Internet Explorer in XP SP2 RC2

First, I'll join everybody else in announcing that XP SP2 RC2 is available for download! If you've put off installing it, now's the time to give it a shot and test all of your favorite applications and web sites. Most of the work recently has been on bug fixes, and compatibility fixes in particular. If there's anything that doesn't work by now it will probably not work in RTM unless you notify both Microsoft and the vendor (or web site administrator).

Below are a few of the changes in IE for RC2 (since RC1). This list is very incomplete - I'll try to post a follow-up entry or two to cover some of the changes I missed or that are in areas I'm less familiar with.

Information Bar Updates

When the Information Bar blocks an ActiveX control, the name and publisher are now included in the warning text. If the control has a visible area in the page, similar text will also be shown in that area, and users can right-click in that space to show the context menu to install the control. This change was made to increase discoverability and help the user make a better decision about whether to proceed to the Authenticode dialog.

We also implemented an application compatibility fix to handle the common scenario where a web site detects that the ActiveX installation failed and redirects to an error page. In this case, users will be shown a version of the Information Bar on the redirected page, and clicking the "Install ActiveX Control" menu will navigate back to the page where the control was suppressed and allow the Authenticode dialog to be shown. The end user experience is not smooth, but this unblocks a large number of web pages that were redirecting on failure.

As a last resort, holding down the CTRL key is a universal workaround for pages that have tricky logic that eluded our attempts to unblock something after it's been suppressed by the Information Bar. This works for ActiveX controls, file downloads, and pop-up windows.

Other minor changes (I don't recall if these were in the last public release or not):

• Users will now receive a dialog the first time the information bar is shown so that it is more discoverable, particularly for people who rely on screen readers and may not otherwise be aware that content will be blocked by modeless UI.
• There's now a close button on the bar just in case it gets in the way.
• There are now two independent security zone settings for whether to suppress the ActiveX install prompt and whether to suppress non user-initiated file downloads.
• When the Information Bar is shown, the cursor briefly changes to an arrow plus the icon that is shown in the bar.
• We added (and tweaked, and tweaked) sounds for the Information Bar and pop-up blocker.

Manage Add-ons Updates

The Manage Add-ons dialog now shows more useful columns by default, including the name of the add-on, the publisher, and the file that implements the add-on. You can also choose to display columns for additional information such as the CLSID and the folder that the file is located in.

Pop-up Blocker Updates

Jeff Davis can detail the changes here. The primary one that I worked on was to enable ActiveX controls such as Flash launch new windows for user-initiated actions. Previously these were all blocked because IE did not detect mouse clicks or key presses within windowed controls.

New Pet Peeves Fixed

The disappearing status bar bug should be gone for good. We also fixed most of the scenarios where the URL you were typing in the address bar would get stomped or disrupted if a navigation happened while you were typing.

(Edit: Made it clearer that these are just changes made between RC1 and RC2. See the official documentation and other blog entries for a more complete list of changes made in SP2.)

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2004
  Pop-up blocker has a problem in RC2. It blocks the pop-ups, but when you click it the option to "show blocked pop-up" is no longer there (was there in RC1). I've noticed the problem on a couple different machines, running XP home & XP Pro, including a fresh install of RC2 and an upgrade from RC1.
  
  

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2004
  Seth, the new option is named "Temporarily Allow Pop-ups", and it effectively does the same thing.

• Anonymous
  June 27, 2004
  Why are you making our lives so hard. What is the need for a popup blocker. If you don't want the ads from a site don't visit the site. So simple.
  
  My paper pops up one popup per day. Big deal. So why are we haveing this marketing drivel shoved down our throats for a problem that doesn't even exist.

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2004
  I am noticing that popups that never had status bars before, now show status bars, even when they are explicitly turned off in the window.open command.
  
  Why is this?

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2004
  Frank, this is by design to help mitigate some UI spoofing attacks.

• Anonymous
  July 08, 2004
  David Candy,
  
  Are you insane? Sure, your one site behaves itself. Unfortunately the masses of the world have gone and blown it for you. Insane numbers of popups and pop unders, some with content you really don't want appearing on your desktop in a workplace -- no way, hose.

• Anonymous
  July 08, 2004
  the SP2 RC2 is not rendering XBMP images, hope they fix it, otherwise we're gonna see a lot of hit counters start to go [X]
  

• Anonymous
  July 09, 2004
  Another pop-up problem when using websites where you have logged in, when you allow the pop-up temporarily, IE refreshes the current page, thus resetting the connection with the server. Ironicly, this happened when I used one of Microsoft training sights, I had completed an online test, 45mins after answering the questions, a popup was blocked, i allowed it, and the page reloaded back to the main front page! lost it all.

• Anonymous
  July 09, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 09, 2004
  Ok I recently installed XP SP1a and everything was nice then windows update installed a bucnh of SP2 updates and somehow it disabled all popups from IE so I went and installed ZP SP1 RC2 and set it to enable all popups, and still all popups are still disbaled I have no other popup blocking softweare installed at all I'm 100% positive of that it was only after I recevied SP2 updates for Internet Explorer where this bug occured any help?

• Anonymous
  July 10, 2004
  For those who still use IE to any extent (hey, I do - although I'm slowly swimming to Firefox) - Tony Schreiner lists upcoming bug fixes in Internet Explorer in XP SP2 RC2 (whose preview is apparently out)......

• Anonymous
  July 12, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 12, 2004
  Sam, we used to capture and replay popups, but the problem is that some sites script to the popup and would break in other ways if we simply replayed it without refreshing the page.
  
  These sites will need to be changed, and Microsoft has their own share of them. :-)

• Anonymous
  July 12, 2004
  Matt, I'm not sure what to suggest except to check the registry keys that Jeff Davis describes at http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffdav/archive/2004/06/21/161789.aspx.
  
  There are no known bugs with the Popup Manager blocking popups when it is disabled.

• Anonymous
  July 14, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 19, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 19, 2004
  Chill out Garrie.
  
  You advocate people switch to alternate browsers. Well, guess what: they all have pop-up blockers now.

• Anonymous
  July 22, 2004
  Garrie, Microsoft is adding the feature because people want it. Surprise: most of us don't like unsolicited pop-ups!
  
  SP2 RC2 still lets visitors know that there are blocked pop-ups and gives them the option to open them. Plus, those of you who love pop-ups can disable the pop-up blocker.

• Anonymous
  July 22, 2004
  Any news on when Sp2 comes in norwegian ...as i run? Lots of people are not able to test the sp, due to different language setup.....World is a big place...

• Anonymous
  July 22, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 23, 2004
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 25, 2004
  The one thing that irritates me is that if you send a proper XHTML document to IE as text/html, it second-guesses your server and tries to parse the document as XML, but MSXML can't quite understand the DTD and displays an error page. I would really like it if IE could at least recognize XHTML documents as HTML, being that it seems that neither following the HTTP/1.1 specification in this area nor supporting application/xhtml+xml will likely happen any time soon.
  
  Thanks for listening.
  
  I'd also like to reply to some of the others who suggested using a different browser. It's true that Gecko browsers, KHTML browsers and Opera are all better than IE, but hoping to convince all of the ignorant world to switch is naive idealism. So I think we should advocate better browsers, but help Microsoft fix the problems that cause our pages to be totally unintelligable for those that don't want to or don't have the permission to switch.

• Anonymous
  July 29, 2004
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• Anonymous
  August 03, 2004
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• Anonymous
  August 10, 2004
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