Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 Build 2469.2 Feature Update List

Personal Bar & Contacts                                                                             The purpose of a Beta release is for us, the product team, to solicit feedback and bug reports from testers such as yourself. Thus far the IE 6 Technical Beta program has been very effective in this regard, identifying several bugs, and providing lots of feedback on what you like and dislike about the product. In one place in particular, feedback has been fairly clear. While some users, particularly more technically savvy users, liked the Personal Bar and Contacts features, the majority of users did not. The feedback we’ve received in the newsgroups and direct communication with beta testers tells us that simplicity, quality, and performance are top goals for the product, and that the Personal Bar and Contacts features were contributing to none of these. Rather than continue to expend resources on a feature most of our customers would not use, we have made the difficult decision to cut the Personal Bar feature, and refocus our efforts on the basics of browsing, as well as other features such as Privacy, Media Playback, and Image Browsing.

Smart Tags
This build also introduces support for SmartTags. This is a feature that allows end users to get contextual information about different items in the content that they are browsing. SmartTags manifest themselves as underlines on certain keywords. The end user can click on the underlined word to get a contextual menu that provides more information about the entity represented by the word. This feature is on by default and can be turned off through the Advanced Option dialog.
 

Virtual Machine                                                                                               In Windows XP and the downlevel OS redist of Internet Explorer 6, the Microsoft Virtual Machine will no longer be packaged as part of the installation. This change is effective in the latest IE6 tech beta build. Those end users that do not have a previous version of the Virtual Machine installed on their machines, the Virtual Machine will be installed on demand, from the Web, the first time that it is needed. The effect on end users will be minimal. Content will continue to work and the support for the technology will remain at the same level as it was in previous releases. OEMs and corporations will be able to create and deploy custom packages that include the Virtual Machine, using the Internet Explorer Administrators’ Kit (IEAK). Also, the Microsoft VM will continue to be available for download from Microsoft.com and Windows Update. This method of distribution gives the company greater ease of delivery and responsiveness in distributing updates to the Virtual Machine to our customers.

Privacy                                                                                                          This build incorporates the latest changes to the Privacy feature in IE 6. We are looking to you for feedback on this feature. Please take a look at the latest build and actively try out this functionality. Let us know what we may have missed or what is presented in a non-intuitive manner in relation to Privacy and cookie management. Also, please test your sites and deploy compact policies (for more information, please refer to http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/security/privacy/ie6privacyfeature.asp). Note that support for the test (TST) compact policy will be discontinued in the final release version.
 

A key difference between the privacy capabilities in IE 6 and previous IE releases is in relation to the P3P based privacy policies associated with each cookie. While in previous versions users were able to do fairly extensive cookie management, users did not have any sense as to the site’s intent in relation to their cookie usage, and were not able to make an informed decision on whether to accept or reject cookies. The Privacy feature in IE 6 enables the sites to establish a trust relationship with their users, through their P3P based privacy policies.
 

This latest beta build exposes a wider range of privacy options, as well as it re-enables functionality that was present in previous IE releases, within the context of P3P policies. End users are now able to reject/accept cookies from a specific site and they are also able to be prompted for every cookie. End users can request to view a site’s full P3P XML based policy. Last, end users are able to import custom Privacy policies (this flexibility is useful for corporate deployment, or for organizations that want to standardized or promote different levels of privacy to end users).

We are looking forward to your comments and feedback on this functionality.


Known Issues

Accessing Windows Update after uninstall of IE6
After you uninstall this TechBeta build, Tools -> Windows Update may take you to a page that does not exist. You can access the correct Windows Update site by going to Start -> Windows Update or typing http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ in your browser.
 

Install on Demand Security Warning
If you try to install a Language Pack through Install on Demand, you will be presented with a Security Warning. It will ask you if you want to install and run Internet Explorer 6. You will need to click Yes to make the warning disappear. The Language Pack will then install properly.
 

Whistler incompatibility
DO NOT install this build of Internet Explorer 6 over Windows XP! Doing so will cause your machine to fail and may not be reversible. If you are part of the Windows XP Beta program, you will receive new builds with the matching version of Internet Explorer appropriate for that Windows XP build. We want to guarantee a baseline experience and stability with Windows XP, so please do not install your Tech Beta build on it.

Cannot download with Netscape
If you are using Netscape 6 and click "Download latest build", you will get a dialog box asking you to submit information. After clicking "OK", nothing is submitted. This prevents you from downloading the bits.

Cannot download with IE versions 2 to 3.02
If you are using any versions of Internet Explorer between and including IE2 and IE3.02, after you click “Download latest build,” you will be presented with a scripting error and will not be able to download the bits.

Find a Map                                                                                                  Using the "Find a Map" feature by choosing "View>Explorer Bar>Search" will result in continually being prompted to enable cookies, despite any settings you may have. This will be addressed in a future release.

Privacy settings work-around
Internet Explorer is currently developing privacy features in version 6.0.  If you experience problems in using a particular web site or receive errors related to cookies try adjusting your Internet Explorer Privacy settings to Low to ensure compatibility.  Below are steps to accomplish that.

1. In Internet Explorer, click on Tools and select Internet Options
2. Click the Privacy tab.
3. Adjust the Privacy Preferences slider to Low.

Likely the failure is because the site makes use of third party cookies, without them having compact policies. More information about the Internet Explorer6 privacy features is available from http://msdn.microsoft.com.                                       You should let us and the site know of these problems, so that they deploy compact policies in advance of the release of Internet Explorer 6.

Developer's Notes

IFRAME security="restricted"
A new property has been added to the Frame and IFrame elements: Security="restricted".
This new property has the ability to push the Frame/IFrame into the restricted zone so the security setting for this zone will be placed on the contents within the frame. The key scenario here is to prevent malicious script or ActiveX controls from running within a frame on a web-based email application.
Here’s an example scenario: John wants to check his mail on Yahoo. He goes to the Yahoo site, logs in and notices that he’s got a new message from hacker@hacker.com. Thinking that everything is safe and secure, he clicks on the mail, which displays the contents within an iframe. If we did not have the security property available to us, the iframe will exist within the same security zone as the rest of the application. This will allow the hacker to write malicious script that can access the parent window and browse through the rest of John’s mail. The hacker may also have the ability to run destructive ActiveX controls. By forcing the frame into the restricted zone with security="restricted", script cannot execute and ActiveX controls cannot run.

Custom Cursor
The user is now able to generate their own cursor. Even animation is possible! IE supports .cur and .ani files. The look of the existing cursor has been changed to be standard CSS2 compliant.

Focus events
Due to historic compatibility with Netscape, onfocus/onblur are asynchronous and non-bubbling events. Developers have a hard time generating reliable focus driven scenarios because the timing of these events is unpredictable.
To solve these issues a solution has been provided by adding two new events: onfocusin and onfocusout. Please verify that these new events get fired as expected and check the From/To source property.

"onmousewheel" event
This event allows you to track the mousewheel movements. Please verify that the delta is returned correctly and that the behavior is as expected in controls such as Textbox and Select.

MSXML3 registers itself over msxml
In this tech beta, msxml3 will register itself over any existing version of msxml on your machine, routing all calls into msxml to msxml3. (Msxml3 is the first version of msxml that is completely compliant with W3C standards and the first version of msxml to support XSL/T.) Please verify that data islands and all xml related behavior works as expected.