W3C Charters Pointer Events Working Group

Following Microsoft’s submission of the Pointer Events specification, the W3C announced Friday the launch of the Pointer Events Working Group. The group intends to use Microsoft's proposal, based on the APIs available today in IE10 on Windows 8, as the starting point for a Recommendation track specification, an important step towards interoperable support on the Web. In their announcement, the W3C said, “enabling content creators to use a single [pointer] model for different input types will make content creation more efficient and inclusive.”

Last week during the W3C’s annual Technical Plenary and Advisory Council (TPAC) meeting in Lyon, France, members of the W3C met informally to discuss Pointer Events. Present in the meeting were representatives of Google, Mozilla, Opera, Nokia, LG, Intel, Microsoft, and others. With the overwhelming support pointer events received from browser vendors and Web developers, consumers and developers benefit. We look forward to working together to bring the next generation of input to the interoperable Web through standards.

Jacob Rossi

Program Manager

IE10: Fast, Fluid, Perfect for Touch, and Available Now for Windows 7

In Windows 8, we reimagined the browser with IE10. We designed and built IE10 to be the best way to experience the Web on Windows. With the IE10 Release Preview for Windows 7 consumers can now enjoy a fast and fluid Web with the updated IE10 engine on their Windows 7 devices. The release preview of IE10 on Windows 7 is available for download today.

IE10 on Windows 8 brings an entirely new browsing experience and set of capabilities to the Web, such as a new touch first browsing experience and full screen UI for your sites, security improvements that offer the best protection against the most common threats on the Web, improved performance, and support for the HTML5 and CSS3 standards developers need.

With this release preview, Windows 7 customers receive all of the performance, security, and under-hood changes that enable a stellar Web experience. IE10 Release Preview also sends the "Do Not Track" signal to Web sites by default to help consumers protect their privacy.

Fast and Fluid

Browser performance is critical for running today’s modern Web sites and applications. IE10 is all around fast, bringing improved hardware acceleration and Chakra JavaScript engine to Windows 7. We continue to focus on improving real world site performance andthird party recognition of IE's leadership in this area has been consistent.

You can experience IE10’s leading performance first hand with new demos on the IE Test Drive site with examples of hardware accelerated rendering in the Aston Martin 3D visualization for high frame rates, and interactivity, touch, and media with Audio Explosion.

The Mandelbrot test drive is another example of how IE10 runs real world sites fast, particularly sites with computationally intensive JavaScript and graphics. In this demo you can drill into detailed views of the Mandelbrot set and see how long it takes to calculate the view and how many iterations are calculated per second.

This image shows one of the presets calculated using the Mandelbrot Explorer test drive demo.

The chart below shows the result of Mandelbrot calculations for 21 presets run in IE10, Chrome 23, and Firefox 16, showing IE10 on average is over twice as fast as Chrome and about 20% faster than Firefox. Each calculation was run on identical hardware, a single Samsung Series 9 laptop with an Intel® Core™ i5-2537M CPU @ 1.40 Ghz with 4GB of memory running 64-bit Windows 7. You can see the full data results from this comparison here.

This chart shows the results of 21 Mandelbrot preset calculations run in IE10, Chrome 23, and Firefox 16 on Samsung Series 9 laptop with an Intel® Core™ i5-2537M CPU @ 1.40 Ghz with 4GB of memory running 64-bit Windows 7

More Interoperable HTML5 Support

IE10 shines on Windows 8, and with this release preview, IE10 brings the same powerful HTML5 engine to Windows 7 customers:

Rich Visual Effects: CSS Text Shadow, CSS 3D Transforms, CSS3 Transitions and Animations, CSS3 Gradient, SVG Filter Effects

Sophisticated Page Layouts: CSS3 for publication quality page layouts and application UI (CSS3 grid, flexbox, multi-column, positioned floats, regions, and hyphenation), HTML5 Forms, input controls, and validation

Enhanced Web Programming Model: Better offline applications through local storage with IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache; Web Sockets, HTML5 History, Async scripts, HTML5 File APIs, HTML5 Drag-drop, HTML5 Sandboxing, Web workers, ES5 Strict mode support.

