Wanted: IE8 Beta Testers

As previously mentioned in the IE8 Beta Feedback post back in March, we have several ways to submit feedback on the IE8 Beta. Currently the only way to directly file a bug with the IE Team is to be a part of the IE8 Technical Beta program on Microsoft Connect. Beta 2 is right around the corner and we are expanding our reach!  If you wish to be a part of making IE better by contributing great bug reports then please email us at IESO@microsoft.com and tell us a little about yourself including why you’d be a great beta tester.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Allison Burnett
Program Manager

Written by ieblog on July 30th, 2008 with no comments.
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IE8 and Reliability

Developing technologies that work reliably on their own and as part of the computing ecosystem is core to our mission and is an important part of our commitment to Trustworthy Computing. Our customers and partners expect technologies and services they can depend on anytime, anywhere, and on any device.  We focus on constant improvements to the dependability of our technologies and services.

For Internet Explorer, reliability means that the browser should always start quickly, perform well, connect to the Internet, and show Web sites without crashing or hanging. Most users want their browser to work, recover smoothly after a crash, and display the Web correctly. Users are not as concerned with what causes the problem, whether that be a poorly functioning add-on or poorly performing website. As part of our ongoing commitment to improve reliability, we have done a great deal of work in IE8 to make the browser more robust in all of these areas:  performance, recovery and display. In particular I will discuss:

• Loosely-Coupled IE: An architectural feature that helps isolate different parts of the browser from each other for smoother browsing performance.
  
  
• Automatic Crash Recovery: A feature that is designed to get users back to browsing as quickly as possible after a crash.
  
  
• Windows Error Reporting: A way for our customers to provide us with information to improve the reliability of Internet Explorer.

Loosely-Coupled IE

One of our most significant investments is in a feature called Loosely-Coupled IE (“LCIE”), which is an architectural attribute that helps isolate different parts of the browser from each other, most notably, the frames from the tabs. LCIE is the foundation that we have built a few of our features on including Automatic Crash Recovery of which I expand on below.

If you haven’t already read about what we started in Beta 1, I would encourage you to read my first post which covers how we isolated the frame window, which roughly corresponds to the “chrome”, from the tabs by putting them in their own separate processes so that a tab can now crash without bringing down the rest of your browser.  Visually, this separation would look like the following, with the frame area highlighted and the tab area dimmed:

Building on Beta 1, we have continued to develop LCIE in IE8 Beta 2 to further improve reliability and performance.

For Beta 2, we added the following changes:

Frame Process Merging

To help improve startup performance, we have  reduced the number of processes that we start. Instead of firing up two processes every time you launch the browser (one for the frame and one for your tabs), we now only fire up one frame process the first time you launch IE. Subsequent launches will only start a new tab process or make a new tab in an existing tab process.

For users that are accustomed to browsing websites in multiple “sessions”, for example if you want to log in to multiple email sites simultaneously, you can specify the “-nomerge” command line option to disable this feature.

More tab processes

It turns out that the vast majority of all IE sessions contain three or fewer tabs. Accordingly, in Beta 2 we try to give users three efficient tab processes.  This is contingent on the user’s computer capabilities, but the more capable a computer is, the more processes we will use, up to a point. Adding more processes gives users much better isolation in the event of a failure. If each tab is in its own process, websites are completely isolated from each other.

Virtual tabs

We have also added the internal capability to “hot swap” the process from underneath a tab. Previously, Protected Mode worked on a per-process basis. For example, say you add a website to your trusted sites in IE7. If that site links to another site that is not in your trusted sites, it will cause you to switch browser windows when you click the link.

We improved this in IE8 Beta 1 with LCIE when we split the frame from the tabs. With the split we can create a new tab in the same window and switch you to that tab as opposed to being “punted” to a new window. 

Virtual tabs lets you navigate across Protected Mode in the same tab since we just switch the process under the tab to the correct integrity level. This is really just “UI-sugar” – virtual tabs do not impact security or protected mode in any way, other than to make it more convenient to transition between protected mode on/off.

