Author Archive

In our previous post about IE’s Reset Internet Explorer Settings feature, we’ve discussed how incompatible browser extensions, add-ons, spyware or malware can cause compatibility issues such as application hangs in IE7.

In this post, we wanted to go into more detail about how to troubleshoot with Internet Explorer 7. So, how does one go about identifying the cause for toolbar or add-on program problems?

To identify if an incompatible browser add-on or extension is at the root of your troubles, we recommend taking advantage of Internet Explorer’s (No Add-ons) mode. The following are steps to do this:

1. Click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools, and then click Internet Explorer (No Add-ons).
   If your browser appears to be working properly in Internet Explorer (No Add-ons) mode, continue with the following steps to help identify which add-on may be causing the problems. If you’ve used Internet Explorer’s (No Add-ons) mode and are still experiencing issues, try our KB Article, How to perform common troubleshooting steps for Internet Explorer 7 Beta. Information found here can help you further troubleshoot problems that may be connectivity and network-related or caused by a third party application or by a specific website’s code.
   
   
2. To isolate the specific browser add-on that is contributing to the issue, you can use IE’s Manage Add-ons feature to pick specific add-ons to disable:
   1. Click Tools -> Internet Options.
   2. Click the Programs tab, then Manage add-ons (see figure below):

      Note: The Manage Add-ons option under Tools is disabled in No Add-ons mode so you must go to Internet Options, Programs, Manage add-ons to manually enable/disable add-ons.
      

   3. Select an add-on in the Name list, and then click Disable (see figures below):

      
      
      

   4. Click OK, OK again, OK again and then close IE.
      
      
3. Restart IE normally and see if your problem is resolved.
   1. If it is, you should uninstall the specific add-on via Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs or the applications own uninstaller.
   2. If the problem persists, you will need to repeat steps 1-3 until you have identified the specific add-on causing the problem.
      Tip: Disable several add-on’s at once to speed up your process of elimination.

In general, updating to the latest version of a toolbar or extension can resolve most issues. Below we’ve included a few commonly known problems and where to get the latest updates:

• Google Desktop: Google has fixed an issue that was known to cause IE7 to crash when opening new tabs. The latest version is now available here.
• MSN 1.02 Toolbar: The MSN 1.02 toolbar crashes Internet Explorer 7. The workaround is to disable the toolbar, using manage add-ons or, uninstall it. You can download the latest version here.
• Microsoft Developer Toolbar: Older versions of the Microsoft Developer Toolbar does not display correctly on systems running Internet Explorer 7 Beta, and can cause hangs. You can download the latest version here.

The following is a list of known incompatible toolbars that can cause crashes or hangs in IE. We’re actively working with application owners to provide newer, compatible versions so please expect to see updated versions soon of your favorite toolbars. The current workaround is to disable or uninstall these when running IE7:

• RoboForm Toolbar
• Cooxie Toolbar
• Diodia Download Toolbar 2.4.01
• AskJeeves Toolbar 4.0.1.1
• CitiBank’s Virtual Card Number Generator
• Mojicon Dispenser 1.05    
• Logos Toolbar

Check the Release Notes for Internet Explorer 7 Beta for the latest list of incompatible toolbars and where to find updated versions that work with IE7. The release notes also discusses some known incompatible programs and extensions as well as workarounds for common issues.

If you want to give us feedback or submit a bug on an incompatible application or extension, visit the Microsoft Connect site and sign up for our Internet Explorer Feedback program in order to access the IE pages.

As always thank you for using IE7!

Keryn Mark
Program Manager

As we get close to the final availability of Internet Explorer 7, I want to provide an update on our distribution plans. To help our customers become more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates (AU) shortly after the final version is released for Windows XP, planned for the fourth quarter of this year.

