Internet Explorer @ IETF 90

This week Microsoft is sending a number of engineers, including members from the IE team, to the Internet Engineering Task Force meetings in Toronto. We’re looking forward to the conversations and working groups as it’s always great to get together face-to-face with engineers from across the industry.

In particular, there are several discussions we’re excited about including HTTP/2.0 and the safe preference header Internet proposal, which we’ve already been working on with several industry partners and has been enabled in IE as an early implementation.

If any of you are attending the event, please stop by and say hello.

-Adrian Bateman

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2014
    Javascript2 or a successor to javascript is most needed at this time; including the minimal level of 1970s era programming Pascal level features modules, typed parameters, typed variables, structs, nested methods is best. The last 19 years have been good for JavaScript; so now we need core proven programming technologies.  The implicit typing and void pointer level coercion should not be today's problem - that was a 1970s and 1980s problem. Typescript, coffee script and other cross compilers are only a stop gap and not a long term solution.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2014
    When will new IE12 version be released? Microsoft again is already behind schedule for one major browser version every year which should be an easy target.

  • Anonymous
    July 20, 2014
    @hAl: IE11 has been updated multiple times with new functionality. There was a large update in April (see blogs.msdn.com/.../announcing-an-updated-version-of-internet-explorer-11-available-on-windows-8-1-windows-7-and-windows-phone-8-1.aspx) including Enterprise Mode, WebGL updates, and new F12 tools. Two weeks ago we included the safe preference header implementation described above in the July update. These are just two examples since General Availability of IE11.

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2014
    videos

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2014
    @adrianba - Which is great, through it would be very handy if you guys would post a page somewhere that discribed what changed in each version of IE11. I know for example that 11.0.9 added Improved support for vertical text, but a full list for each version would be great. What else would be great is if you could tell us if the changes in the Internet Explorer Developer Channel are coming to IE11 or that it is actualy a new build for IE12. And when we will see IEDC 2 would be nice to know too!

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2014
    Whenever there are actually feature updates (and not just security and other fixes), it would be nice to see branded updates to the browser, like 11.1, 11.2, etc.  Each should be accompanied by a changelog. This would help a lot in testing, so when a feature we depend on changes we know when it happens, what changed, and what we need to test.  Similarly, having really simple branding changes (e.g. an "11.1") would make it easier for us to communicate to our own customers.  For example, if we use feature detection to tell whether a capability exists or not, we might be able to tell our customer "if you want capability X in our software, please upgrade to version 11.whatever".

  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2014
    @James S - Indeed, the second number in the IE version should be there for a reason, and ever since IE5, it Always has been 0. Internet Eplorer 11.0.7 should have been named 11.1. Sure, "it's just a number", but it makes things so much clearer to end users. A nice changelog, like I said before, would come in handy for developers too. I'm not sure if you guys are planning to update IE with Windows 8.1 Update 2, but please go for a normal versioning. Not like Chrome and Firefox do, just the old school features = minor bump.

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2014
    We definitely appreciate the feedback and have been discussing the best way to highlight these changes. In general, changes are published in the Microsoft Knowledgebase including non-security changes. For example, here is the article for July: support.microsoft.com/.../2975687 On the question of when features will move from the Developer Channel to IE: this will depend on the size, impact, complexity, and independence of the feature. For example, small independent changes that are additive and do not impact other features are more likely to come sooner than things that require more code churn or greater changes to the engine. We decide for each feature when it might be ready to ship as we make progress. We'll talk more about this soon - watch this space. Thanks again for the input.

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2014
    Will the final version of IE12 all also support Windows 7 SP1? We would like to!

  • Anonymous
    July 23, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 24, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2014
    the help link: go.microsoft.com/fwlink is not helpful at all. I've rebooted multiple times and all my .Net and PowerShell utilities are fully up to date. Can the error messages be a bit more cryptic? I know that Microsoft doesn't like to give error messages that are actually helpful but for developers you really should try to make this work better. It's very frustrating.