LCIE's capability of isolating different parts of the browser coupled with more tab processes and virtual tabs will improve the performance and overall reliability of Internet Explorer.

Automatic Crash Recovery

In the event of a crash, Automatic Crash Recovery is designed to get you back to browsing as quickly as possible. It uses LCIE’s tab isolation to help localize the failure to your tab. If you experienced a crash in Beta 1, you may have noticed this bubble:

This is the “tab recovery experience” – the failure has been confined to your tab. Your browser never goes away and we get you back to the site pretty quickly.

What’s happening behind the scenes is that we are keeping track of an array of information about your tab. In Beta 1, the following data about each tab was stored: 

• Current URI
• The travel log (your back/forward history)
• Tab order
• Which tab was active

When you crash, we tear down the old tab process, create a new tab process and recover the stored data back into the tab. For many website this works well; however, there are other websites, such as sites with web forms, or sites that you need to login to, that we didn’t recover successfully.

In Beta 2, we improved this further by adding:

Session cookies

Session cookies are often used for authenticating the user to a website. Session cookies are temporary cookies that only persist for the lifetime of your browsing session. When you login to a website, they usually give you a session cookie that contains a unique token that identifies you while you are logged in. As you navigate around the website, IE sends your session cookie to the site, and the site can examine this token and determine that you are authenticated. Unlike persistent cookies, they are not written and retained on your hard disk.

In IE8 Beta 2, we recover your session cookies too  and  still do not write them to disk! We store copies of them in the frame process. When your tab crashes, we just copy them back from the frame into the tab, and the user is automatically logged back into the site they were using (i.e. webmail, blog sites, social sites).

Note that session cookie recover only takes place for tab crashes.  If the whole browser crashes, the session cookies are lost, however we do expect that the overwhelming majority of crashes to be isolated to the tabs, as most crashes are caused by malfunctioning add-ons, which are now isolated to a tab process.

Form data

We can now recover your form data. If you typed information, such as an email, blog post, comments, into an HTML form, we can now recover that information.

Leveraging LCIE’s tab isolation allows Automatic Crash Recovery to quickly restore the user to their browsing session without having to log back in to their sites or re-enter new data into forms.  Combined, LCIE and Automatic Crash Recovery provide a really innovative and graceful way to recovery from crashes.

Windows Error Reporting (aka Watson)

In the event of a crash or a hang, you may have received a choice to “send information to Microsoft”. You may be wondering what we do with this information.

The short answer is that we look at it every day. We take each report seriously because this data is extremely important to us. Not only can we determine what is causing issues, in aggregate, but we can determine the specific issues that are affecting the most people, and actually fix them.

If IE crashes or hangs and you choose to send information, Windows Error Reporting does some work to collect information about the state of the program when it crashes or hangs. We can see what add-ons are loaded and what IE was doing when it crashed. To the coders in the audience, it sends a call stack along with a memory dump. If you’re writing an application for Windows, or an Internet Explorer add-on, you can get Watson data about your own application and use it to improve quality.

Windows Error Reporting is smart enough to collect similar problems into “buckets”, which are usually lots of instances of the same underlying problem. If the problem lies in IE code and it is encountered frequently, we fix it. In IE8, we recognize that the most important failures that we can fix are ones that are out there happening on users’ machines. We have even committed to fixing the top 50% of all Watson hits in IE (including issues that may have carried over from IE7).

Microsoft goes to great lengths to protect privacy when customers submit error reports.  When an error occurs, a report is generated with the minimum amount of data needed to check for a solution.  This report does not contain any personal information and customers are asked before any information is sent back to Microsoft.  Microsoft also does not track error reports back to an individual — unless that individual chooses to track an error report to find out if a solution has been found for the error.  Even then, Microsoft developers working with the data cannot identify the customer and will request further information only if additional contact is needed to solve the problem. 