Developers building on these capabilities in Windows 8 can run the same markup with the same performance and capabilities on Windows 7. You can find a full list of new functionality available to developers in the IE10 developer guide here.

Commitment to Privacy with "Do Not Track" on By Default

IE10 continues our focus on helping consumers protect their privacy, which started in IE9 with features such as Tracking Protection. In Windows 8, "Do Not Track" (DNT) is "on" in the Express Settings at time of set-up, and IE10 in Windows 7 also sends a "Do Not Track" signal to Web sites by default. Microsoft's customers have been clear that they want more control over how their personal information is used online.  While "Do Not Track" is a technology solution that’s still in its formative stages, it holds the promise of giving people greater choice and control of their privacy as they browse the Web.  IE10 Windows 7 customers are notified of the "Do Not Track" setting via IE10's first run welcome page, including instructions for how they can turn off "Do Not Track" should they wish.

We believe that meeting customer expectations by putting people first is the best way to grow online commerce and the Internet economy. Our commitment is to provide Windows customers an experience that is "private by default" in an era when so much user data is collected online. IE10 is the first browser to send a "Do Not Track" (DNT) signal by default.

A Better Web Today, and Ahead

The opportunities continue for HTML5 to make both Web sites and applications better. Those opportunities are exciting for everyone on the Web.

IE10 is an entirely new IE. It's fast, fluid and perfect for touch. Try it out for yourself on a Windows 8 device or, if you are a Windows 7 user, download the preview today. We look forward to continued engagement with the developer community and your feedback onConnect.

-- Rob Mauceri, Group Program Manager, Internet Explorer

IEAK 10 for Windows 8 now available

Internet Explorer Administration Kit 10 (IEAK 10) for Windows 8 is now available for download at http://ieak.microsoft.com. IEAK 10 simplifies the creation, deployment, and management of customized Internet Explorer 10 packages. IT Professionals can use IEAK 10 to configure the out-of-box Internet Explorer 10 experience for their users and to manage user settings after deploying Internet Explorer 10.

• Kevin Luu, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

IE 9.0.11 Available via Windows Update

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS12-071 - Critical

This security update resolves three privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the current user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 9 on Windows clients and Moderate for Internet Explorer 9 on Windows servers. For more information, see the full bulletin.

Recommendation. Most customers have automatic updating enabled and will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically. Customers who have not enabled automatic updating need to check for updates and install this update manually. For information about specific configuration options in automatic updating, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 294871.

For administrators and enterprise installations, or end users who want to install this security update manually, Microsoft recommends that customers apply the update immediately using update management software, or by checking for updates using the Microsoft Update service.

• Tyson Storey, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

BUILD 2012: 50 Performance Tricks to make your HTML5 Applications and Sites faster

Creating high performance Web applications is crucial for every Web developer, be it a Web site that runs on a standards based Web browser or a Windows Store App. Microsoft recently hosted the BUILD 2012 conference at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. At this conference, I had the opportunity to share the Internet Explorer team’s favorite 50 performance tips to make HTML5 apps and sites faster. If you weren’t able to attend the conference, I recommend you check out the video.

These performance tips and tricks apply equally to Web sites that run on standards based Web browsers, and Windows Store Apps, which are also just the Web. There are six principals detailed in the talk that will help you improve the performance of your apps and sites today:

• Quickly respond to network requests
• Minimize bytes downloaded
• Efficiently structure markup
• Optimize media usage
• Write fast JavaScript
• Know what your application is doing

I hope you enjoy the talk.

— Jatinder Mann, Internet Explorer, Program Manager

User Experiences – Listen, Learn, Refine

Your feedback is an essential part of how we refine the user experience for the final product.

The IE9 beta reached millions of users around the world (over 25 million downloads), and we received a lot of feedback – a total of over 17,000 pieces of feedback since the start of IE9. The extensive reach of the beta gives us the opportunity to learn how users really use the product. Your feedback and opt-in user instrumentation are used to better understand your experiences with IE9. By listening to your specific feedback, and learning more about how you use the features through instrumentation, we gain more insight into how users browse. With those inputs, we took action to improve the overall user experience, and you can see the results in the IE9 RC.

