Every now and then a news story comes up which reminds us that if people with bad intentions, even sensible people can fall into traps on-line. There was one such story last week where friends of the victim said she was “the sensible one” – if she wasn’t unusually gullible it could happen to anyone....

Earlier this week I went to “Oxford Geek Night” and the title of one of title of one of the sessions was “The Zombie Cookie apocalypse” delivered by David Sheldon (I wish his slides were on-line so you could read more and I could give him a proper credit), it wasn’t the only informative session – there...

Dave Heiner, one of our Vice Presidents and our Deputy General Counsel has posted an explanation of exactly what will be happening . I would expect something in due course to explain how organizations can prevent their users being presented with the choice screen (if you are using WSUS – and you should...

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be talking about IE8  (and depending on what gets announced at Mix maybe IE9 as well). Whilst I don’t have the data to prove it I’m convinced a lot of people running Firefox are doing so as a way of getting a modern browser when their company still has something...

I don’t often paste things from senior Microsoft folks into my blog, but I’d like to quote some things from our managing director here in the UK, Gordon Frazer February 9 th marks Safer Internet Day , a vital drive to promote a safer internet for all users, especially young people. For the second year...

OK cards on the table. I’m prejudiced. I don’t pretend to be anything else, and I try to open about my biases - flaunt them even. And Like most prejudiced people I can explain the logical roots that my prejudices spring from. When it comes to browsers I think IE is pretty good .Actually let me qualify...

I was chatting with a couple of colleagues yesterday about internet explorer. Someone grumbled “When people think of browser add-ons they automatically think of firefox, but there are some really good ones for IE”. I have talked in the past about IE7 pro (which despite the name works with IE8). I use...

I wanted to talk about the privacy enhancements in IE8 , and to save you from reading something of epic length this is only part 1. First, I do know there are some poor souls out there who work for benighted organizations which can’t get off IE6 - so the idea of working efficiently with a multi-tabbed...

IE 8 just locked up on me. This in and of itself is a Bad Thing. I’ve got into the habit of having lots of tabs open in IE - I checked it’s currently 70 (why … ? because I can, it’s a pile off stuff I’m thinking about, going back to or what ever). IE 8 will recover from being killed off in task manager...

I’ve been pretty enthused about IE8 since it got to Beta 2. Yes there are some sites which need to be put into “Compatibility view”, which would be better called “IE 7 view” as it renders sites correctly which rely on IE7’s departure from standards. There is an argument for saying “Stuff what the standards...

A few days back I wrote about acceleators in IE 8 and talked about how search box had been streamlined as well. I knew we’d re-worked how tabs worked but my first reaction was “yeah … but so what”. I’m a big fan of tabs: IE 7 changed my experience of the internet. I guess other tabbed browsers did the...

Internet Explorer 8 seems to be guided by the same “many little improvements” philosophy that has driven Windows 7 – or put another way it’s not packed with radical new features , and in some cases I find it hard to be sure if something really wasn’t there before: I think the “Privacy Policy” is new...

I was a little surprised to find it was nearly 3 years ago that I first wrote about Open Search… So first off… Open search provides a specification for XML to describe search services. It’s easy to build this XML, and there’s a Microsoft Page which builds it for you , so here’s an example for IMDB, which...

One of the things about a new browser is that various web sites expect particular ID strings to identify browsers they know and get awkward if they don't recognize the browser ID. So one of the nice things in IE 8 beta 2 is that you can select compatibility mode for particular sites and send the string...

IE8 has features to please users, which makes me expect a pretty rapid uptake (Read Eileen for a user's eye view of accelerators) . We've also tried to remove the standards issues which annoy developers. Here's the problem though. If you have diverged from official standards in the past, then what do...

I have used this blog to grumble about "Flash turds" - those super-annoying adverts whose determination to grab the eye brings them to the point of being a test for epilepsy. I'm not seeing many of them being built in Silverlight, yet, but it can only be a matter of time. Fortunately I use...

So I said that we'd done a lot while I was away , other gems now sifted from my inbox include. As well as all the other Server "SKUs" I mentioned before , we've announced HPC Server 2008; (formerly called Compute Cluster Server - CCS) the beta is downloadable now. Staying with servers, Home...

I was talking to a customer (I know he reads this blog, so no names). He was having some trouble because two parts of Microsoft weren't communicating the way you'd expect them to. And I said in passing that one thing which we are unjustly accused of from time to time is underhand collusion: for example...

After being taken to task by some recent commenters I'm a bit hesitant about suggesting that I (or others) are vain, but I can't come up with a better tag for it. I find that quite often I want to find a post on my blog. Because I often write about things I've found on the web the link to them is in...

One of the things that annoys any technical person is when you get asked a question and have to shrug and say "No, never seen that one", even if you suspect there is a genuine problem. I've had a couple of people ask me about problems with Outlook web access under Vista. The symptoms are usually in the...

This isn't a question about your employment practices. In recent years a lot of work has been done to make buildings usable by wheelchair users; but how many of the people you do with visit your office. I've known for some time that websites do a lousy job, the most obvious case being the use of Flash...

[Note: the information below was correct when it was published, please read the update at the end] You can judge my loyalty to the Williams F1 team by the fact that - after several miserable years of results, I still call myself a fan. Williams' main sponsor last year was RBS . I'm thinking about...

Back in July, we announced that that IE 7 for Windows XP will be pushed out using Windows update. Since IE7 is bound up with Windows Vista, the release of IE7 for XP will happen at about the same time as Vista releases to manufacturing. A few weeks after that it will be pushed out via Windows Update...

We have been getting some bad press over a bug which affects the Vector Markup Language in IE 5 and IE6 (but not IE7). Over on the Security Response Center Blog there are several posts about it. There were attacks based on the vulnerability (though very few), so we published a workaround and then released...

Here's Something I bet most people most people thought they'd never see. (Thanks to Information week ). We're making sure we help Firefox development. We have an Open Source Software Lab in Redmond - they have an interesting web site at http://port25.technet.com . It makes a good story to portray Microsoft...