Get Ready for Beta 2

LCIE, Automatic Crash Recovery and  a good deal of bug fixing has helped make IE8 Beta 2 a browser you can depend on. When IE8 Beta 2 is released, I encourage you to check it out!

Andy Zeigler
Program Manager
Reliability and Privacy

Written by ieblog on July 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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How to Jumpstart the Economy - Tax Free Small Businesses

I can't remember how many companies I have started in my life. It's quite a few. Many have worked, some haven't. The one thing I know with certainty is that at no time prior to starting a company did capital gains or income tax percentages ever impact whether or not I would start a business. As any entrepreneur will gladly tell you, you have to have income before you are taxed, so how much you pay on your earnings is a good problem to have, and a better problem is how much you have to pay on capital gains.

What has impacted my decision on whether or not to start a business is the amount of paperwork involved and the local, state and employer taxes involved. Its complicated and expensive to start even the smallest business in the real world. The real world of course is different than the Internet world. The state of business, and in particular, entrepreneurship in the US has devolved into two worlds, the Internet and the real world.

In the Internet world, all you have to do is setup an account with an ad network, put it on your website, generate some traffic and they send you a check. Which is exactly what I did with the Google SearchBox below. No licenses, no tax id, no announcements in the newspaper. It took me minutes. Its exactly what millions of people do as well and its created an entire Internet economy that lives off of Google, Yahoo, MIcroSoft, AOL, Ebay and others. Its the entrepreneurs path of least resistance, which is exactly why most take this route.

Compare that with setting up a real world business. This is from the State of Texas: (Which I am proud to say makes it far easier than most states to start a business).

Step 1:Legal Structure and Registrations
Step 2:Business Tax Responsibilities
Step 3:Licenses Permits and Registrations (Note to State of TX, this link was broken, I had to find the destination page )
Step 4:Business Employer Requirements

As an entrepreneur , I can tell you that working through the requirements of these four steps is scary and intimidating. Why ? Because to merely start your business, you have to deal with lawyers and accountants, which not only costs a lot of money, but more importantly, requires you to trust those lawyers and accountants to make decisions that could have make or break consequences on your business. You may have the best idea with the ability to execute on that idea, but one little snafu by these professionals and your business is down the tubes.

Even worse, if you mess up on any of this, you could get in legal trouble. You could get sued, or find yourself in the middle of some legal nightmare.

Then of course, there is the financial reality of having to pay all of the business and employer taxes.

Contrast the above to what it takes to start a business on the Internet. Sure, Internet businesses are supposed to follow all the above steps in one manner or another, but they don't. Sure, when an Internet site hires people they are supposed to treat them like employees in the real world, but they don't. On the Internet, there are no employees, only contractors and consultants. No one pays employee taxes until they are big enough to have something to lose if they get caught.

Which brings us back to How to Jump Start the Economy.

If you want to see an immediate re invigoration of the economy, open the door back up for individual entrepreneurs to enter the real world without fear and without an immediate financial burden that pre empts their ability to be successful.


If we really want to stimulate job creation in this country, take the same approach to small business with 25 or fewer employees that we take to Internet taxes. Outlaw them.

No taxes of any kind on small businesses with 25 or fewer employees. No employer payroll tax. No state or local taxes. No taxes on earnings. Nada. The business owners will pay income taxes on their personal income they pay themselves, but not corporate earnings


The only taxes they would collect and remit are sales taxes, the employee's portion of payroll taxes and of course they would still file personal income taxes on their individual earnings.

Make this available only to individuals, and only for a single company (to prevent gaming the system by having multiple 25 employee and under companies)

The impact on the economy would be amazing and immediate. Those without jobs would be able to work for themselves, they would be able to join together and start companies. They would be able to take risks with far less capital. Sweat Equity would be all it takes to start a business.

Not only would we see hundreds of thousands of new businesses started seemingly overnight, with millions of new hires, but from those new businesses would come new ideas that hopefully would give us our next "Internet", an engine for economic growth that super cedes today's ideas.