For example, one area that we heard a lot of feedback was to refine search queries from the One Box (the new address bar with built-in search). Users can type a search query in the One Box that navigates to a search result Web page. Typically, the search result Web page shows a large search box at the top and bottom of the page to refine the query. We heard during beta, that users wanted the ability to refine the query through the One Box, too. We learned that the user behavior of starting a task and refining the task are closely connected. This led to extending the One Box to retrieve the search query through selecting the search icon.

Applying your feedback to refine the experience

Listening is a key part of our design process, and your feedback is a critical piece in refining the experience.

We start the design process by defining the user goals. We use these goals to guide our thinking so that the focus is always on the user. During the design of a feature, we use the instrumentation and telemetry we have, and apply judgment to determine the specifics of a feature. Once the feature is implemented, we evaluate it through a series ofuser studies. The user studies help identify issues that may not have been found through our internal use of the product at Microsoft. Even with the thousands of internal users, this is too small of a sample size to be representative of our larger user base.

This is what makes the beta so important. The broad reach of the beta allows us to evaluate the design with real users on a massive and statistically relevant scale. We have a variety of channels for feedback - the Connect site, blog post comments, site visits, and unsolicited comments from friends and family. We went through each and every piece of feedback to understand the user intent and expectation. We then stepped back to see how the feedback aligns with the goals we set out for the IE9 release for site-centric browsing through Windows.

We also recognize the range of our user base – some users browse to a dozen different sites on a regular basis while more enthusiastic users browse to many sites in just one session.

We want to make the broadest impact possible for all of our users. Our approach is two-fold:

• Invest in the areas where the default browsing experience is designed for everyone with sites at the center and
• Extend browsing to enthusiasts while keeping the default experience focused for everyone.

Here are some of the changes we’ve made to the user experience for the RC release based on your feedback:

Frame

Less frame, more site content!

“Thank you for putting browser clutter in the background and letting the sites shine through.” – LovingIE9Beta

We are encouraged by the positive feedback on a site-centric frame that minimizes visual distraction from sites and significantly reduces the vertical space. The RC frame is now leaner with 5 more vertical pixels for the site content.

IE9 frame (un-minimized) is on the right with the 63 pixels of vertical space

IE9 frame (maximized) is on the right with 55 pixels of vertical space

With more vertical space for the site, you can see one more email item, tweet, or news headline.

A consistent way to extend the frame

The frame layout shows only the most essential controls for navigation, giving you even more space for the site. For enthusiasts that want more of the browser controls visible can extend it through the frame context menu. At beta we heard that finding the right context menu is tricky – sometimes you get the system context menu depending on where you invoked the menu. We’ve combined the system and frame context menu so that you can consistently access the menu you want.

The menu bar is back

“I can press Alt to get menu up, but if I wanted to keep it there I can't.” – acidtrance.

Now you can set the menu bar to always be visible.

One Box

Refine a search query

“Difficult to refine search terms, because search terms get replaced by the search page URL” - yasufs

When you search in the One Box, the last search query is available through the search icon on the right of the search box. This also works for the search keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-E.

One Box search icon

Search using specific keywords like “:”

“As a power user I need to use advanced search operators like 'site:' or 'filetype:' very often. With the new address bar this results in an error message” - persident

Previously the One Box treated text with the colon “:” as a protocol like “mailto:” and “tel:” which triggered navigation instead of search. From the beta we learned that enthusiasts rely on these search-specific keywords to narrow down their search results. In IE9 RC when we detect the colon we first check to see if there is a matching protocol, and if it is not found we treat is as a search query.

Directly navigate with copied text (Ctrl-Shift-L)

“I know I can paste and then hit enter, but to do 2 steps instead of 1 when I use it all the time is frustrating.” - larune

In the IE9 beta, we updated the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-L to set focus in the address bar to navigate quickly. We learned that enthusiasts want even more ways to efficiently navigate. We extended this keyboard shortcut to directly navigate with text on the clipboard - copy text or a URL anywhere on the system and use Ctrl-Shift-L to navigate/search directly without needing to set focus in the address bar.