During the past year, we’ve discussed many of the advanced security features in IE7 that will help make our users more secure, including ActiveX Opt-in, the Phishing Filter and Fix My Settings features. These are just some of the security enhancements we’ve designed to help protect users from malicious software and fraudulent websites, and Microsoft recommends that all genuine Windows customers install IE7. To ensure users are prepared to upgrade, AU will notify users when IE7 is ready to install and show a welcome screen that presents key features and choices to “Install”, “Don’t Install”, or “Ask Me Later” (screenshots below).

We are also providing a Blocker Toolkit for our enterprise customers who may want to block automatic delivery of IE7 in their organizations; this blocker has no expiration date. Enterprise customers can download the free Blocker Toolkit from the Microsoft Download Center today. We’ve also made additional information for IT administrators available at the Windows Update/Microsoft Update site on TechNet.

Now back to how the process will work for the rest of us…

How the Automatic Updates installation process works

As I said earlier, AU will notify you when IE7 is ready to install. Alternately, you will be able to visit the Windows Update or Microsoft Update sites and obtain IE7 by performing an “Express” scan for high-priority updates. Either way, you will see the welcome screen that allows you to choose whether to install it. (Users will also be able to download IE7 from the Microsoft Download Center.)

If you decide to install IE7, it will preserve your current toolbars, home page, search settings, and favorites and installing will not change your choice of default browser. You will also be able to roll back to IE6 at any point by using Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel. Finally, users who have AU turned off will not be notified.

(To learn more about Automatic Updates please visit the Microsoft Security site)

I think this approach strikes a good balance across a couple of dimensions - helping customers become more secure, giving them control, and providing options for enterprises.

Tony Chor
Group Program Manager

Installation Experience Screenshots

Below are example screenshots of the notification experience:

Note: Final Welcome screen is in draft form and still subject to change

Hello again!

If you are already using Internet Explorer 7 you might have noticed our tab settings. Perhaps you already changed one or more of them to better suit your browsing habits.

Whenever we create a setting, we always have many discussions about what its default should be, what it should be called, and where it should go. In some cases we have great information (such as usability studies, customer surveys, and instrumentation) to help guide us in our decision making. In other cases we have less information. When we get features out in betas, we scour the newsgroups, blogs, bug reports, and reviews to see if we get any related feedback.

In this post I’d like to show you our tab settings, explain what they mean, and talk a bit about why the defaults are what they are.

Let’s look at our Beta 3 tab settings, and then we can walk through them:

Figure: Tab settings (Tools->Internet Options->Tab Settings)

“Warn me when closing multiple tabs”
This one is relatively straightforward. If you select this option you will get the “Do you want to close all tabs?” dialog when you close multiple tabs.

We default to prompting users because:

1. The dialog was one of our top tab requests from Beta 1. We know many people want it.
2. There’s an easy way to turn it off if you do not want it.

“Always switch to new tabs when they are created”
When you select a link and choose to open it (from the context menu, Ctrl+Click or middle mouse click), we default to opening it in a background tab. Selecting this option will open those tabs in the foreground.

We default this one to opening in the background because:

1. Opening in the background best exposes the power of tabs.
   1. Helps people easily queue up multiple pages to read.
   2. Lets you spend less time waiting for pages to load.
2. Our feedback from Beta 2 has been very positive.
3. There’s a shortcut to have a specific link open a tab in the foreground – use Ctrl+Shift+Click rather then just Ctrl+Click.

“Open only the first home page when Internet Explorer starts”
There are some people who love to have a tab group as their home page, but do not necessarily want to have 8 pages load every single time they open Internet Explorer. If this setting is selected, every time you launch Internet Explorer the first page of your home page group will open. To open the rest, you simply select the home button.

The default is to launch your entire home page group because:

1. We avoid introducing new concepts where possible (in this case a quasi home page).
2. Feedback we received indicates most people like the current behavior.

“Open new tabs next to the current tab”
In the Beta 2 Preview new tabs would always open at the end of the tab row. With this setting newly opened tabs will insert next to the tab you are on instead.

