First IE6 Service Pack Begins Testing

Testers have reported the first beta build of Internet Explorer 6 SP1 has been released for evaluation. The service pack will be the first major upgrade to IE 6 since it went gold in late August. Various bug fixes and feature enhancements, as well as an accumulation of security fixes will be included in the release.

Internet Explorer 6 marked a departure from the traditional IE interface, bringing about a new look and behavior. Enhanced features such as Explorer bars, media playback, and automatic picture resizing were the main incentives to upgrade for non-Windows XP users.

As with previous releases of Windows, IE6 is included as a core component of Windows XP, and the company has held steadfast to right to bundle. However, Redmond has since relented by allowing users to remove icons from the start menu and desktop through an entry in the operating system's Add/Remove programs utility.

Version 6.0 can also help to maintain the privacy of personal information on the Web, and provide error reporting to identify problems to be fixed in future Internet Explorer service packs.

The beta build is numbered 1114 and contains the following changes:

• SMIL 2.0: Expanded support for the W3C Synchronized Multimedia Working Group's SMIL 2.0 proposed recommendation through a new version of HTML+TIME.
• 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.)
• 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.
• 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.
• "onmousewheel" event: This event allows you to track the mousewheel ovements.
• Focus events: Due to historic compatibility with Netscape, onfocus/onblur are asynchronous and non-bubbling events. Two new events have been added: onfocusin and onfocusout.