First IE6 Service Pack Begins Testing
November 29th, 2001, 3:44 PM ET
By: David Worthington, BetaNews
Story URL: http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=1007066649

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.


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