IE7 Security Guide and other resources
Friday, August 17, 2007 7:20 AM
There have been several requests for good IE resources - especially resources pertaining to Internet Explorer 7. The majority of these requests are in reference to three areas - Security, Deployment and Developing for IE7. Bearing in mind that the folks on the Performance team are not hardcore web developers, this last request is a bit outside our expertise, but I'll do my best to provide some good starting points! So without further ado ...
Security: Probably the best place to start in terms of IE7 Security is the Internet Explorer 7 Desktop Security Guide. You should also check out the video of Markellos Dinorios' presentation at Tech-Ed 2007. The Security and Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7 article on MSDN is also an excellent resource.
Deployment: One of the technologies we get lots of questions about is the Internet Explorer Administration Kit. IEAK7 for multiple languages is available for download on the Microsoft website. Make sure you read the IEAK Guidelines before you get started. Remember that if you haven't finished your compatibility testing on IE7, you'll want to think about using the IE7 Blocker Toolkit to prevent IE7 from getting rolled out inadvertently. We wrote a post about this a while back called Blocking Internet Explorer 7 Installations
Development: The folks over at the IE Blog put together a post covering the major talking points of John Hrvatin's presentation at Tech-Ed 2007 on Web Development Tools. They aren't really getting into the full-featured authoring or deployment tools such as Visual Studio or Expression Web. The focus is more on the lightweight, in-browser dev tools such as the IE Developer Toolbar and IEWatch that can be used for planning & experimentation, debugging, learning and network traffic analysis. You can read more about these tools and check out some demos over at the IE Blog.
Another good post over on the IE Blog site is a discussion of Good Practices for ActiveX Updates which was jointly written by Marc Silbey, one of the IE Program Managers, and Steve Herndon who is the Lead PM for Silverlight. Finally, the IE Blog folks have a great post on Extension Development in Protected Mode. With Protected Mode Internet Explorer, we introduced the idea of elevation policies - a series of registry keys and values that tell Protected Mode how to handle elevation for a specific extension’s broker process. Protected Mode normally runs the Internet Explorer process with lower privileges. In general, extensions should operate as low integrity processes. However, some extensions require access to medium or high integrity objects. Because of this, extensions can be configured during installation to run with a higher privilege level by creating an elevation policy that is associated with them in the registry. To learn more about integrity levels, broker processes, and how to work in Protected Mode, visit the MSDN Internet Explorer Development Technical Article on the topic.