This option is the default because:

1. Related tabs are much more likely to end up grouped together.
2. When you have too many tabs to fit on screen, they go into the overflow. With this setting on, tabs are less likely to open off screen in this situation.
3. The MSN Toolbar shipped with this behavior, and they have been happy with the response so far.

“Open home page for new tabs instead of a blank page”
There are actually 3 options for what appears when a new tab is created. The first is the about:Tabs page (this was new in Beta 2), but when you decide you don’t want to see it anymore, you can select to have a blank page or your first home page as the page that appears when you click the new tab icon (or hit Ctrl+T).

The default is to open it in a blank page because this is faster, and we can predictably put focus directly to the address bar for blank pages. This way when you create a new tab you can just start typing. Fast is good.

The setting to open your home page here was introduced due to feedback we received!

Note: This setting only applies after the About:Tabs (or “Welcome to Tabbed Browsing”) page has been dismissed. To dismiss this page check the “Don’t show again” box and then select “Close” on the About:Tabs page.

“When a pop-up is encountered”
There are three options for how to open pop-ups:

• Let Internet Explorer decide how pop-ups should open
• Always open pop-ups in new tab.
• Always open pop-ups in a new window.

The last two are fairly self explanatory, the first “Let Internet Explorer decide…” is my favorite option, and needs a bit more explaining. Basically what this will do is open any pop-up without size or other restrictions in a new tab, the rest will open in a new window. For users experienced with tabbed browsing this is typically the best option, as it allows most windows to open in tabs, but allows pop-up style windows to open in a new window.

The default we have in Beta 3 is to always open in a new window because we had it set to always open in tabs in Beta 1, and the feedback was that this made things harder for many people who don’t understand tabs. If you’re a tab user check out the “Let Internet Explorer decide” setting.

“Open links from other programs in:”

• A new window
• A new tab in the current window
• The current tab or window

The default we have in Beta 3 is to open links from other programs in a new tab in the current window. This improves the behavior from IE6, which navigates an existing window and can cause users to lose the page they were on. By taking advantage of tabs this avoids unnecessarily creating new windows. Currently this is our only setting with a default value that introduces tabbed browsing to people who may not have used it.

“Use most recent order when switching tabs with Ctrl+Tab”
In addition to the general tabs settings, for advanced users there is a setting in the “Advanced” tab of “Internet Options”…

Figure: Advanced tab setting

This setting makes our hotkeys for switching tabs (Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Shift+Tab) behave like Alt+Tab in Windows. That is, it allows tabs to be switched in a most recent order (which is great for comparing web pages). When you have this setting selected we also close tabs in a most recently used order as well, so you’ll see a lot of jumping around in the tab row.

The default is to have this off:

1. We value predictability over the more focused compare scenario.
2. We want to be consistent with other apps that use tabs throughout the system.

Anyhow, as you can see there are many ways to customize your tabbed browsing experience. Take a look through, try out the various options and tell us what you think!

- Aaron Sauve
Program Manager

Domain names are not limited to ASCII any longer, and as the web is growing more and more domain names now contain characters from other character sets. Such domain names are called Internationalized domain names (IDN), for example http://ايكيا.com is a domain in Arabic for IKEA. IE7 added support for IDN in Beta 2. We listened to your feedback during Beta 2 and we are changing the principles of IDN to accommodate the way customers want to use international characters on the web.

Preventing IDN spoofing by default in IE7 Beta 2

IE7 beta 2 implementation of IDN feature is such that if a user navigates to an IDN URL and if the scripts that are present in the URL are not part of the user’s configured Accept language, IE7 will convert the URL into Punycode and display it in the address bar. IE7 also displays the information bar saying that the website address contains characters which cannot be displayed using the current language settings.

This design makes IE7 secure by default against any URL spoofing attacks containing non-ASCII characters. In order to view a URL in Unicode format the user must have the language specific to that character script added to the browser’s Accept language.

