Author Archive

This morning we released IE7 Beta 3 for Windows XP. This version includes improvements in reliability, compatibility, security, and a few end user features. Give it a try at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx.

Based on your feedback, we’ve made some changes to IE7. Beta 3 returns the email button to the toolbar customize dialog (one of the most requested features), and enables reordering of tabs by dragging them to the left or right. In this version you can also scroll horizontally while zooming.  To improve the RSS experience, IE7 now allows you to update all your RSS feeds on-demand as well as mark them all “READ”.

Beta 3 also contains all the security fixes addressed in the June IE security bulletin, so we encourage all Beta 2 users to upgrade to Beta 3.

Please remember to uninstall any previous IE7 builds before installing this one. IE7 Beta 3 runs on Windows XP SP2, Windows XP x64, and Windows Server 2003 SP1. This beta does not install on Windows Vista Beta 2; a new version of IE7+ in Windows Vista will be available with the next public Windows Vista release soon. IE7 still replaces IE6; if you’re a developer and need to have both IE6 and IE7 on a single machine, I recommend Microsoft Virtual PC (here’s a link to their 45-day free trial version) or Chris Wilson’s post on the subject.

As with Beta 2, we’ll release German, Finnish, Arabic, and Japanese versions in the next few weeks.

I’m looking forward to reading the feedback - positive and negative - as it comes in. I also want to encourage developers, web developers, designers, and IT Pros to use Readiness Toolkit to help you deliver the best possible experience to your sites’ IE7 visitors.

Today’s release is the final beta for IE7. Our next steps are the Release Candidates followed by general availability in the second half of the year.

Thanks,
Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

We’ve noticed questions/comments/confusion about uninstalling IE7 so I wanted to highlight one of our FAQs and add a little more detail.

Uninstalling IE7 will leave you with a fully-functional IE6 and allow you to install the latest release, IE7 Beta 3, which we recommend for all IE7 beta users so they benefit from the latest bug fixes and security updates.

To uninstall Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, Beta 2 Preview, or Beta 1:

• Click "Start", and then click "Control Panel"
• Click "Add or Remove Programs"
• Scroll down to "Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2" or "Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview", select it, and then click "Change/Remove".
• If not found, check "Show Updates" at the top of the dialog box, scroll down the list to "Windows XP - Software Updates", select "Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview" or "Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1" and then click "Change/Remove".

To uninstall Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3:

• Click “Start,” and then click “Control Panel.”
• Click “Add or Remove Programs.”
• Scroll down to "Windows Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3", select it, and then click "Change/Remove".

If you still can’t uninstall, read on…

Note: %windir% is your Windows directory and usually located at C:\Windows

• “I can’t find any IE7 entry in Add/Remove Programs. What should I do?”
  • You can run the uninstaller directly using the commands below.  Each is for a different beta release so only one will work. Note that to see these folders, you need ‘view hidden folders’ enabled.

IE 7 Release	Uninstall Command
Beta 3	%windir%\ie7beta3\spuninst\spuninst.exe
Beta 2	%windir%\$NtUninstallie7beta2$\spuninst\spuninst.exe
Beta 2 Preview from March	%windir%\$NtUninstallie7b2pmx$\spuninst\spuninst.exe
Beta 2 Preview from January	%windir%\$NtUninstallie7bet2p$\spuninst\spuninst.exe
Beta 1	%windir%\$NtUninstallie7beta1$\spuninst\spuninst.exe

• “I don’t have those folders (%windir%\$NtUninstallie7-----$ or %windir%\ie7beta3).  What now?”

