standard Time
Saturday-Sunday 6 am - 3 pm Pacific Standard Time

I hope that everyone enjoys the second beta of IE7.

- Al Billings and Bryan Chee

Update: The phone support is for customers in North America in English. We are not able to offer support in other regions or languages through the support number at this time. This wasn't made clear here before so I wanted to give everyone an update on this. - Al

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 (and more) Available

ieblog — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 01:05:00 GMT

This evening we released IE7 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie. This release is not the preview or the update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Simply: please try it.

We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability data (yes, we do analyze the information that comes when you click “Send Error Report”), and user experience feedback. People on the team will post additional details about changes over the next few days.

For those of you outside the United States, we will release German, Finnish, Arabic, and Japanese versions over the next three weeks.

This beta is another step to our goal of delivering a safer and easier browsing experience when we release the final IE7 product in the second half of this year. I’m looking forward to reading the feedback - positive and negative - as it comes in. Beyond consumers, I encourage developers, web developers, designers, and IT Pros to use Readiness Toolkit to deliver the best possible experience to end users in IE7.

For this Beta 2 release, we’re taking the extra step of offering no-charge phone support to consumers in North America, Germany and Japan. We’re offering phone support to encourage people who usually shy away from beta software to try IE7 Beta 2. We believe that IE7 - even at this beta stage - is a significant improvement and we want as many people as possible to try it and use it. IE7 is feature complete and has been through significant compatibility and reliability testing. People (especially technology enthusiasts) will have a good experience with it.

What’s next? Windows Vista Beta 2, and then Beta 3 of IE7, release candidates, and then a final release before end of year.

Thanks,

Dean

P.S. Please remember to uninstall any previous IE7 builds before installing this one: Control Panel, Add / Remove Programs, Show Updates, scroll to the bottom.

Windows Vista’s RFC-compliant TLS Extensions – Can your server handle them?

ieblog — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 15:41:00 GMT

Back in October, we blogged about some of the HTTPS improvements we’re making to IE7. At the time, we mentioned that we have encountered some HTTPS servers which claim to support TLS, but violate the RFC and “hang up” when extensions are received during the HTTPS handshake process. On Wednesday, Windows Networking GPM Billy Anders posted to the Windows Networking team blog, explaining why buggy TLS servers will result in connection failures when Windows Vista clients send TLS extensions.

The IE site-compatibility team will be proactively contacting the few major web sites who are running broken TLS implementations, but please be sure to try out your own secure sites using the upcoming Windows Vista Beta 2. If you cannot connect to the site by default, but successfully connect after you uncheck “Use TLS 1.0” in Tools | Internet Options | Advanced, please contact the manufacturer of your web server software about the availability of a fix for their TLS implementation.

- Eric Lawrence

IE Chat Transcript Online

ieblog — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:40:00 GMT

The transcript from yesterday's IE chat is now available online. The chat was a lot of fun and donuts kept us going as we answered more than 120 questions in the hour available. In the photograph you can see from left to right Peter Gurevich, Amy P (hiding behind Peter), Chris Wilson, Max Stevens, Uche Enuha and Cyra Richardson with donuts in the center of the table as they all type answers to questions at a furious pace.

There's also a news article covering some of the answers in the chat at http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3598941 where they spelt my name incorrectly as Massey rather than Massy but that's OK. :-)

Watch the chat schedule at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/default.mspx for upcoming chats. We typically hold the IE chats on the second Thursday of every month. We might have May's chat in the afternoon rather than the morning pacific time to allow other time zones an opportunity to participate.

Thanks

- Dave

IE ActiveX Update in April Security Update

ieblog — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:13:00 GMT

Just a notice that the April Security Update for IE also contains a non-security change to the handling of ActiveX controls, as we’ve previously mentioned. Again, due to the nature of this topic, we are not taking comments on this post.

- Tony Chor

IE April 2006 Security Update is now available

ieblog — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 16:12:00 GMT

The IE April 2006 security update is now available! This security update is now available via Windows Update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates available via the new Microsoft Update. I would encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already.

This update addresses 10 security issues: 8 remote code execution vulnerabilities, one information disclosure vulnerability and one spoofing vulnerability. For more information on the contents of this update:

Microsoft Knowledge Base article: MS06-013 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (KB# 912812)

Details on the vulnerabilities and workarounds can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS06-013.mspx.