In today's climate, its politically expedient to volunteer taxpayer money as a solution to all problems. That's wrong. Instead, we should open the door to our country's Intellectual capital and the entrepreneurial energy that separates us from the rest of the world. Make it easy for entrepreneurs to do what entrepreneurs do, and great things happen. Voters and politicians alike seem to have forgotten what has made this country an economic powerhouse.



@import url(http://www.google.com/cse/api/branding.css);

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Written by Mark Cuban on July 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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Air Mozilla Live: Meet Mark Surman

Today from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00) Asa Dotzler hosts Air Mozilla Live. Join us at http://air.mozilla.com.

Asa’s guests this week will be Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman. Here’s how Mitchell introduced Mark on her blog:

I’m thrilled to report that we’ve identified the person we believe should lead the Mozilla Foundation into a new stage of activity. That person is Mark Surman, the role is Mozilla Foundation Executive Director. “We” in this case is the Executive Director Search Committee, the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors, Mozilla Foundation staff, plus a set of other Mozilla contributors who have spoken with Mark.

Who: The Mozilla community, host Asa Dotzler, and guests Mitchell Baker and Mark Surman.
When: Wednesday, July 23, from 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. PDT (UTC-07:00)
Where: View the webcast and join the chat at air.mozilla.com and on IRC server irc.mozilla.org, channel #airmozilla.

Written by Paul Kim on July 23rd, 2008 with no comments.
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My FCC Presentation on the Future of Digital Media

Its hard to get much said in a 5 minute limit, but hopefully I made a few points that got people thinking.

Thank you for allowing me to offer this presentation on the Future of Digital Media. Its great to be back in Pittsburgh. A city that continues to grow in its vibrance, entrepreneurial spirit and verve to continually reinvent itself. Im proud to have grown up here.

The future of any technology can be defined by the economic opportunities it creates. One just look around Pittsburgh to see the explosion in the number of businesses built around advances in medical technology to see the importance of entrepreneurs focusing on new technology. The impact has been enormous.


Which brings us to today. What are the opportunities in front of us to get excited about in the digital media field ?

The first thing to understand is that digital media is not synonymous with the internet. There is a vast and growing world of digital media opportunities that exist outside the internet. Here are some examples:

1. While the wonders of the internet often keep us glued to our screens and at home, they also contribute to our need to get away. One of the shortest term opportunities is out of home entertainment. One opportunity that will expand is the use and implementation of 3D entertainment. While its not unusual for movies to be produced in 3D, there is a market for other types of 3D entertainment that is ready to take off. The Dallas Mavericks did a live 3D broadcast of one of our games this past season that we broadcast to a local movie theater enabled with a 3D digital projector. It was a huge success, fans loved it, 3D glasses and all, and have asked for more. We have seen the same demand for other types of content as well. Fortunately, there are not any production trucks dedicated to 3D live programming, so we are looking at building one.

From games to gaming to concerts to plays to specially developed events. 3D will be a mainstay of the future of digital media. Using entertainment as the starting point, the technology will advance, decline in price, and applications will be developed that will expand the use of 3D from entertainment to corporate to medical and personal and more. 3D is and will continue to be an exciting digital media application for a long time to come.

In order to support future digital media applications such as 3D, the networks that will carry them will need to evolve. That evolution will lead to new and exciting digital media applications, but will require new protocols and a far greater integration into the fixed routers of existing networks.

2. The second opportunity is with application specific networks. Unfortunately, the best networks cant be all things to all people and applications, which is exactly what the internet has to be. Not only does it have to be all things to all people, it has to be dumbed down to continue to be open for everyone and anyone. i believe we will see an expansion of networks that are optimized for specific protocols, performance guarantees and applications.
The most obvious example of this is are satellite and digital cable networks. These networks are optimized for broadcast and on demand applications at as high a quality as their bandwidth can support. They also have become platforms for application development and are starting to see increasingly robust toolsets. Unlike the internet, which is best delivery effort, with no promises or guarantees, the networks which deliver our digital TV are optimized to be reliable to five 9s with near instantaneous delivery.