Tab enhancements

Dedicated tab row

“I prefer the tabs to be in a separate row, and I agree it should be an option so each person can choose.” – Jeff Yates

“What others said: speed and UI is great, just need an option for advanced users to move tabs into separate row. Keep up the good work!” - Vilius

We’ve heard from many avid users who want the option for a larger address bar and more room for tabs. There is a new option for a dedicated row of tabs to maximize the room for the address bar and tabs if you need it. Tabs use the entirety of the horizontal space – edge-to-edge.

IE9 RC Frame with a dedicated tab row

Visible active tab

“when you have a couple of tabs open its hard to know which is the tab that is in focus or selected.” – LiquidBoy

When you have a lot of tabs, we heard that it was hard to find the active tab, especially when there are tab groups that use color to indicate a group. We’ve increased the contrast between the active and inactive tabs so that in a glance it is easy to find the active tab.

Close button on inactive tab

“I would like to be able to close any open tab by click on the "X" of that tab without bringing it to the foreground.” –osu940

The close button is available on an inactive tab so you no longer need to select a tab to close it. Alternatively, you can middle-click using your mouse on the tab to close it.

Pinned sites

Pin a site with Taskbar on the right or left

“my taskbar is actually docked at the left of the screen. when I want to pin a tab to the task bar, it does not recognize the task bar anymore.” – umhan

Pinned sites is a way to have your favorite sites at your fingertips through the Windows 7 Taskbar, simply by dragging the tab to the Taskbar. The most common configuration of the Taskbar is at the bottom. When a user drags a tab to either the left or the right, we treat this as Windows 7 Aero Snap to view tabs side-by-side. We realized that when the Taskbar is configured to the left or right, it was in conflict with Aero Snap. For RC, you can now pin sites to the Taskbar regardless of your Taskbar location. You can continue to use tab Aero Snap by redoing the snap motion (the first one motion is treated as pinning to the Taskbar, the second time it is treated as Aero Snap for a side-by-side view).

Taskbar located on the left, first drag tab motion is to pin the site

The second drag tab motion is to Aero Snap for a side-by-side view

Pin a site with InPrivate Browsing

“why not make it possible for the user to choose to make InPrivate the default browsing mode? I may want to be InPrivate all the time, for example.” - Paul

If there is a site that you prefer to browse using InPrivate Browsing (does not store history, cookies, temporary Internet files, or other data) like checking Web mail on a shared computer, you can now pin the InPrivate Browsing site to the taskbar.

Hotmail as a pinned site with InPrivate Browsing

Pin multiple sites

“Pin a group of favorites as a single pinned entry” – Andy Jacobs

I saved the best for last. We received lots of positive feedback on having sites on the Taskbar just like any other application. Users found this to be a faster way to launch their everyday sites. We also learned through feedback that enthusiasts often use a set of sites together – for example banking sites, shopping sites, entertainment sites, etc. With the IE RC you can now set multiple homepages to a pinned site (right-click on the site icon). Each time you launch the pinned site the related sites are also available.

Shopping sites – Adding Ebay to my Amazon pinned site

The dozen changes described in this post are a small subset of improvements we’ve made for the IE9 RC. Please give it a try. We couldn’t have made these changes without your thoughtful feedback.

Thanks to everyone who tried the IE9 beta and took the time to share their thoughts. You helped us design a better product for everyone who uses IE9.

—Jane Kim, Lead Program Manager, Internet Explorer User Experience

W3C Geolocation API in IE9

IE9 RC includes support for the W3C Geolocation API, which enables Web developers to request the user’s physical location. This capability is useful for many Web sites, especially those that are already location-aware. For example, mapping services can now center the map based on where you actually are. Sites that let you check in can recommend nearby places. Local search can work more reliability.

Internet Explorer respects your privacy. With your permission, Web sites can obtain your approximate latitude and longitude by calling one of the W3C Geolocation API methods. If a Web site requests your location, Internet Explorerwill notify you and let you choose whether or not to grant the requesting Web site access to your location. You can allow or deny the Web site access to your location once, or you can always allow or deny by clicking on the “Options for this site” button. At any time, you can clear the list of sites you have allowed or denied access to on the Privacy tab in Tools->Internet Options. On that tab, you can also turn off geolocation and prevent any Web site from requesting your location.