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2014
    @Mike - totally agree!  I spent hours filing bugs on connect but in the end gave up.  with every new release they marked all the open bugs as wontfix or worse yet "as designed" (e.g. they didn't implement it or messed it up when they did it).  Sadly while dealing with that frustration Microsoft would then shut down the previous release tracking and remove all bugs. 100's of us complained and as always it fell on deaf ears.  After dealing with this for 2, then 3 releases we realized that we had no interest in playing this game anymore and there was a massive revolt against filing bugs in Connect for IE until Microsoft started to respect the developers that were filing them. Sadly that day has yet to happen.  As a result Connect is now an abandoned wasteland not used any more and utterly rejected by most developers. Its very sad.  Chris Wilson and Eric Lawrence were the only IE Team members that realized proper fully open bug tracking was the only correct solution going forward to get the respect of developers back and make this a full circle effort to get IE caught up to other browsers. Microsoft/IE MGMT never got on board.  Chris and Eric left for better pursuits not under the constraints of Microsoft's old ways - and here we are today - still without proper bug tracking and terrible animosity due to the mismanagement and failings from the past. A public apology for the behavior  was requested (still not yet received).  Once provided with a written commitment to actually listen to feedback, act on it, verify bugs, and allow submission of test cases that other developers can verify then I'm sure we'll all come back to help. For now - we couldn't care less.... because Microsoft doesn't care at all.

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2014
    nice job thank you

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2014
    @Real McCoy - The http://http/ thing is usually a result of prepending the protocol (or scheme) to the URL. http://http://www.microsoft.com will be automatically corrected to http://http//www.microsoft.com by all of the browsers. So I do not think anyone is injecting "http://" to the URL, instead the protocol is prepended twice. I expect an HTTPS URL (when the issue occurs) to turn into https://https://www.microsoft.com and be corrected to https://https//www.microsoft.com

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2014
    I filed the bug, added comments with additional "how to try and reproduce", and not even an acknowledgement (most other reports at least get an acknowledgement). For a bug as serious and as annoying as this one, MS seems to want to just ignore it.  No feedback at all, not even any questions about it. And that Connect form is horrible... is there some way to better filter the list or search for things?  If so, I can't find it.

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2014
    @pmbAustin - You might want to post a link to the ignored bug here - it may help triage it quicker.

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2014
    @adrianba [MSFT] A new IE version 12 is needed with support voor HEVC still image profile en preferbly also with support for HEVC/h.265 video. The IE version supporting those images needs to become active on Windows 7 (thus before end of mainstream support) as we do not want a situation where we have to keep old format (jpeg) images for too long next to new format images.

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2014
    @NumbStill ... I did, up above, but I'll repost it again here: connect.microsoft.com/.../white-tabs-when-iexplore-exe-process-gets-large-rendering-problems Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 30, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 30, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2014
    Honestly, I feel like YOU are being less than helpful.  Or at least not listening to me. The biggest requirement for experiencing this bug is patience.  It ALWAYS happens if you wait long enough.  Leave your browser open with a dozen tabs for days and you WILL experience it.   There's little more data I can add, because there isn't any predictable way I've found to trigger it at will.  It just happens.  When it happens, there's almost always some different sequence of events that led up to it.  It seems to me hitting this bug is INEVITABLE, as long as you have multiple tabs open, and leave IE and the tabs open for a long time.  I can't give you specific sites, because THERE ARE NONE.  I've bent over backwards to try and manufacture some sequence of pages or actions that will trigger the bug faster than others, but all I have is what I've given you. When I start to experience page turns that "slow down" over time... or when sound (like the 'ping' when a page displays a modal dialog, or the 'click' of a page-turn) starts to get out of sync with the visuals... that's another clue it's starting to happen.  It means a process is getting large, performance is nose-diving, and soon rending problems will appear, and about that time, the 'large' process will suddenly spike CPU and stay there.  Rarely, it will come back down after a minute or two, but mostly it will just sit there pegging the CPU at 25% like it's in an endless loop. All you need to do is monitor your iexplore.exe process sizes, while you're using IE.  Open a dozen pages.  And browse normally.  It might take a day or two.  Just don't close the browser.  Keep opening new tabs every once in a while.  Let others just sit.  Don't close tabs. It'll happen. Trust me.  If you have any patience at all, you WILL see it.  I've never been able to NOT see it. I've given you all the info I have.  I've given it a dozen times on this forum over the years.  There are always people who say "Yeah, me too!", so it's definitely not just me.  It happens on ANY system I use.  It's just that if you constantly close IE, or only use one tab, you'll probably never hit it.  Or if you just assume IE is slow and sluggish from time to time, you might just dismiss it and not realize you're hitting it.  If you shut down your laptop every day, you probably "clear things out" before you get there.  I don't know.  I just know what I experience on a too-regular basis. It happened again last night.  Came home from a movie, picked up the laptop and started browsing, and after 30 minutes or so, the pages were turning REALLY slowly, and the audio "clicks" were lagging the page turn by a full second or so.  Sure enough, one of the processes was up to 800,000k.  There was no reason for it.  No "large" pages loaded.  Killing the process, and performance was restored, and no process was over 100,000k.

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2014
    This happens a lot too on my device (Surface Pro 1)