These networks create unique opportunities for interactive applications, and for the delivery of content to mass audiences. There are open, or reasonably open standards such as Docsis 3.0/Tru 2Way that are now becoming available to any and all developers. I would strongly recommend that those of you who are looking at digital media applications to consider the opportunities available on these networks which already reach almost every home in the US.

That said, while platforming on an advanced media network is enticing, there are risks here. The consolidation of ownership among video distributors , who own both the networks and content could create roadblocks of discrimination towards their own products, or for the products of major media corporations with considerable market clout. These could preclude small programmers and entrepreneurs. Which is why HDNet is supportive of a shot clock to resolve these conflicts and to encourage those here to consider applying these same conflict resolution elements to not just content, but to software developments as well. However, even with these risks, as an entrepreneur, I think application development on proven digital media networks is a great opportunity for myself and others

There is one last point I would like to make in my allotted time. The one area of digital media that will create the greatest opportunity for entrepreneurs is the ability to develop and or control applications on fixed routers on internet connected networks. As those who want to see better performance of digital media, particularly live streaming over the internet will realize, best performance will come from utilizing application specific protocols such as multicast. This will create significant demand that will quickly and easily outstrip providers ability to support the demand. This will have the affect of putting ISPs in the role of gatekeeper for determining who gets the ability to broadcast over the internet vs who has to deliver content on a one to one, unicast basis. At some point in time, someone will realize that the holy grail of distribution of digital media over the internet will come from partnering with the many ISPs to enable multicasting and its related protocols, and to peer them as an unwired network. It wont be cheap, fast or easy, but it would be a game changer.

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Written by Mark Cuban on July 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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Font Embedding on the Web

Hi! It’s Bill Hill here again, still fighting the good fight to make typography on the Web as good as we’re used to seeing in print. We made significant progress this week, when one of the USA’s most prestigious font companies announced its support for the Embedded OpenType format for font embedding on the Web, and launched a new website to promote other browsers to support it in addition to Internet Explorer (which has had EOT support built-in since 1996).

At the same time, Ascender Corporation and its collaborators in the typographic community also warned of the legal dangers of using the Font Linking mechanism currently supported by other browsers.

Read the announcement in full or visit the new Ascender site for further details.

Font Embedding with EOT

Embedded OpenType (EOT) is currently before the W3C in a submission to make it an open Web Standard. The format was previously proprietary to Microsoft. We created it to enable font embedding within Microsoft Word documents in the early 1990s, and it was later extended for use on the Web by Internet Explorer.

In its introduction to the technologies of font embedding on the Web, Ascender says, ”Fonts play a critical role in the display, printing and manipulation of text-based information and content. Font embedding is a broad and complex topic, and we hope this website becomes a valuable resource for everyone who creates or uses fonts to learn more about proper font usage and licensing.”

The website has sections covering issues such as:

• Fonts and the Law
• Document Font Embedding
• Fonts and the Web (a comparison of the various embedding technologies)
• Shipping Fonts with Applications, Digital Content, and Devices

In the section on Fonts and the Web, Ascender compares EOT, sIFR and Font Linking, and welcomes the move by Microsoft and Monotype Imaging to propose EOT as a W3C standard (Monotype Imaging, another prestige font company, developed MicroType® Express compression to reduce the size of EOT files). The proposal has been with W3C for several months.

“EOT offers several advantages for type designers, and web designers. For type designers EOT creation tools must respect the embedding permissions built-into their fonts and EOTs are bound to a specific web page or site. For web designers an EOT can contain a subset of the glyphs, and it can be compressed – both of these features can shrink EOT file sizes to reduce download times and improve performance,” says Ascender.

Font Linking, in which raw font files are stored on a server and downloaded using the @font-face mechanism, falls outside the realm of fonts embedded in documents, Ascender warns. ”Web page designers should be very careful to avoid violating commercial font EULAs (end-user licensing agreements) by placing fonts on Web servers”. Ascender’s own EULA, for instance, prohibits installing fonts on servers without purchasing an extended license.