• Open %windir%\ie7*.log (not ie7*_main.log) and look for a line something like this:
              time_stamp: CreateUninstall = 1,Directory = C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallie7-----$

• If found, the uninstall folder was created but later deleted.
  • Please tell us what happened. Did you delete it to free disk space? Do you run a tool that might delete it? Something else? We know there are some cleaner tools that remove the uninstall directory. We’re working with the vendors to have their tools updated and we changed our directory name in Beta 3 to prevent this problem in the future.
  • Call product support (1-866-876-4926)

• If you have a line like this:
              time_stamp: CreateUninstall = 0…
  
  
  • Please tell us right away. Did you reinstall Beta 3 or is this in a Beta 2 log?
  • Call product support (1-866-876-4926)

• "I'm told I need to be the same user to uninstall but I am the same user."
  • Add this key to the registry:
    

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer]
    @=""
    "InstalledByUser"=dword:00000000

    Alternatively, you can take the indented section above, paste it into a text file, and save it as a .reg file. Run the .reg file and then try uninstalling.

• “I get a warning about other programs that may not work after removing IE7. What’s the warning all about?”
  • The dialog contains a list of programs that may not work after uninstalling IE7.  The purpose is to prevent out-of-order uninstall of related programs. If a dependent program is left on the system without its prerequisite, it may stop functioning, require reinstallation, or even cause your system to stop working properly if it is an OS component. The details of this are described in KB 823836.
    
    While this warning is important, especially if for some reason you’re uninstalling security updates or hotfixes, I want to clarify that the programs listed are everything you've installed since installing IE7.  The uninstaller doesn't have a way to detect what updates are actually related so it lists everything.  That's why an unrelated application like Windows Live Messenger may appear in the list depending on the installation order.

Thanks for trying IE7 and please continue to report your problems and file bugs by following these instructions

John Hrvatin
Program Manager

Hi everybody, Max here. I posted before about "A New Look for IE” back when we released the beta 2 preview, and with the launch of beta 3, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about some of the new functionality we have added and changes we have made specifically related to your feedback.

First and foremost, let me thank everybody who has put the time and effort towards giving us feedback, whether it’s through our connect site, participating in our monthly online chats, talking with us at the conferences we attend, or even just commenting here on our blog; this helps us make the product better for you. Since beta 2, we’ve fixed many issues, and we continue to drive to releasing a more secure, reliable, easy to use browser with IE7.

New Icons

In response to feedback especially here on the blog and on Channel 9, we want to show you some new icons for beta 3.

We’ve lightened up the stop, refresh, and search icons, and we’ve changed the icons for the favourites center and add to favourites to give you back the good old favourites star.

Tab Reordering

The next big change we have made, which I’m super excited about as this was one of the more highly voted for issues on the connect site, is that in beta 3 you’re now able to reorder tabs via dragging!

Just drag the tab where you want it to go. This is a super convenient way to keep your tabs organized within your window.

Authenticated FTP

We also heard lots of feedback about FTP not working in IE7. In beta 2, anonymous FTP sites worked, however if the site required authentication, then one needed to either use windows explorer to get the familiar folder view of the FTP site, or use the somewhat arcane ftp://username:password@ftp.site/ URL format in order to make it work in IE7. In beta 3, IE7 now prompts for credentials and gives an html view of the FTP site. If you’re interested in the folder view for the FTP site, simply choose the “Open FTP Site in Windows Explorer” menu entry from the Page menu.

Easy Access to Email

Earlier in the IE7 development cycle, we decided to remove the command bar icon that provided access directly to one’s email. Through our Customer Support Services division, we learned that the lack of this icon was in fact one of the top call generators for IE7 beta 2, and hence we’ve added this icon back. It’s now available to be put into your command bar through the customization menu. Right click on the command bar and select Customize Command Bar -> Add or Remove Commands.

A smaller change

There’s one more change I want to tell you about, first because I think it’s a great example of a small detail that makes a big difference in how much people enjoy using the browser, and secondly because it was expertly done by one of our new summer interns, Michael Ritche.

IE6 featured auto scaling of large images to fit the browser window, and it had this weird button that would show up over the top of the image after some indeterminate amount of time. It felt a little odd to use, and was somewhat unpredictable. In IE7, thanks to Michael, we’ve replaced this with a simple magnification cursor. Now, you can click to zoom the image to full size, and the image will be centered on where you clicked.

