Office Home And Stude/nt Users already honing thei

Microsoft launched the last edition of Online Explorer eight (IE 8) towards the Web precisely a week in the past. But that doesn;t mean end users and developers are happy. Instead, a lot of are champing in the bit to obtain Microsoft to commit to their preferred lacking attributes for IE 9.Microsoft, for its part, won;t say anything about IE nine, apart from it;s inside the organizing stage. During an IE eight Professional Zone Internet chat on March 25, members with the IE crew reminded participants that Microsoft isn;t ready to talk in any way about IE 9 dates or functions. The group certainly isn;t ready however to accept officially suggestions from your user/developer base for Microsoft;s subsequent browser update.(”We will be placing a new form on [the Microsoft private test site] Connect for improvements for the next edition of IE. We will send out an email towards the Technical Beta participants when it is available on Connect,” one Softie told chat participants yesterday.)Microsoft;s attempts to slow things down isn;t stopping end users from pitching their top priorities from their IE nine wish lists. Among the functions participants and other consumers with whom I;ve spoken are mentioning: a file download manager,Office 2010 Product Key, support for varied Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Version 3 attributes, an XML parser, sounds for Web Slices, better RSS support, and more granular control over JavaScript pages.One chat participant opined that password save/confirmation shouldn;t force an IE page load/login.Kymberlee Price,Windows 7 Key, a Program Manager for Security on the IE group, responded:“Password management is something we looked at in IE8 but ultimately had to cut. As a person I totally understand why this is a popular and compelling scenario. But as a security person I see it as fraught with challenges to implement. Login with a single master password for example - differentiation of passwords is beneficial to protecting sensitive data like bank accounts separate from less sensitive data like Twitter accounts.”Another chatter said XHTML+MathML support would help students and others who need to publish math-centric content on the Internet. A Microsoft official said Microsoft is hearing “a lot of requests for this feature, as well as for scalable vector graphics (SVG), “both of which add richer presentation towards the Web.” But he made no promises that these would be part of IE 9.Participants within the ExpertZone chat also asked Microsoft officials about recently reported problems between sites running in Restricted Sites zone (like SpywareBlaster, Spybot,Windows 7 32bit, etc.) and the last IE eight build.Eric Lawrence, IE Security Program Manager,Office Home And Stude/nt, responded:“This was a side-effect of a recent change to better support non-standard top-level-domains which are becoming more common. You can read about the general issue with non-standard TLDs on IE8 maintains an internal public suffix list. That list changes IE;s handling of ‘known; special TLDs. Unfortunately, the Zones registry format has a dependency on TLDs, which means that we must recalculate the registry against this new TLD list. That works fine in the general case, but fails badly when there are thousands of sites within the lists. We;re working on this issue.”(Again, no official word on when a fix might be coming. I;d doubt this one will have to wait until IE 9, in spite of this.)I asked Zhu Yan, who runs the LiveSino.Net enthusiast site, what he;d like to see in IE 9. He had a wish list a mile long already,Office Standard 2010, including everything through the aforementioned download manager, to on the web Favorites service and Windows Live ############## synchronization. He also said he;s wishing for better rendering, more compelling third-party add-ons and integration with Morro (the OneCare security service replacement that Microsoft hasn;t said something about for months).What are you hoping to see in IE 9?