As discussed previously, another IDN restriction for IE7 Beta 2 was that it did not allow intermixing of scripts for a given label (a label is a segment of a domain name, delimited by dots; www.microsoft.com contains three labels “www”, “microsoft” and “com”) in a URL. Also, for a given label IE did not allow mixing of non-ASCII scripts with ASCII. This step was mainly taken to protect users against homograph-spoofing attacks. Consider the scenario where a user commonly browses sites with Cyrillic URLs. If the user gets a phishing email to visit www.paypal.com where one of the ‘a’s is in ASCII and the other is in Cyrillic, the user might believe they are visiting the real paypal which uses all ASCII characters in their domain name. To protect against this spoof, IE7 will detect the mixed characters and show the URL in Punycode rather than misleading the user.

Improving user experience for some mixed script scenarios for IE7

We heard your feedback about how restrictive the feature was by not allowing mixing of ASCII characters with other scripts. For instance, in some locales it is common to have business names that mix ASCII and characters from local languages.

We looked for a way to allow mixed characters in a fragment without introducing the risk of a spoof. The IE team worked with experts from the Windows Globalization team to investigate which scripts can be mixed safely with ASCII characters. 

In the Release Candidate build (post-Beta 3), IE will permit mixing of ASCII with certain scripts and will display the URL in Unicode. However, IE still will not allow intermixing of allowed scripts (list given below) within a label, if they belong to different languages, even though the user has added the language containing the scripts to their Accept Languages.

Consider the following example where a URL label contains Hang and ASCII (website for LG Korea)

IE will now display this URL in Unicode for a user who has added Korean language support, since the non-ASCII script belongs to the Korean language set and is now on the allowed list of scripts. However, IE will show the raw Punycode encoding for a user who has not added Korean language support.

Here is a list of scripts that IE will permit to mix with ASCII

• Arab (Arabic),
• Bali (Balinese),
• Beng (Bengali),
• Bugi (Buginese),
• Deva (Devanagari),
• Ethi (Ethiopic),
• Gujr (Gujarati),
• Guru (Gurmukhi),
• Hang (Hangul),
• Hani (Han),
• Hebr (Hebrew),
• Hira (Hiragana),
• Kana (Katakana),
• Khmr (Khmer),
• Knda (Kannada),
• Laoo (Lao),
• Mlym (Malayalam),
• Mong (Mongolian),
• Mymr (Myanmar),
• Orya (Oriya),
• Sinh (Sinhala),
• Syrc (Syriac),
• Taml (Tamil),
• Telu (Telugu),
• Thaa (Thaana),
• Thai (Thai),
• Tibt (Tibetan)

In summary, you told us how you planned to use the feature and we listened. We’re very excited that we were able to make this change to allow richer domain names for international sites!

Thanks,
Tariq Sharif
Program Manager

Are you developing on the Windows RSS Platform? If so, you may want to check out the post on some improvements on the RSS team blog.  Most notably the RSS Platform is now API complete. This means that, barring any serious bug that we must fix, applications written against the Beta 3 API will run unmodified against the final RTM release of the platform. Check them out.

Walter VonKoch
Program Manager

I had mentioned a while back that we planned to call the version of IE7 in Windows Vista “Internet Explorer 7+”. Well, the feedback we got on the blog was overwhelming – many of you didn’t like it. So, as we’ve said on our website, we heard you. I’m pleased to announce that we’re switching the name back to “Internet Explorer 7”. No plus. No dot x. Just “Internet Explorer 7”.

Specifically, here are the official full names:

• For Windows XP: “Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP”
• For Windows Vista: “Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista”

Those can be a bit of a mouthful, so you’ll see us using the shorter “Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP” and “Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista” when we need to refer a platform-specific feature (like Protected Mode in Windows Vista). We’ll use “Internet Explorer 7” to talk about IE in general and features that are consistent across all platforms (like the Phishing Filter).

We’re glad we checked with you all before we shipped so we didn’t go out with an unpopular name. Thanks for all your feedback – keep it up!

