Opting in to the Information Bar

The information published in this post is now out-of-date and one or more links are invalid.

—IEBlog Editor, 20 August 2012

So this is my first post on this blog, my name is Phil Nachreiner, I’m a developer on the IE team.  I’ll post more about myself in another time, but I’d like to talk briefly about opting into the security features we added in XPSP2.  For example, we’ve made it extremely easy to opt existing applications that use the WebBrowser Control into the XPSP2 Information Bar without having to recompile the application.  In the registry under the key:

HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMainFeatureControl 

There exists the FEATURE_SECURITYBAND key:
HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMainFeature ControlFEATURE_SECURITYBAND

This is the Information Bar key. You can opt an application in by adding a DWORD of your exe and setting the value to 1.  In order to see notifications, you will also need to opt into a Feature Control that triggers a notification for example the WEBOC_POPUPMANAGEMENT key provides Popup notifications (See the Information Bar link below for other notification keys).

In my registry I see that Maxthon and MSN Explorer have both opted into the Information Bar, cool!! 

We’ve also provided a way to programmatically enable the Information Bar and this can be done through the: CoInternetSetFeatureEnabled API

To read more information specific to opting in to the Information Bar see this MSDN article:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/hosting/wbcustomization.asp

Here’s two other MSDN articles that talks about feature control keys:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/XpSp2Compat.asp

https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/security/szone/reference/enums/INTERNETFEATURELIST.asp

-Phil