Add-on Guidelines and Requirements in Action – Upgrade Advisor

We’ve blogged in the past about guidelines and requirements that we’ve published to help add-on developers create quality add-ons.  We wrote these guidelines based on years of providing support to users and developers in response to questions from the developer community.

We’ve shared several great examples of these guidelines and requirements in action in the past few months. As part of IE’s cumulative security updates, we’ve released an update to the Internet Explorer Upgrade Advisor list that helps users update to new versions of add-ons that follow the guidelines and requirements. In this post, we highlight the latest add-ons that have made changes based on the guidelines and requirements, and we describe the Upgrade Advisor user experience in detail.

It’s been encouraging to see more add-ons recently release new versions with improvements in functionality based on these guidelines and requirements. As more developers follow them, our users will have a better experience. Here are some of the add-ons that have made changes to their functionality:

It’s important to update users to the new versions of these add-ons so they can benefit from improved stability and compatibility. Today we released an updated Upgrade Advisor list with IE’s Cumulative Security Updates to help users do just that. Users who have specific versions of the above add-ons may see the Upgrade Advisor dialog box when they launch Internet Explorer 8:

The dialog box presents the user with three options to choose from:

Option 1: Check online for an update
When the user selects this option or closes the dialog without making a choice, the dialog box is dismissed and a web page is displayed in a new window that runs in No Add-ons Mode. The user can follow the steps in this web page to install the new version of the add-on. If a link to the new version of the add-on is not provided by the vendor, or the new version does not follow the guidelines and requirements, the web page will inform the user that no update is available yet.

Option 2: Always open Internet Explorer without this add-on
When the user selects this option, Internet Explorer disables the add-on, the dialog box is dismissed, and Internet Explorer continues to launch.

Option 3: Keep using this add-on anyway
When the user selects this option, the dialog box is dismissed and Internet Explorer continues to launch with the add-on enabled until the next refresh of the Upgrade Advisor list which occurs approximately every 8 weeks.

Many thanks to the teams that have made changes to follow the guidelines and requirements. We will continue to work with add-on vendors to help them release new versions of add-ons that have better stability, compatibility and performance.

Herman Ng
Program Manager

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  Please support 60% of your Windows customers and 74% of your enterprise customers by offering IE9 for Windows XP minus hardware acceleration. Vista Ultimate and Vista Home will end of life in 2012 (no extended support) leaving only Windows 7 and Vista Business as supported OSes under which IE9 can be used. Besides Direct2D, DirectWrite and color management, XP can support all other IE9 features including XPS print path. Video can use DirectShow. In 2012, otherwise only Windows 7 and Vista Business/Enterprise users will be able to use IE9.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  In above comment, iI meant "except  Direct2D, DirectWrite and color management".

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  I chucked all but one addons and replaced Ie7pro with Simple adblock as Simple adblock seems to have less impact on browser performance than Ie7pro does. http://simple-adblock.com/ The addon-manager could do with uninstall and update links that you can click on to get to an uninstall/update possibility for the specific addon.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  @7flavor: if people don't bother upgrading Windows XP they won't bother upgrading to IE9. By the time IE9 comes out, Vista and Win 7 will have a bigger marketshare over XP.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  @ZippyV: You are probably right, still I would like to know the stats on how many IE8 installations are on which platforms. @7flavor: About the same percentage of users were using still Windows 95 and older when IE6 was released for Windows 98 and newer only.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  @ZippyV: You are probably right, still I would like to know the stats on how many IE8 installations are on which platforms. @7flavor: About the same percentage of users were using still Windows 95 and older when IE6 was released for Windows 98 and newer only.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  @Nat: the fact that you can make something run doesn't mean that it's compatible. Either IE, or the add-on, or possibly both could work suboptimally, and the add-on may not even work as intended or even crash in some condition. Indicating in the dialog the incompatibility (and therefore the potential problems) is the right thing to do IMHO.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  Although I think this isn't the right place for this discussion, I agree with 7flavor. Developing websites is a hard job, because you have to write code for all browsers - and then start again to write code for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. It would be wonderful if IE9 accepts standard based websites, but I have not much hope. Actually the promises sounds good - but other browsers don't stop developing either and when the IE9 Final arrives there will be new standards and half-standardized methods (widely supported). To guarantee that the web page even runs with IE you have to test it. But Linux or Mac users don't want to buy a newer Windows to do this. So even if full-browsing is not available with IE9 and Windows XP, there should be a way to test IE9 rendering.

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2010
  Could you please make for all add-ons (that you know) with more than 200 ms load time also show with a similar dialog (and yes, that includes the ridiculously slow Live Toolbar of your colleagues) See: blogs.msdn.com/.../add-on-performance-part-1-measuring-add-on-performance.aspx In that dialog in stead of: The <arbitrary addon> with version <9.9> build by <some addonbuider> is not compatible with Internet Explorer 9 You could say: The <arbitrary addon> with version <9.9> build by <some addonbuilder> has been found to load very slow with Internet Explorer 9 new tab creation. and then give the same options as in article above described dialog.

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2010
  @Hef For this purpose, Microsoft provides users with virtual machine image to test various configurations of windows and internet explorer www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx

• Anonymous
  August 12, 2010
  These guidelines can be a problem for many add-on developers. We've spent a lot of time solving all the issues rising with this and ready to help any developer facing the same problems with these guidelines softomate.com/.../ie_plugins

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2010
  Is there any chance IE9 will have an autohide feature for the status bar (like Chrome)? It is really that useful: it shows you links and loading status but gets out of the way when loading's done.

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2010
  @Anonymus: Thank you!

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2010
  I would love to see you guys try to get a hold of the Brothers Chap to help them "make" a SBemail in full HTML 5 standards.

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2010
  @ZippyV: That's not really true at all. I would really like to see a breakup of how many IE7/IE8 users are on XP and how many on Vista/7/. IE9 is coming out next year and by near year, at the current rate, I don't see how Win7 marketshare will be higher than XP (14% vs 61%) The reality is Microsoft is interested in pushing Windows 7 more than truly deliver on the "same markup everywhere" promise. This isn't really progress. IE9 is like a value-added service for Windows 7 customers. What company other than Microsoft ignores such a large chunk of its customers for sake of more sales and $$$?

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2010
  @7flavor, your numbers are a lie. Windows 7 is the fastest selling OS in history, and Vista+Win7 already have 70% of the share of XP (XP ~50% overall OS share, Vista+Win7 ~35% overall OS share). NO software company provides infinite updates to their users. I think it's hilarious that half of the ppl on this blog complain that IE6 users still are getting servicing updates and half (including some overlap) complain that XP users are not getting IE9.

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2010
  @Facts, check out the Net Applications website which Microsoft itself showcases on its Windows Team blog. But you can keep ignoring the truth. Windows 7 is the most popular already. No one knows XP.

• Anonymous
  August 14, 2010
  The current OS stats from Net Applications: marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx They suggest that Internet users having Vista or 7 are about 28.80% while XP users are 61.87%. Linear trends may suggest anything, but things are rarely linear, so I would avoid speculating. New computers will have Windows 7, but whether people buy new computers, upgrade the existing ones or install Windows 7 on already capable computers is not so easily predictable.

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2010
  Hi Herman, It was a pleasure working with Microsoft to improve stability and compatibility on 3 of those add-ons!