In concluding its comparison, the website continues, “Ascender believes that although not perfect, EOT represents the best current solution for type designers and font foundries to protect their Intellectual Property. It is the only web font embedding solution that respects font embedding permissions, uses an industry-proven subsetting and compression mechanism, and ties embedded fonts to specific web sites. Ascender hopes that other web browsers will make it a priority to support EOT once it becomes a W3C standard.”

The site also has some free fonts to promote the technology, and the first Web-based EOT creation tool.

This endorsement prompted me to go back and start playing around with font embedding, since I hadn’t looked at it in some time. I started by downloading WEFT, the Windows Embedding Font Tool, from the Microsoft website.

Before you try to use the tool in earnest, it’s really worthwhile going through the tutorial on the same page, which has some code samples. There’s also more good information in the “Troubleshooting and Testing” section on the WEFT page.

Don’t expect the tool to do all the work, though. It’s great at creating EOT files and the CSS Font Declarations used to link your pages to them. But - depending on the complexity of the source files for your pages - you may have to do some manual coding to get them to work properly.

Give it a Try, with a Caveat 

Here, I have to do a huge mea culpa.

Creating a set of pages using EOT allowed me to experiment with what a blog, for instance, might look like if it was designed for readability. But I’m a type and font guy – not a Web code jockey. I just wanted to see, quickly, what readable pages might look like. This was an experiment. I didn’t want to start hand-crafting pages. So I took the easy route, and used a publishing application with which I’m very familiar to generate the multicolumn pages.

This is “throwaway code”. It’s verbose, arcane and in lots of places it’s proprietary. A real Web guru like Chris Wilson takes one look, and you just know he’s controlling the urge to scream. The W3C HTML Validator, though, doesn’t manage to control the urge to scream: “85 coding errors, you moron! Starting with no <Doc Type>!”

My pages offended Chris so much, he immediately made a start at re-coding them so they’ll validate and meet Web standards. If I was a sensitive soul I’d be offended, but like I said, I’m no coder. And what a great way to recruit a very busy guy to do some coding for you. My pages are like a crooked picture on a wall which Chris passes every day – if he doesn’t straighten it, it’ll drive him mad…

Just his first pass at making a “legitimate” version of the first page took its size down to only 25% of the original. And even I can tell the code’s a lot better. We’ll work to get “legitimate versions” of the pages posted. We’d have preferred to do this before this blog post, but Chris said something about wanting to spend the weekend with his family or something :), and I wanted to highlight the Ascender announcement while it was timely."

Anyway, if you’re going to blame anyone for the code, blame me.

With that huge caveat, you’ll find my pages at:

http://billhillsite.com

They’re definitely a work in progress, so expect the odd glitch. For example, one or two people have reported mild clipping issues on some displays. I’ll need to investigate.

They were designed to be viewed on a 1400 x 900 display, and should be viewed using the F11 key to make Internet Explorer go FullScreen, to get rid of menus, address bars and anything else that distracts from reading. I’ve got into the habit of toggling F11 to go from my personal “reading” mode to “browsing” mode – where I want all those menus and toolbars…

I had to manually tidy up and paste the @font-family declarations, which look like this:

<style>
   @font-face {
   font-family: Cambria;
   font-style: normal;
   font-weight: normal;
   src: url(CAMBRIA2.eot);
   }

I’ve given feedback on these issues to the team, and we’re working out what can be done to reduce the need for manual tweaking.

Of course, since we’ve opened up the EOT format, we hope other tools will soon be generating EOTs as well, such as the Ascender site. Since the W3C submission includes sample code, it would be great if the tools you use to author pages would integrate EOT generation into the process. Then the code would be more tightly integrated as well.

The good news is that if you have to do some manual tweaking, once you’ve got it right for one page, the code can be easily copied and pasted into your other pages. Even better, you can put it in a Style Sheet, and have all the pages reference it.