Tony Chor
Group Program Manager

Here’s a quick reminder to tell you that members of the IE team will be online for an Expert Zone chat this coming Thursday, August 10th at 10:00AM PDT (5:00PM GMT). A transcript will be published after the chat. You can also browse through the transcripts of other recently held chats.

These chats are lots of fun and we hope you will join us for the chat if you can. See you all on Thursday!

Cheers,
Uche Enuha
Program Manager

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

This update addresses 8 security issues: 5 remote code execution vulnerabilities, 2 information disclosure vulnerabilities and 1 elevation of privilege vulnerability. For more information on the contents of this update, please see:

Microsoft Knowledge Base article: MS06-042 – Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer (KB# 918899)

Details on the vulnerabilities and workarounds can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS06-042.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. IE security updates are cumulative and contain all previously released patches for each version of IE.

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 patches from Microsoft.

- Charles Watanabe
Release Coordinator

Edit: Corrected the number of vulnerabilities addressed in the bulletin

A presentation at Black Hat last week has sparked some discussion in the community. The presentation talks about the potential dangers of script in feeds. I posted on the RSS Team blog regarding the mitigations that are implemented in the IE7 Feed View and the Windows RSS Platform that specifically address potentially malicious scripts in feeds.

We welcome discussions about security and RSS which will ultimately benefit users. Keep the feedback coming!

Walter VonKoch
Program Manager

My name is Mark Harris, and I am the Program Manager driving extensibility in IE7.   With the creation of www.ieaddons.com we have a rich set of 3^rd party add-ons, and we are committed to improving this resource over time.  Most users are familiar with toolbars, but many don’t realize the breadth of the add-ons available for Internet Explorer.

Personalize Your Ride

I rented a Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200C this past weekend (hold the mid-life crisis jokes).  There are a huge number of accessories available for the bike:  custom handlebars, special seats, and (of course) louder mufflers.  These accessories let riders personalize their riding experience.  In a similar way, Internet Explorer Add-Ons provide users with a way to personalize their browsing experience.

For example, many of us have difficulty with spelling.  Enter IESpell: the spell-checker for the web.  It’s a free download for non-commercial use, and spell-checks any text typed into a form.  IESpell will also look up word definitions and works with several language dictionaries.  Right-click on any word in a page, and IESpell will get you the definition. 

Another customized feature is navigation with mouse gestures.  There is a well-put-together add-on (with source!) for Internet Explorer that adds mouse gestures to the browser frame.  With this add-on you can go forward, back, and even open tabs depending on how you move the mouse.  Mouse gestures are not for everyone – but for those who like it, the add-on makes for an even more personal browsing experience.

On the Super-Highway

Another group of add-ons are tied directly to specific web services.  Sites like Windows Live and  StumbleUpon offer add-ons for Internet Explorer so you can enjoy their services while browsing the Internet. 

The Windows Live toolbar is tied in with the Live.com web services.  It lets you access weather, stock quotes, maps, and Wikipedia searches at the touch of a button from your browser session.  It even lets you keep a copy of your Favorites on the Internet, for easy access from any computer.  The toolbar ties in cleanly with Windows Live services, as if it were a part of the browser all along.

StumbleUpon is a social networking service for web site recommendations and reviews.  Their toolbar tracks your likes and dislikes and recommends web sites that you might enjoy.  It uses calls to their back-end web service to provide this functionality from any Internet Explorer session.  Using the toolbar, they integrate the components of their web site with Internet Explorer as if they were  native to Internet Explorer.

The add-ons mentioned here are just a few of the hundreds available for IE7.  New add-ons are being submitted to www.ieaddons.com every day.  There is no way one blog post could showcase all of our favorite add-ons that are available for IE7, so you will be hearing more from us on this subject.  Until then, have fun customizing your Internet experience, and share your favorite add-ons below. 

Mark Harris
Lead Program Manager