If you allow, Internet Explorer will approximate your location with the help of the Microsoft Location Service and works without the need for additional hardware. Given an IP address or a list of nearby WiFi hotspots, it can approximate your physical location using a database of IP addresses and a database of known hotspot locations.

You can try out this capability on the IE9 Test Drive site. Just click “locate me,” approve the prompt, and check out the result. If you zoom out, you can see the error radius that is returned by the API. You’ll notice that location requests with WiFi data are more accurate than those based just on IP address.

In a future post we’ll get into some useful code samples that demonstrate how to integrate this capability into your Web site. Until then, you can check out the Geolocation Demo on the IE Test Drive site.

—Andy Zeigler, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

IE9 Feedback: Platform Previews through Beta

Thanks for your Feedback!

When we released the first IE9 Platform Preview, we talked about the importance of feedback. Since that first release last March, we’ve released six more platform previews, an IE9 Beta, and a bug-fix update to that Beta and the IE9 RC. We want to thank everyone who provided feedback during the last nine months. Sharing your experiences with the IE Test Drive and Testing Center while testing your sites for compatibility and trying out new features like Pinned Sitesall helps make IE9 better. We’d like to take this opportunity to share with you the trends we are seeing in feedback, provide visibility into how we handle that feedback, and show how it is has affected the Release Candidate.

The Numbers

When we discussed our approach to feedback systems, we talked about our commitment to take action on everypiece of feedback we receive. This approach is different than other feedback systems. The level of interest in the previews and Beta so far has been strong. At the time of this post, the IE9 Platform Previews have been downloaded over 3.3 million times, the Beta over 25 million times, and we’ve received over 17,000 bugs from the public via Connect. That is 23% more downloads than IE8 Beta 2 during the same period and over three times as much feedback as we received for the entirety of IE8—from Beta through RTM.

These numbers represent interest from customers, developers and enthusiasts around the world. Over 8,000 people have logged bugs on over 8,000 domains worldwide. More than 7,500 of these users are providing feedback for the first time with IE9. We welcome these new users, just as we marvel at those who have provided exceptional contributions. Two users, Wheels of Flames and the dees (registration required), have logged over 200 bugs each, while another three, iecustomizer, Taciturne, and FremyCompany, have each logged over 50. Wow! We cannot thank these and our other users enough for investing their time and effort.

More on our Feedback Systems

We investigate each item of feedback for reproducibility and uniqueness. Unique reproducible bugs are ranked in terms of importance and severity—a process we call triage. Once we investigate and triage an issue, we update the status in Connect.

Some of the feedback we receive is about the feedback management process itself, and questions around what the different resolutions for reported issues actually mean. Here are the resolutions you’ll see on Connect, and what they mean:

• Fixed: The engineering team reproduced the issue and has fixed it in this release. This is clearly our favorite resolution.
• Not Repro: The engineering team could not reproduce this issue. Some issues are very subtle and hard to reproduce across different systems and Internet access configurations. Help from the community here is crucial. (If you can still reproduce the problem, please provide step-by-step details and additional configuration information by attaching an IEDiag log file and a Fiddler trace while reproducing the problem. If possible, please try to reproduce on a second machine.)
• By Design: The engineering team expects the behavior noted in the report. By Design means we understand the feedback and the behavior is deliberate. An example of an issue that we consider By Design is that the Platform Preview does not install on Windows XP. IE9 has security (e.g. protected mode) and graphics (e.g. DirectX) functionality that requires other components not available on Windows XP, an operating system that first shipped in 2001 with IE6. Because of the decision to not support Windows XP, the issue of IE9 not installing on it is “By design.”
• Won’t Fix/Postponed/Feature Suggestion: The engineering team investigated the issue or suggestion and will not address it in this release of IE. We will consider the issue for the next product cycle, especially if the severity or frequency of the issue changes. An example here might be work that is out of scope for the current release (e.g. MathML support), or features that do not fit in the overall context of the release.