Working with WEFT and EOT

One performance tip for embedding fonts in your pages is to use the subsetting capability available in the WEFT tool to generate the font objects with only the characters you need. They’ll be smaller, and faster to download.

For instance, if you write in English, then you’re unlikely to use the Cyrillic or Greek characters, and you could use “language-based” subsetting. There are seven subsetting options in the tool, including “per page” and “per site”. Since my test site’s a blog which should be frequently updated, I opted at first for “no subsetting”, which creates the largest font objects - but means I’ll never need to update them whatever new content I create in future.

However, on reflection, I thought this might be overkill, and tried language-based subsetting, and got a huge performance improvement!

Calibri and Cambria, for instance, are big fonts with four true weights each, all of them painstakingly hinted for maximum readability at small sizes. The four weights ended up as font objects of ~175K each without subsetting. With language-based subsetting, they were only one-third the size of the original EOTs and the page rendered just the same – only a lot faster.

Nice thing is, as long as I made sure the names of the objects for each font and style remained the same, I was able to just swap out the objects in the root directory of my site, without having to change the code in any of my pages.

Another production tip from my experience which can save you a lot of time: WEFT will let you analyze pages on your Web server – but you can tell it to create the font objects on your local hard drive. Generating the objects on the Web can take a loooong time. Using your local machine it’s very quick, and you can then FTP them to your site.

Font embedding is critical not just to allow designers to make distinctive pages, but for readability. Building fonts that work for text at normal reading sizes of 11 and 12 points requires a lot of work. It could take a designer anywhere from a year to three or more years to develop a full character set, hint it properly to work at screen resolution, and so on.

However, anyone who has a copy of Windows Vista, Office 2007 or Mac Office 2008 already has a great set of fonts they can embed in Web pages. They’re called the C* fonts (because they were optimized for ClearType, and thus all given names which began with “C” J): Calibri, Candara, Consolas (a monospaced font for coding), Cambria (which also contains a set of 4000 Math characters), Constantia and Corbel.

I know personally how much effort went into creating them, because at the time I was managing the group which ran the project. Outside designers created the outlines from their winning entries for a competition we ran, and then the fonts were hinted by the best in the business.

The project took a long time and cost a lot of money – which is why we don’t just give these fonts away. They add a lot of value to the applications (and operating systems) which ship them. But they all have Embedding permissions set to “Editable”, which means you can freely embed them using EOT, as long as you bought one of the products in which they shipped – although you are not allowed to just copy the .TTF font files to a server.

My absolute favorites for reading on screen are Cambria and Calibri. I use them for body text at 12point because I sit a little farther away from the screen than I would read from paper (where the optimum size is 11point). The faces also all have true italics, bold, and bold italics – none of your ugly, synthetic, machine-generated rubbish! A true italic face has unique characters, which are not just a skewed regular or Roman…

The Future of EOT

Remember, these pages will work only in Internet Explorer right now, because it’s the only browser which supports EOT font embedding. EOT was a great idea for Word back in the 1990s, and it was a great idea for the Web in 1995. But because Netscape at that time adopted another standard, and we kept EOT proprietary, no-one used either.

That’s why, last year, I gathered a group of folks together and began a campaign to make EOT an open standard and put a full proposal in front of the W3C.

I really hope it will become a standard, and other browsers will also implement it, because it’s a much-needed solution to the problem of using fonts on the Web that meets the needs not only of end-users and Web designers (who get to use the commercial fonts they already know), but also commercial font creators, more of whom will start enabling embedding as a result.

We have to solve the issue of fonts on the Web in a way that’s fair to everyone in the ecosystem.

Try experimenting with EOT embedding. I’d love to see some samples from people who actually know what they’re doing…

Bill Hill
Program Manager

edit: added two additional headers for readibility

Written by ieblog on July 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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Firefox 3.0.1 security and stability update now available for download

Editor’s note: Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users today. Check out the Mozilla Developer News announcement reposted below for more details.

Firefox 3.0.1 security and stability update now available for download