This was a great first change by Michael, and we’re sure there will be many more.

Jane has posted details of some UX improvements in the RSS experience on the RSS team blog. Check them out.

As we look towards finishing IE7 and starting in our next release, please keep the feedback coming! With your help we’ll continue to improve Internet Explorer.

Thanks,
Max Stevens
Lead Program Manager

Hello, this is Kelly Ford, a test lead on the IE team and a big keyboard user of Internet Explorer.

In an earlier post, Aaron Sauve provided The Keyboard Lover’s Guide to IE. The IE community has given us quality feedback on our keyboard model during the beta cycle, and in beta 3, we have tried to bring more predictability and consistency with earlier IE versions in response to this feedback. In beta 3, we have made some changes in hotkey assignments, added some new hotkeys, and changed keyboard behavior on web pages back to match earlier versions of the browser in most cases.

Bringing Back Menu Hotkeys
In beta 3, we’ve reverted hotkeys so that the hotkeys used to access menus remain the same from previous versions of IE. Specifically, this means that Alt+a will once again access the classic favorites menu, Alt+t the tools menu and Alt+h the help menu.

New Hotkeys
We’ve added several new hotkeys in this beta. Here’s a list of what has been done:

Hotkey	Action
Alt+m	Activate the Home button on the Command bar
Alt+j	Activate the feeds button on the Command bar.
Alt+o	Activate the Tools button on the Command bar.
Alt+l	Activate the Help button on the Command bar.
Alt+c	Open the Favorites Center set to display favorites.
Ctrl+Shift+q	Bring up a list of open tabs.

Changes in Hotkey Behavior for the Favorites Center
We have changed the way hotkeys for favorites, history and feeds work when accessing the Favorites Center. Ctrl plus the appropriate key (i for favorites, h for history and j for feeds) will open the Favorites Center set to the view indicated by the hotkey. Ctrl+Shift and the appropriate hotkey will open the Favorites Center in pinned mode. A second press of the same Ctrl+Shift hotkey combination will close the Favorites Center when in pinned mode.

Giving Keyboard Control to Web Pages
We’ve heard from many web developers and users about keyboard behavior in IE7 with respect to web pages and applications that specify hotkeys. Beta 3 gives priority back to web pages for all keyboard assignments with the exception of Alt+d. This will set focus to the Address bar, even if you use it as an AccessKey in a web page. This will address situations where AccessKeys like Alt+p were going to the Page menu on the Command bar or Ctrl+q was opening Quick Tabs instead of marking e-mail as read in Outlook Web Access.

Staying in Touch
Feedback from the IE community is very helpful to us. Please let us know your thoughts on the keyboard behavior in beta 3. Also, we have an online help topic that lists all of our IE shortcut keys.

Kelly Ford
Test Lead

If you plan to use Complex Scripts (like Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, etc), you should ensure that you have support for complex scripts installed. I know that sounds obvious, but we wanted to make sure people know how and why to do this. Let us examine this in detail using an international URL issue that Dean recently encountered while dogfooding IE7.

What is the issue?

Internet Explorer will sometimes display Right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Arabic or Hebrew, in the address bar in left-to-right (LTR) order. Due to IE’s IDN homograph-spoofing mitigation; this would be an issue only for users who have that language in their language settings (otherwise navigating to an international URL will display the hostname as punycode). Still, this is a genuine customer scenario that should just work. For example, consider a Hebrew URL:

This would show up in the address-bar as http://xn--4dbcd.com by default. But a user with Hebrew in their accepted-languages might see:

We found it very surprising that such an important issue was not reported widely during Beta 1 and Beta 2, so we wanted to dig a little deeper.

What did our investigation reveal?

