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The Windows Internet Explorer Weblog

IE8 Blocker Toolkit Available Today!Today

We believe IE8 helps make browsing the web faster, easier, safer and more reliable. To help our users be more secure and up-to-date, we will distribute IE8 via Automatic Update (AU) and the Windows Update (WU) and Microsoft Update (MU) sites much like we did for IE7. We know that in a corporate environment, the IT organization will often want to delay the introduction of a new browser until they have tested compatibility with internal applications and sites. We’ve done a lot of work in IE8 to maintain compatibility with sites designed for Internet Explorer 7, for example compatibility view and the compatibility meta tag. However we know many IT organizations will still want to test the browser before it is deployed. To help prevent users from installing IE8 through Automatic Update before compatibility testing has been completed, we are providing the IE8 Blocker Toolkit. This toolkit has no expiration date and can be configured either by running the registry file on the client machines or via Group Policy in domain joined environments. The Blocker Toolkit is available today from the

Happy New Year!December 31 2008

Two champagne glasses toasting.

Cheers!
The IE Team

IE Team Chat ScheduleDecember 29 2008

After a great turnout this year, we are continuing our monthly online Expert Zone chats with the IE Team in 2009. Here is our schedule for the first half of next year:

January 22nd

February 19th

March 19th

April 23rd

May 21st

June 18th

All our chats start at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered and hear from members of the IE product team. In case you miss the chat, a transcript will be published afterward and available online. Previous chat transcripts can be found here.

See you in the new year!

Allison Burnett
Program Manager

IE December Out-of-Band releaseDecember 17 2008

Internet Explorer is releasing an out-of-band update available via Windows Update. Alternatively, you can receive this and all other Microsoft updates via the new Microsoft Update. I encourage you to upgrade to Microsoft Update if you haven’t already to ensure that you receive the latest updates for all Microsoft products.

This update addresses one remote code execution vulnerability. The security update addresses the vulnerability by modifying the way Internet Explorer validates data binding parameters and handles the error resulting in the exploitable condition. For detailed information on the contents of this update, please see the following documentation:

This security update is rated Critical for all released versions of Internet Explorer.

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 updates from Microsoft.

Terry McCoy
Program Manager
Internet Explorer Security

The CSS Corner: Alternate Style SheetsDecember 16 2008

As publishing and layout standards for web documents, HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 define relatively few user experience requirements for browsers. One of them, however, mandates the ability for end users to switch among a set of mutually exclusive document styles defined by the author. This feature is known as alternate style sheets. Significantly, the end user must also be able to turn off all styling.

Unfortunately, Internet Explorer did not expose this feature in the user interface until IE8 Beta 2.

The Style Menu

If you navigate to the W3C’s alternate style sheets example page, your Page-Style menu will look like the following:

Image of the Page menu showing the Style Submenu. In the Style submenu are many different style choices as well as the choice of No style.

This new menu lets you turn off all CSS in the page through the No Style option, but you can also select any of the styles defined by the author of this page.

Under The Hood

If we look at the page source, the content of the head element specifies the relationship between the style names in the menu and the URIs of the corresponding external style sheets: