All posts tagged ‘IE’

File Under: Browsers
Feb
2
2012

Microsoft Touts Plugin-Free Web, Offers Desktop Fallback for Flash

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Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer has barred browser plugins in the Metro environment. But Microsoft has revealed a method that plugin-dependent websites can use to leap over Metro’s walls and reach the green fields of the conventional Windows desktop, where Flash is still allowed to roam free.

The relevance of proprietary browser plugins is declining as standards-based web technologies mature. Native web technologies don’t yet supply complete functional equivalence with the capabilities of plugins, but the open web has the advantage of greater ubiquity.

The ubiquity of native web standards over proprietary plugins is set to get a major boost from Microsoft with the launch of Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10. As we have previously reported, the next major version of Microsoft’s web browser will not display plugins in the Metro environment, which will be the default shell in Windows 8.

A plugin-dependent website prompting the user for permission to run on the desktop. Image courtesy of Microsoft

Microsoft has published a series of posts in its official IE development blog that discuss the implications of this change and what it means for users and web developers. In a new post published this week, IE program manager lead John Hrvatin highlighted the advantages of plugin-free browsing and emphasized the need for web developers to start supporting users who browse in environments that don’t have plugins enabled.

“The transition to a plug-in free web is happening today. Any site that uses plugins needs to understand what their customers experience when browsing plugin free. Lots of web browsing today happens on devices that simply don’t support plugins,” he wrote. “Metro style IE runs plug-in free to improve battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers.”

A growing number of websites that rely on browser plugins already offer a standards-based fallback for users who are browsing on popular plugin-free devices such as as the iPhone or iPad. Microsoft has previously discussed some of the steps it is taking to ensure that those websites serve their plugin-free content to Metro users.

There will still likely be many Flash-heavy websites, however, that can’t accommodate users who are browsing without plugins. In the blog post, Hrvatin explained that such websites can ask the user for permission to jump to the conventional Windows desktop and launch the windowed version of Internet Explorer, which will have full support for plugins.

Web developers can get the browser to display the prompt by including the special requiresActiveX=true property in an X-UA-Compatible meta tag or HTTP header. Hrvatin cautions that this feature is included for transitional purposes and is intended to serve as a last resort. The preferred behavior is still for web developers to display a plugin-free version of their site to users who are browsing in the Metro environment.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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File Under: Browsers
Jan
13
2012

The Curious Case of Web Browser Names

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Chances are your web browser is open all day, every day. Whether it’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome or Safari, the browser is the single most important piece of software most of us use. Given its central place in our lives, some history seems in order. If you’ve ever stopped browsing long enough to wonder why Safari is named Safari or where in the world the word “Mozilla” comes from, we have some answers for you.

Martin Beeby, a developer evangelist at Microsoft, has put together a nice little history of web browser names. Some are obvious — Internet Explorer came about because it was “a name that gave people a clear idea of what the product did” — some are less so, like Opera, which was apparently chosen because, among other things, “the Opera is fun.”

With the exception of Opera and IE, none of Beeby’s name origin stories come directly from the companies behind the browsers, so take all of these with a grain of salt. For instance, no one seems to know the exact origins of “Safari”, though the Beach Boys’ album seems like a reasonable guess — surfing the web, Surfin’ Safari… get it? The WebKit blog is named Surfin’ Safari, which might lend some credence to that story, but the name also nicely ties in with the notion of exploring the wild and connotes some of the same images as “explorer” and “navigator”.

Perhaps the least obvious name in the bunch is Firefox’s parent company Mozilla. Beeby cites a well-known story that the name that was derived by combining the words that were its original goal — “Mosaic Killer.” Webmonkey has heard another version of that story that claims the word “Godzilla” was the inspiration for “Mozilla,” a Godzilla-like force that would destroy Mosaic.

Beeby doesn’t offer any stories for less well-known browsers, like Konqueror, which, as the story goes, was going to “conquer” what IE and Netscape had “explored” and “navigated” respectively. The allusion didn’t really pan out, but, when Apple came along and ported KHTML to form WebKit, the developers did name their early efforts after a famous conqueror — Alexander.

For more details, and to learn where the names Firefox and Chrome come from, be sure to read through Beeby’s post.

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File Under: Browsers
Jan
4
2012

Microsoft Bids Farewell to IE 6 as U.S. Use Drops Below 1 Percent

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IE 6 falls below 1 percent in the U.S. Delicious.

Microsoft is throwing itself a little party to celebrate the demise of Internet Explorer 6. Based on the latest data from Net Applications, the much-maligned browser recently fell below 1 percent in the United States, which prompted the IE Team to celebrate with a cake on IE 6′s grave, as it were.

Roger Capriotti, director of Internet Explorer marketing, writes, “IE 6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away.”

The U.S. joins Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in the less-than-1-percent category and several more nations are not far behind. Microsoft also recently announced that it would begin forcing IE updates for those that have opted into automatic Windows Updates, which should help further reduce the number of both IE 6 and IE 7 users.

Unfortunately for web developers the worldwide browser market share picture is not quite as bright. Internet Explorer 6 still has a considerable user base in China, where it tops 25 percent, and much of the rest of Asia hovers in the 5 percent range.

The other bad news is that despite the demise of IE 6, compensating for the shortcomings in both IE 7 and IE 8 remain necessary parts of a web developer’s job. And, given that Windows XP users will never be able to upgrade beyond IE 8, IE 8 will likely take IE 6′s place as the official pain in the ass of web developers everywhere.

Photo from the Windows Team Blog

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
30
2011

Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 4: Windows 7 Users Need Not Apply

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Microsoft has released the fourth preview of Internet Explorer 10. As is the case with previous Platform Previews, the release is aimed at developers: the new features are important to those creating rich, complex web applications, but will have less impact on web users.

However, even web developers might struggle to get too excited about the latest preview, because they probably won’t be able to run it: it only works on the Windows 8 preview release that Microsoft shipped at its BUILD conference in September.

Safely share data between domains with IE10's CORS

The new features include Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), JavaScript typed arrays and binary file manipulation, and HTML5 video subtitling. Typed arrays and support for binary files enable much better performance for JavaScript applications that handle binary data, such as images and audio.

CORS provides a safe way for JavaScript applications to use services offered by different providers. Traditionally, JavaScript has been restricted by the same-origin policy: a script can only have full access to content that is hosted at the same domain, port, and protocol. This provides security by preventing theft of, for example, cookies and page data by objects included from other sites.

CORS allows one application to expose its data to another application even when the same-origin policy would otherwise deny such access. This is useful for creating “mashup” applications that combine web services from multiple different providers.

Microsoft has positioned its Platform Previews as a way to let developers test and provide feedback on new features so that they can inform Microsoft of bugs, and guide the development of new specifications. The first two Platform Previews for Internet Explorer 10 were made available to users of Windows 7. This preview, however, is not. If you want to use it, you’ll have to use the Windows 8 Developer Preview.

The third preview was in the same position; Microsoft did not release a Windows 7 version of Platform Preview 3. Instead, the version of Internet Explorer that shipped with the Windows 8 Developer Preview was the third preview. Though Internet Explorer 10 will support Windows 7 when released, web developers wanting to test the software now will have to use an unsupported, not-even-beta operating system to do so. And while they can do so using a virtual machine, doing so will disable most or all of the hardware acceleration features found in the browser, making it a second-rate experience.

This is a decidedly odd move. Internet Explorer 10 is going to be fundamental to Windows 8 in a way that no past version of the browser has been. HTML and JavaScript are one way for developers to create new touch-friendly Metro-style applications, and this support will be built on Internet Explorer 10.

But as important as Metro-style applications are to Microsoft, the browser will still have a substantial user base on Windows 7, and the web developers of today are far more likely to be using Windows 7 than they are Windows 8. Regular non-Metro web applications still matter. Effectively excluding this group from the preview—the group most likely to have valuable feedback and insight—makes one wonder what the entire purpose of the scheme is.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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File Under: CSS, Web Standards
May
20
2011

A Guide to CSS Hacks for Internet Explorer

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Woolly, the CSS sheep.

Internet Explorer. That’s all you really need to say to raise a web designer’s blood pressure. And yes, we know IE is improving, but there are still plenty of users stuck on IE 8 and IE 7 (even IE 6) and you can’t just leave those browsers out in the cold.

The first method that came along to deal with IE’s rendering quirks were various CSS hacks — slip an underscore in here, add an asterisk there and you can target specific versions of IE in your stylesheets.

CSS hacks work well enough, but they’re a pain to maintain. Using conditional comments to load IE-only stylesheets is another option, but now you have extra HTTP requests and two stylesheets to maintain. You could also use conditional comments to add CSS classes to the <html> or <body> tags of your pages, but that increases the size of your pages in every browser.

The truth is there’s no perfect way to handle IE. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages and the right answer will vary from project to project.

We can’t tell you how to handle IE, but we can tell you that developer Mathias Bynens has put together a very well written and thorough rundown of all the different ways you can handle Internet Explorer’s rendering quirks — conditional stylesheets, conditional classnames and good old CSS hacks. Bynens also has a fourth option: combining conditional classnames with “safe” CSS hacks.

Bynens defines “safe” CSS hacks as hacks that “work in specific versions of a given web browser” and are “unlikely to be parsed by all other browsers, including future versions.”

Regardless of how you choose to deal with Internet Explorer, the reality is you will have to deal with it. Bynens’ post makes a great primer on the various options available and is well worth adding to your bookmarks.

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File Under: Browsers
May
11
2011

Install Google Chrome Frame Without Admin Privileges

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Google has some good news for those of you stuck using Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8. The company’s Chrome Frame technology, which injects the Google Chrome rendering engine into Internet Explorer, can now be installed without needing admin privileges in Windows.

For now the new features are only in the experimental dev channel, but once this build has been stabilized the new features will roll out to the beta and final release channels.

While it’s true that simply switching web browsers is a far better solution than using Chrome Frame, for those who can’t switch browsers because they’re stuck in corporate IT environments where old versions of IE still reign supreme, Chrome Frame remains the only real solution. Of course such environments are also precisely the sort of places where users can’t install their own software, which is why Google has eliminated the need for admin rights to install Chrome Frame.

Triggering Chrome Frame is left up to individual sites, which must add a meta tag to their pages to check for Chrome Frame.

For more info on what’s new in the latest release of Chrome Frame, check out this video from Google’s ongoing I/O conference in San Francisco:

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Aug
25
2010

Get to Know Your New User Agent Strings

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With the two most-popular web browsers ready to drop new versions within the next couple of months, you’re going to have to adjust a few twiddly bits on your website if you’re sniffing user agent strings. Of course, you should be sniffing for capabilities and not blocking browsers, but nonetheless, it’s helpful to see what the new strings look like.

Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft’s new browser, due in September, has a new UA string. Details are on the IE blog, but here it is:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)

Firefox 4

Likewise, the new version of Firefox — version 4 is due October-ish — will have an updated UA string. Unlike IE, Firefox runs on several platforms, so there are a few:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/yyyymmdd Firefox/4.0.1
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/yyyymmdd Firefox/4.0.1
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/yyyymmdd Firefox/4.0.1

Easy enough to decipher. The “year month date” part is where the Gecko build id will show up. This build id will be different for each platform. Mozilla developer Daniel Witte covers the changes in depth on his blog. There’s also a more complete reference on the Moz Dev Center wiki.

Mobile browsers

Both Mozilla and Microsoft have new mobile browsers in development. Firefox Mobile was once known by the codename Fennec, so the mobile UA string is the same as desktop Firefox, but it has Fennec/fennecversion appended at the end.

The new IE mobile UA string is:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows Phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0; <DeviceManufacturer>;<DeviceModel>)

There are more details on the Windows Phone IE blog.

All this talk of strings gives me the itch to hear a little “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”


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File Under: Browsers, HTML5
Jun
23
2010

New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives

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Nothing fishy about IE9's hardware acceleration: This demo shows an animated fish tank rendered using Canvas.


Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 platform preview 3, the latest pre-release version of the company’s next web browser.

Curious developers running Windows can download platform preview 3 starting Wednesday afternoon. This version of IE9 features expanded support for specific HTML5 elements that can take advantage of the browser’s new hardware-acceleration abilities.

“Most computing tasks on the web only take up 10 percent of the PC’s capabilities,” Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin said at a press event Wednesday. “We want to unlock that other 90 percent.”

The new IE9 platform preview has expanded support for HTML5′s native video and audio capabilities, as well as expanded support for the Canvas element.

“Showing how well we handle these HTML5 elements is the point of this release,” says Microsoft’s Rob Mauceri.

Microsoft has taken a fair bit of heat in the browser world for being slow to adopt HTML5. Though not yet finalized, the emerging specification is already widely supported by Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Microsoft’s current version of Internet Explorer, IE8, is woefully behind these other browsers when it comes to support for HTML5 and other standards like CSS 3.

With IE9, due around the end of the year, the company hopes to get back on the right path.

Microsoft has engineered this version of the browser to take advantage of the latest multicore processors and GPU chips shipping in the newest hardware. Several of Microsoft’s hardware partners — AMD, Asus, NVidia and Dell — were on hand with their newest, fastest machines at the press event to show the browser preview running through some Microsoft-built demos.

The company first showed off a hardware-accelerated preview of IE9 at a developer event last year, and then upped those capabilities with the second platform preview in May. But Wednesday’s release of IE9 has some updated code to access the hardware and an updated JavaScript engine to make scripted animations smoother.
Continue Reading “New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives” »

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File Under: Browsers, HTML5
Jun
9
2010

Google Updates Chrome Frame Add-On for Internet Explorer

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Google has released a significant update to its controversial Chrome Frame, an Internet Explorer plug-in that replaces the default IE rendering engine with the engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser.

Chrome Frame essentially embeds Google’s browser inside any tab or window within Internet Explorer. It forces IE to load a website using the same WebKit rendering engine as Google Chrome, complete with its enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like embedded audio and video.

Previously only available as a “developer preview,” the new version of Chrome Frame has been updated to beta status. Chrome Frame’s underlying code has also been updated to match the Chrome 5 browser, which means Chrome Frame can now handle more HTML5 features like better audio and video playback, Canvas animations, geolocation, Web Workers, WebSocket connections and offline databases.

Chrome Frame now also integrates with IE more closely, meaning that the add-on now works with IE’s InPrivate browsing mode, and that clearing cookies and cache in IE will now also clear out the same elements in Chrome Frame.

If you’re stuck with IE 6 at work, but you want to see the latest and greatest the web has to offer, Chrome Frame makes for a decent solution. The only downside to Chrome Frame is that it will only be triggered on websites that have explicitly enabled it using a special meta tag. Of course, all of Google’s sites are on that short list, so you can at least experience some cool cutting-edge stuff like drag-and-drop in Gmail, geolocation in Google Maps, or real-time communication in Google Wave.

Despite the fact that Chrome Frame does not just take over IE, Google’s add-on is not without some degree of controversy. Back when Chrome Frame was first announced, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, warned against the idea, arguing that the Chrome plug-in for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit.

So far those fears haven’t come to pass, but now that Chrome Frame is a beta release, it may begin to see wider use.

Shaver’s main argument — that simply telling users to switch browsers is far better strategy — is still undeniably the best solution. After all, if you’re savvy enough to know about and install Chrome Frame, you’re most likely savvy enough to just upgrade IE or switch to a better browser. But even the most recent version of Internet Explorer, version 8, doesn’t have the same level of capability as Chrome, and Chrome Frame gives IE users an opportunity to play around on the bleeding edge.

Also, there’s a subset of users who need IE 6 for legacy corporate intranets and applications, but also need to interact with today’s web. Given that several Google services — like Google Apps and Google Reader — no longer support IE 6, the day is fast approaching where Chrome Frame will be the only option for those still locked into IE 6 who want to use the newest web apps.

If you’re one of those people, head over to grab the latest version of Chrome Frame.

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File Under: Browsers, Software, Web Standards
Mar
17
2010

Internet Explorer 9 Shows Up Faster, But Still Lacking

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5e1680db-782f-401c-b71f-9adc8f7b7836

Microsoft has announced more details about Internet Explorer 9 the next version of the company’s much-maligned, but still dominant web browser. The highlights for IE’s update include much-needed performance improvements, hardware acceleration for graphics, as well as support for a number of new HTML5 elements and CSS 3 features.

If you’d like to take the developer preview version of IE 9 for a spin, head over to Microsoft’s new IE 9 website.

Of course with any new IE release, there is some inevitable disappointment, and IE9 is no exception — like it’s predecessors, IE9 is playing catch up rather than pushing the web browser envelope.

While there is reason to be excited about IE9, the browser is just as notable for what’s missing, namely features Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari are already shipping — the HTML5 Canvas element, support for HTML5 Web Workers and open web font support. Open web advocates will also be disappointed to here that IE9 will support the H.264 video codec instead of Ogg Theora. H.264 is a patented video technology (the same used by Flash), but Ogg Theora is believed to be unencumbered by patents, which is why open web advocates prefer it.

The H.264 news is especially disappointing given that speed at which IE updates, or rather doesn’t update. Web developers now know that, even if a better, more open and free video codec comes along, they’ll most likely have to support H.264 anyway since IE rarely releases updates at the speed of the web.

But rather than dwelling on what IE9 doesn’t do, let’s concentrate on the good news.

Based on what we’ve seen at this stage, IE9 is much, much faster than IE8 thanks to improvements in IE’s rendering engine. IE9 will also include a new JavaScript engine that puts the browser on par with script performance in Safari 4, Chrome 4 and Opera 10.5. Although all four other browsers are still marginally faster, IE 9 eliminates one the biggest gripes about IE 8 — it’s dog slow.

In other words, while IE9 still isn’t top dog in the speed race, at least it will have a somewhat respectable spot in the browser pack.

Also welcome news is IE9′s intention to support much of the CSS 3 spec, including advanced CSS selectors, fonts, colors, rounded corners and borders. As far as we’ve been able to discover, CSS 3 transitions and transformations are not part of IE 9.

Microsoft is also touting IE9′s “hardware accelerated” HTML5 capabilities. However, in our testing, IE9 was not significantly faster or smoother rendering the demo page on Microsoft’s site than were Firefox, Safari or Opera. Google Chrome does, however, completely fall apart on that particular demo page.

More good news in IE9 can be found in the hardware-accelerated SVG rendering, which, similar to what is available in beta version of Firefox, promises to improve native SVG graphics.

Sadly, the SVG support also highlights what many already consider the biggest oversight in IE9 — no support for the HTML5 Canvas tag. Lacking support for the canvas tag, which can be used to display SVG-based animations, IE9′s SVG support is considerably less appealing to web developers.

Of course, given that the canvas tag (along with the video tag) is essentially designed to get rid of the need for the Flash and Silverlight plug-ins, it isn’t to surprising that Microsoft is in no hurry to drive any nails into Silverlight’s coffin.

It was also announced that IE9 will not work with Windows XP. Given that Vista and Windows 7 have been out for some time, not supporting XP isn’t entirely surprising, but it’s still disappointing — especially since Windows XP remains a popular option on netbooks.

Provided you’re not using Windows XP and you’d like to help make IE9 better, you can head over to the IE Platform Preview for developers and download your copy today.

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