This is a “Critical” update and affects all supported IE configurations from IE5.01 to IE6 for XPSP2 and IE6 for Server 2003 Service Pack 1. All IE security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released patches for each version of IE. Security Updates for IE7 Beta 1 users on XPSP2 and Vista February CTP are not available today, but will be available on Windows Update within the next two weeks. I will update the blog when these are available. 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 turn on automatic updates for their systems to download updates more easily.

- Charles Watanabe

Reminder: Windows 98, 98SE, and ME are expiring soon!

ieblog — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:02:00 GMT

Hey everyone, Christopher here with another in a string of Windows Lifecycle reminders.

Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Millennium are due to expire after July 11^th of this year. Please read this posted article, which contains all the details about the timing and implications of the change.

All Windows 98/SE/ME users are encouraged to upgrade to a supported version of Windows (such as Windows XP SP2).

Thanks,

- Christopher Vaughan

April Chat with IE Team

ieblog — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 15:50:00 GMT

Members of the IE team will be online for an Expert Zone chat this coming Thursday April 13^th at 10:00AM PST. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered and hear from members of the IE product team. A transcript will be published after the chat and transcripts of other recent chats are available.

These chats are a lot of fun as we all type furiously to keep pace with the questions being asked. Please join us for the chat if you can.

Thanks,
- Dave

Time, Time, Time, see what’s become of me...

ieblog — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 19:36:00 GMT

Hello again. This is Peter Gurevich, Program Manager for all things rendering and display related on IE. How are all of you enjoying the IE7 Beta 2 preview refresh?

I have been thinking a lot lately about the nature of Time. Now before we launch off into some big Physics discussion (which would be fun) I mean HTML +Time. I want to use this blog post as an opportunity for all of you to discuss and provide feedback on how you use it in your sites.

How do you currently use HTML + TIME? Have you seen the Introduction to HTML+TIME article? What do you think is the coolest feature? What are your usage patterns? Can you point me to your sites or other sites that you know of that use HTML + TIME? Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

So, don’t be shy, Lets hear it. (But please keep the input related to HTML + TIME)

- Peter

Page Zoom now supports horizontal scrolling with the mouse wheel

ieblog — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:20:00 GMT

Hey there, Peter here. I am really excited to tell you about the new horizontal scrolling feature in the Beta2 preview refresh as well as other enhancements we are working on for Page Zoom.

We have received a lot of great comments and feedback from our customers about Page zoom and number of great suggestions. Thanks, we really appreciate it. We are working on how we can improve the Zooming of background images as well as how to stay centered when zooming on a centered page.

The biggest feedback we got is that people wanted the page to re-layout upon zoom so they wouldn’t see the horizontal scrollbars. We have been looking hard at providing an option to make this happen. Unfortunately, due to our schedule, it doesn’t look like this feature is going to make it into the IE7 product. It is high on our list for next version.

Now just because we cannot provide that particular feature in IE7 doesn’t mean we aren’t going to do any thing to make horizontal scrolling easier. The work we are doing to stay centered should help reduce how often you see the horizontal scrollbars, but we are also making it easier for you to horizontally scroll. If you try it out, you will discover that we now enable horizontal scrolling with Alt + Mouse wheel. We are aware that this causes the classic menu to appear/disappear when you lift up on the Alt key so we are planning on changing it to CTRL + Shift + Mouse wheel in the final release.

I really hope this helps with your horizontal scrolling needs and enhances your browsing experience. Please let me know what you think.

- Peter

Working with the IE ActiveX Update

ieblog — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:02:00 GMT

To learn more about how IE works with the IE ActiveX Update and the options at your disposal to control the user experience of your web pages, please review this article on MSDN.

You can try out the new behavior today on released versions of IE6 or IE7 Beta 2 Preview.

Again, due to the nature of this topic, we are not taking comments on this post.

- Tony Chor

More on Simple List Extensions

ieblog — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:57:00 GMT

There are two posts on the RSS team blog about the use of the Simple List Extensions, which have been implemented by IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform.

The first is Simple List Extensions in action, and it shows examples of live sites (like Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo) using the RSS extensions to add sorting and filtering capabilities to their feeds.

The second is a longer post on Understanding Lists and SLE, which explains why RSS list feeds are useful and how they work (with diagrams!).

Check them out and let us know what you think in the comments.

- Sean

New info on IE ActiveX update

ieblog — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:05:00 GMT

For new information on the IE ActiveX Update, please see Mike Nash’s announcement.

Due to the sensitive nature of this issue, we are not taking comments on this post. Thanks for your understanding.

- Tony Chor