How it Comes Together

Your feedback helps us make IE9 better and we appreciate it. We use the feedback that you provide to aggregate and identify your top issues. We tally the number of duplicate bug reports, number of validations (when users click “I can reproduce the issue too” on Connect), and the number of comments to identify the most critical user concerns. From there, one of the steps of triage is to determine if the feedback is a product issue (code defect), feature request, or general feedback. We read all feedback and assign it an action on the path to closure. Additionally, every week we look at the list of top issues as a team to ensure we are doing the right thing for our customer concerns.

When we talked about how we listened, learned, and refined the user experience, we noted that your feedback was critical to several of the major changes we made in the IE9 RC. We provided several examples of how user input from Connect, blog post comments, and other sources led to improvements in the browser. Feedback directly contributes to what we call “Design Change Requests,” which typically occur when feedback indicates that a design decision should be revisited. Whether they were feature requests or bugs, we took all of the top issues seriously, fixing all of the top five issues and seven of the top 10. Note that we fix these at various times throughout the product cycle – it’s important for users to test out each new Platform Preview and full browser build to verify that their issues are resolved and validate the improved quality of the product.

Top 10 Concerns in IE9 Beta

Feedback ID	MS Connect Title	Duplicate Reports	Validations	Community Comments	Resolution Description
598728	[REQUEST] Make IE9 URL-BAR better please IE team!	283	351	177	The core of this issue is the desire to see more of the address and tabs for users who open many tabs. In response to this feedback, with the RC we added a feature to allow you to separate the tab bar from the address bar.
599845	Loading Circle	298	252	138	Users found that the spinning circle in the tab stopped before the page had fully loaded. We’ve fixed this in RC.
598400	Download speed not shown	169	198	80	Users wanted to see the speed of multiple downloads in progress. With RC, we’ve added this feature to the top level of the Download Manager.
598389	Highlighting text and releasing the button over a link clicks the link	123	117	59	This issue was fixed in Platform Preview 6
598102	Please return my Menu Bar	102	131	36	Users couldn’t find the Menu bar (which was found using the Alt key in the Beta). With the RC we’ve updated the right click interface in the title bar and tab bar to allow you to turn on the Menu bar permanently.
600623	Feature Request - Move Home, Favorites, and Tools buttons	88	87	30	With RC we addressed the primary user concern around the option to have a dedicated tab row along with showing the menu bar. With these options, users can get the favorites and tools option in the top-left region.
598091	Websites cannot be pinned to taskbar it taskbar is on the left of the screen	88	60	16	When users had their Taskbar anywhere other than the bottom of the screen, attempting to pin a site by dragging a tab was interpreted as an Aero Snap command for a side-by-side view. With the Release Candidate, the initial drag to a non-bottom aligned Taskbar is interpreted as a pin command – if you then drag your mouse away and back over the Taskbar, it will be interpreted as a Snap.
598615	Back button is drawn incorrectly	82	69	39	The clipping of the Back button is By Design. It is designed to provide some visual tension for the left side of the browser, balancing out the three buttons on the right side. It emphasizes the importance of site content over the browser frame.
598257	spellchecker	57	79	44	We are not addressing this feature request in IE9, but will be considering it for future versions.
598737	Show Desktop not showing Sidebar Gadgets	52	77	26	Gadgets should always remain visible on your desktop, even when you hit the Show Desktop button. We fixed this issue in the RC.

While we are pleased to be able to fix many of the top issues, in the end we won’t fix every issue reported. As we said above, there are a variety of reasons why we decide to not fix a reported issue. Some of these issues are external to IE, some may introduce security issues, while others may be limited in their scope of impact. Sometimes we receive conflicting feedback – while one segment of users may like the cut-off Back button, others may not. In all circumstances, our decision making revolves around delivering a quality default experience for all of our users.

Looking Forward

Our continued request is that you download the IE9 Release Candidate, try the samples on the test drive site, and try your own sites. Visit your favorite sites, try out the new features we announced and changes we made to the browser frame, and send us feedback about your experiences. Developers, send IE9 the same markup that you send to other browsers and use feature detection, not browser detection, to alter behavior between browsers and versions, when needed.