This happens only on machines where support for complex scripts is not installed. Complex Scripts are those which require contextual processing for display, editing, and other functions, such as:

1. Bi-directional (BiDi) reordering (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew)
2. Contextual shaping (e.g. Arabic, Indic family)
3. Display of combining characters (e.g. Arabic, Thai, Indian)
4. Specialized word-break and justification rules (e.g. Thai)
5. Disallowing illegal character combinations (e.g. Indian, Thai)

IE’s address bar uses the Windows EDIT control which uses GDI to display characters. When support for complex scripts is not installed, GDI can just map a given Unicode codepoint to a glyph and display it, but can’t do context-specific stuff like changing the order or shape of characters. All this language specific complexity is handled by Uniscribe, which is installed when you install support for complex scripts. Inside the browser, of course, we support all these scripts ourselves, regardless of whether the Windows EDIT control support is installed – the problem only occurs in the address bar.

Who does this issue impact?

You can run into Unicode URLs incorrectly displayed in the address bar if:

1. You are running a non-complex-language build of Windows XP/Server 2003, such as an English build. Uniscribe support is always installed on complex-language-builds of Windows XP/Server 2003. Windows Vista always has this support installed.
2. You have not added support for input in any complex language using the system control panel. The complete support is installed if you install support for any complex script input.
3. You have that particular complex/bidi language in your accepted-languages. As I mentioned above, if the language is not added to your accepted-languages, you’ll just see punycode in the address-bar.

We have not seen any bug-report mentioning this, and do not think this is an issue that a typical user of complex scripts would run into.

How can you fix the issue?

If the description above matches you, or if you just want to play it safe, you should install complex script and RTL languages support. This not only corrects the IE behavior, but will give you a more consistent experience when using complex scripts in other components and software running on Windows XP.

Go to “Control Panel-> Regional and Language Options” and check the setting shown below. You’ll need the Windows XP CD and will need to restart.

Feedback?

Comments and feedback are welcome! Make sure you try out IE7 Beta 3!

-Vishu Gupta
Developer

It’s that time again! Members of the IE team will be online for an Expert Zone chat this coming Thursday, July 13th at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM GMT). These chats are great opportunities 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 lots of fun and we hope you will join us for the chat if you can.

Cheers,
Uche Enuha
Program Manager

Edit: Added the hyperlink to the chat.

The IE team is proud to announce the availability of Arabic, Finnish, German and Japanese versions of IE7 Beta 3 in addition to the English versions we released a week and a half ago.

You can download IE7 Beta 3 from the following locations:

Arabic: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ar-xm/betadownload.mspx
Finnish: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/fi-fi/betadownload.mspx
German: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/de-de/betadownload.mspx
Japanese: http://www.microsoft.com/japan/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

To get support, all users can take advantage of the following forums:

Internet Explorer Feedback (English). Read more about how to use this public feedback and bug database.

IE Newsgroup (English)

Arabic users can also use the Arabic Internet Explorer newsgroup.

Phone support is also available for German-speaking users.

Germany: +49 1805 67 2255
Austria: +43 150 222 2255
Switzerland +41 848 80 2255

Monday-Friday 8:00 – 18:00
Saturday 9:00 – 17:00

Please remember to uninstall any previous IE7 builds before installing this new release.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Tony Chor
Group Program Manager

The transcript from the July 13^th chat is now available online. The response to Beta 3 has been great and people are overall happy with the recent improvements. There were a bunch of us and we enjoyed answering the stream of questions as they poured in.

You can find our chat schedule at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/default.mspx . We typically hold the IE chats on the second Thursday of every month. Keep sending us your feedback and see you at the next chat!

Cheers,
Uche Enuha
Program Manager

I am happy to announce the Beta 3 release of Internet Explorer Administration Kit 7 [IEAK 7]. IEAK 7 allows enterprises, ISPs, ICPs, OEMs to create custom packages of IE 7 on XP or IE 7+ on Windows Vista. If you are looking to provide your IE 7 users with your own default set of preferences, toolbars etc, read on.

Some of the common customization scenarios for IE 7 are:

• Customize your users’ IE 7 with related home pages, feeds, etc. Create a version of IE 7 that has these values and make it available to your users.
• Install a specific toolbar as part of the IE 7 install.

