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Internet Explorer 8 event
I went to a little IE8 event hosted by Microsoft Belgium yesterday. Craig Spiezle, director of security and privacy gave a talk about IE8. It was mostly about the new security features but also contained a few interesting general tidbits.
After a roundup of common security threats (phishing, browser vulnerabilities, cross site scripting) Craig talked about how the IE8 team solved these issues. We also looked at a few new security and privacy related IE8 features.
Private browsing
IE8 now has a private browsing mode (called InPrivate), similar to Safari’s private browsing and Chrome’s incognito mode.
When MS announced private browsing they got a few questions from government/police departments whether that would make it harder to catch those evil “cybercriminals”, which is not the case. They said the InPrivate browsing has been called covering your tracks, e.g. making sure your girlfriend does not know you watched Who’s Nailin Paylin (this was not the actual example). In other words, it will protect you from relatives but not from the police department if your internet activity reeks of evil (e.g. child porn, terrorism).
InPrivate blocking
You can activate a feature called InPrivate blocking, which blocks 3rd party activity (meaning from another domain) if it occurs too often. This is mainly a feature to prevent your data being mined across sites. However, this is sort of an advanced user feature and I wonder whether anyone will actually use it. I also wonder whether this will not lead to problems with ads, analytics packages and syndicated content. These kind of requests consistently come from third parties.
Reported attack sites
Microsoft is keeping lists of reported attack sites that get updated all the time. When you visit a reported attack site you get a similar warning screen like you have in Firefox 3 when you visit a reported attack site (sort of looks like this).
Besides the list of domains there is also a list of files that might contain viruses. If you download a file that is marked as potentially dangerous, IE8 will give you a warning.
Standards and compability rendering mode
In other (old) news, IE8’s rendering defaults to standards mode. You can add a meta tag in the <head> section of your site to make the site render in compatibility mode, meaning it uses IE7s rendering engine. Microsoft’s don’t break the web mantra was mentioned.
Will IE6 be phased out?
IE8’s rendering engine is tons better in supporting CSS2, but we will only be able to use those properties if fewer people use older versions of IE. If only more people would upgrade their browsers! I asked a question about this:
Q: Are there any plans to phase out IE6 quicker than it is being phased out now? (and subsequently the same question for the IE7-IE8 transition when IE8 comes out)
A: All Microsoft products are supported for 10 years. After 5 years we will only introduce security related fixes. Also see the Microsoft Support Lifecycle.
Related to this, Eric Meyer wrote an article about John Resig’s Sizzle project, that might be able to help bridging the gap, so we can finally use all the exciting properties that we’ve been hearing about for years (display: table-cell; and multiple background images to name two).
A neat feature
A very neat feature is that you can delete your browsing history and cookies while keeping the data of sites in your favorites list intact.
Testing IE6, IE7, IE8 alongside each other?
Since the talk was given by the security guy I did’t ask my questions about rendering support and the motivation behind certain decisions (e.g. why is text resizing still there when there is page zoom?). However, here’s the other question I asked:
Q: Will it be possible to run IE6, IE7 and IE8 alongside each other for testing purposes?
A: No, you will have to switch IE8 to IE7 mode, you cannot run them at the same time. However, we have an internal tool that does this which may or may not be released; this is still internally being debated.
When will IE8 be released?
There is no release date at this point. Part of the release date depends on how Windows 7 development (the codename for the next Windows version) progresses.
Thanks for the session Miel!
Interesting read. I hope MS will release the tool to test websites in IE6, 7 and 8 alongside eachother. It would make the life of us web developers a lot more comfortable.
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:05 ∞Sounds like progress. Although, I am afraid to be disappointed. Some developer tools would be nice, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
October 23rd, 2008 at 7:29 ∞Totally welcome! See you at the next one, somewhere mid November. Thanks for the write-up and the linklove.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:04 ∞