The IE7 compatibility view built into IE9, which some sites may run in, does not offer the best performance possible. If you still have sites that run in IE7 compatibility mode we recommend that you move those to IE9 standards mode. We want sites to get the full performance benefits of IE9 that come with running in IE9 standards mode. We also want your feedback from handing IE9 the same markup you hand other browsers.

Thanks again for your participation in the Internet Explorer feedback program.

—Justin Saint Clair, Program Manager

Web Tracking Protection: An Emerging Internet Standard that Helps Protect Consumers from Tracking

Today, the W3C has accepted and published Microsoft’s member submission for an Internet standard to help protect consumer privacy. This announcement from the Web standards body responsible for HTML5 is an important step forward for people and businesses that interact online.

The privacy concerns from consumers and academics and governments world-wide have both technical and non-technical aspects. Addressing these concerns will involve technology. The W3C’s involvement provides the best forum possible for that technology discussion. Just as the community has worked together at the W3C on interoperable HTML5, we can now work together on an interoperable (or universal, to use the FTC privacy report’s term) way to help protect consumers’ privacy.

Addressing these privacy concerns will also involve much more than technology. Governments and regulators and law enforcement have a crucial role to plan in addressing the public’s privacy concerns. There’s a large and growing body of work that shows the complexities of the non-technical issues they face. Some examples are the privacyreport from the US Federal Trade Commission in December 2010, the work of the EU’s Article 29 working group andEU ePrivacy directives, and public discussions like the recent one at the UC Berkeley. 

The technology solutions we work on as an industry need to work well with the social, economic, and political discussions that occur world-wide outside the W3C. The FTC’s report, for example, provided a context that made ourannouncement of IE9’s Tracking Protection functionality much easier for many to understand. That report also notes the following issues and questions about technical solutions:

• A universal mechanism should not undermine the benefits of online behavioral advertising, including funding free online content and providing personalized advertisements that many consumers want.
• A universal mechanism should be different from the Do Not Call program (which has a registry of consumer phone numbers) in one key regard:   it should not require a registry of unique identifiers as that could negatively impact privacy.  Instead, the FTC recommended a browser-based mechanism.
• Should a universal choice mechanism go beyond a total opt-out and include an option that lets consumers make granular choices about the types of data they are willing to have collected from them and the type of advertising they wish to receive?
• Universal choice mechanisms should be understandable, simple, easy to find and very clear about what the choices mean.
• There are a number of questions about the mechanics of a universal mechanism, including how it should be publicized, how it can be as clear as possible, how many consumers are likely to choose to opt out of targeted advertising, what will happen if many opt out and whether legislation should be passed if the private sector does not implement a universal mechanism voluntarily.

Through this lens, the W3C’s Web Tracking Protection, based on the IE9 Tracking Protection functionality, is a strong step forward.

The proposal with the W3C is a significant step toward enabling an industry standard way for Web sites to (1) detect when consumers express their intent not to be tracked, and (2) help protect themselves from sites that do not respect that intent. Enabling consumers merely to express their intent to not be tracked is just not sufficient. It’s a subset of what effective tracking protection should do. IE9’s Tracking Protection also enables consumers to block the content that does the tracking. You can see some initial examples of Tracking Protection lists here. This diagram illustrates how a browser that supports Web Tracking Protection works with lists:

We look forward to working with the community through the W3C on a common standard for Internet Privacy. It will help consumers who use browsers that support it.

—Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer

Updated 2/24: added link to announcement of IE9's Tracking Protection

ActiveX Filtering for Consumers

ActiveX Filtering in the IE9 Release Candidate gives you greater control over how Web pages run on your PC. With ActiveX Filtering, you can turn off ActiveX controls for all Web sites and then turn them back on selectively as you see fit. While ActiveX controls like Adobe Flash are important for Web experiences today for videos and more, some consumers may want to limit how they run for security, performance, or other reasons.

In this post, we’ll show how you can improve your browsing experience with ActiveX Filtering. We’ll walk through how this feature works in IE9 and share details on how IT administrators can deploy this feature in corporations. In a future post we’ll share some best practices that Web site authors should use to ensure that their sites work well with ActiveX Filtering.