With IEAK 7 Beta 3, you can do the above and more – You can set IE 7 defaults, include your own custom components to be installed and create a package with the above customizations that can be made available to your users. IEAK 7 can generate both customized full downloads of IE 7 for XP and small customization-only packages that can be applied on top of an existing IE 7. IEAK also provides the ability to generate these packages for various languages that IE 7 supports. For example, English IEAK 7 Beta 3 will also have the ability to package another language IE 7 Beta 3. However we are also committed to releasing IEAK 7 itself in the various languages for which IE 7 is available. IEAK 7 Beta 3 incorporates feedback received from Beta 2 users. You can now turn off the IE 7 first run page and provide your own welcome page.

We listened to a lot of feedback and arrived at the following principles to enable customization of IE 7 while respecting user choice. These are:

1. Customizations trump user settings. If a particular setting isn’t customized in the custom IE 7 package being installed, then user settings prevail.
2. Uninstall doesn’t change user settings.
3. Installation of a customized IE 7 results in applying those settings only once per user.
4. If multiple customized instances of IE are installed, only the last customization remains.

With these principles, here are the answers to some common questions we get around IEAK:

• What happens to my settings if I upgrade to a customized IE 7?
  Customizations provided by the custom IE 7 being installed get applied. If a particular setting isn’t customized, then that user's existing setting remains. For e.g. If a user’s home page currently is set to http://blogs.msdn.com/ie and if the custom IE 7 package doesn’t set this setting, then http://blogs.msdn.com/ie remains as the home page.
  
  
• What happens to my settings if I upgrade from an already customized IE 7 to IE 7 from Microsoft?
  Current settings remain.
  
  
• What happens to my settings if I upgrade from one custom IE 7 to another?
  The new customizations take effect.
  
  
• What happens if I uninstall a customized IE 7?
  The current settings remain.

Want to create your own customized IE 7 for your users? Even if you have already done it with Beta 2, now is the time to move onto Beta 3. Here is the link to IEAK 7 Beta 3: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/ie/ieak7/default.mspx

Love to hear your feedback.

Srinivasulu Grandhi
Group Manager
IE ITPRO Team

For nearly a year now, I’ve been following a cool social browsing addon called StumbleUpon. As of last week, the StumbleUpon addon is available for Internet Explorer, and is one of my favorite addons.

Here’s how it works: As you browse the web, whenever you come across a page that is particular interesting to you, you can click the “thumbs up” button in your toolbar. And if you don’t like a page, you can hit the “thumbs down” button. You don’t have to rate every page, just the ones you feel strongly about, and clicking a button in the toolbar is a pretty simple way to give feedback.

Now, as StumbleUpon learns what you like and don’t like, it automatically matches you with clusters of users who have similar preferences. Then, as you browse, you can choose to “stumble” to pages that are preferred by other people who are similar to you. You don’t have to share your votes with anyone else, but if you opt-in, you help other people find cool new sites too.

Om Malik says that it is “simply addictive”, and many others agree. I find that StumbleUpon can recommend content to me that is more interesting and relevant to me than many of the other content filters like techmeme or digg.

The addon was initially developed for Firefox, and quickly became popular. But a tool like StumbleUpon gets smarter when there are more people using it, and the team soon needed to extend the feature to the majority of Internet users who use Internet Explorer. News.com and TechCrunch have both commented on the business case for shipping on Internet Explorer, and that’s easy enough to understand.

But how difficult or expensive was it? Well, Justin from the StumbleUpon team told me, “Our experience porting our Firefox addon to IE7 has been smooth and relatively painless - actually a lot easier than we expected. Within a month we built an IE7 toolbar implementing all desired functionality as well as a few features exclusive to the IE platform.”

Download it and try it out! Do you have a great add-on that you need help porting to Internet Explorer? Let us know how we can help you.

Joshua Allen
Technical Evangelist