You can try out ActiveX Filtering in the Release Candidate using this demo from the IE TestDrive site. You can also see the feature in action in this short video:

Background: ActiveX Controls & Browsing

To display interactive content and video, many of today’s Web sites use plug-ins like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. “ActiveX” is the technology these plug-ins use to run inside of IE. Like other add-ons, they are essentially Windows applications that run in the browser. Poorly written add-ons and ActiveX controls can therefore affect IE’sperformance, reliability, security and privacy in similar ways.

Some controls may be used to display undesirable or malicious content, preventing you from having a good experience when viewing a Web site.

ActiveX content may prevent you from having a good experience viewing a Web site

Some consumers are concerned about the potential impact of ActiveX controls and would want to limit them to run only on Web sites where you need them to view the content. ActiveX Filtering is a built-in, more generalized version of browser extensions like FlashBlock and ClickToFlash.

Introducing ActiveX Filtering

With ActiveX Filtering, you choose which sites are allowed to use your ActiveX controls, while all other Web sites cannot use them. ActiveX Filtering helps limit the impact that ActiveX controls have on your browsing experience since the controls can run only on specific sites. ActiveX Filtering also prevents Web pages from showing potentially unwanted content that relies on ActiveX controls.

ActiveX Filtering enables you to focus on the content you want to view

By default, IE9 does not filter any ActiveX controls on Web sites to ensure you experience the sites as intended by their authors. If you desire increased control of ActiveX controls while browsing, you can enable ActiveX Filtering via the Tools menu:

Tools /  > Safety > ActiveX Filtering

Once you enable ActiveX Filtering, IE prevents ActiveX controls from running on all Web sites. When you visit a Web page that contains ActiveX controls, notice that ActiveX content is blocked from loading on the page. IE displays fallback content chosen by the site’s author if it is available.

Instead of displaying a prominent notification prompting you to install or enable controls, IE stays out of the way of your browsing while it also makes it easy for you to turn off filtering when you need to. IE displays an icon in the address bar to indicate that some content has been filtered on the site.

If a Web site contains ActiveX content that you want to view, you can turn off filtering for just the current Web site. When you click on the icon in the address bar, IE displays the fly-out window:

You can click “Turn off ActiveX Filtering” for just the current site. Once you take action, IE refreshes the Web page to ensure that ActiveX controls are properly instantiated in place of any fallback content that was originally present on the page. ActiveX controls from other Web pages under the same domain (in the above case, msn.com) will also be unblocked.

The icon on the address bar changes color to indicate that you have turned off filtering on this Web site. After you’ve finished viewing the content, you can turn ActiveX Filtering back on by clicking on the icon again, which re-displays the fly-out window:

The address bar icon and fly-out window are also used for the Tracking Protection feature. If you have installed a Tracking Protection list you may see this icon appear on sites that only contain content blocked by Tracking Protection. In these cases you’ll need to launch the fly-out window to determine what content has been blocked. If you want to reset all the exceptions you’ve made for ActiveX Filtering and Tracking Protection, you can use Delete Browsing history. Be sure to select just this one checkbox:

Section to delete ActiveX Filtering data from the Delete Browsing History dialog

ActiveX Filtering for Managed Desktops

Administrators can deploy ActiveX Filtering for their organizations easily by setting a group policy. The feature is disabled by default for the Local Intranet Zone so that intranet Web sites and LOB applications can continue to use ActiveX controls without disruption, and can be adjusted separately for each security zone.

Try it out!

To have a trustworthy browsing experience, it’s important that you are in control of the applications running in your browser. With ActiveX Filtering, you can now browse the Web with more control of your ActiveX controls. You can easily turn on the controls on sites that contain ActiveX content you want to view. This feature successfully limits the content that is allowed to run ActiveX controls, thus minimizing any potential performance, reliability, security or privacy impact on your browsing experience.

We encourage you try out this feature on the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate today, using the demo available from the TestDrive site. Please let us know if you find sites that don’t work properly with ActiveX Filtering. We look forward to hearing your feedback through blog comments and the Connect site.

—Herman Ng, Program Manager, Internet Explorer