Add-on Guidelines and Requirements in Action – Upgrade Advisor

We’ve blogged in the past about guidelines and requirements that we’ve published to help add-on developers create quality add-ons.  We wrote these guidelines based on years of providing support to users and developers in response to questions from the developer community.

We’ve shared several great examples of these guidelines and requirements in action in the past few months. As part of IE’s cumulative security updates, we’ve released an update to the Internet Explorer Upgrade Advisor list that helps users update to new versions of add-ons that follow the guidelines and requirements. In this post, we highlight the latest add-ons that have made changes based on the guidelines and requirements, and we describe the Upgrade Advisor user experience in detail.

It’s been encouraging to see more add-ons recently release new versions with improvements in functionality based on these guidelines and requirements. As more developers follow them, our users will have a better experience. Here are some of the add-ons that have made changes to their functionality:

Add-on Name New Version
AOL Toolbar 5.74.1.5498
Ask Toolbar 5.6.2.119
BuySafe Shopping Advisor Toolbar 5.0.1.366
Comcast Toolbar 1.0.0.17
Quero Toolbar 5.0.0.5
XFinity Toolbar 1.0.0.17
Yandex.Bar 5.1.2.1189

It’s important to update users to the new versions of these add-ons so they can benefit from improved stability and compatibility. Today we released an updated Upgrade Advisor list with IE’s Cumulative Security Updates to help users do just that. Users who have specific versions of the above add-ons may see the Upgrade Advisor dialog box when they launch Internet Explorer 8:

IE Upgrade Advisor Dialog

The dialog box presents the user with three options to choose from:

Option 1: Check online for an update
When the user selects this option or closes the dialog without making a choice, the dialog box is dismissed and a web page is displayed in a new window that runs in No Add-ons Mode. The user can follow the steps in this web page to install the new version of the add-on. If a link to the new version of the add-on is not provided by the vendor, or the new version does not follow the guidelines and requirements, the web page will inform the user that no update is available yet.

Option 2: Always open Internet Explorer without this add-on
When the user selects this option, Internet Explorer disables the add-on, the dialog box is dismissed, and Internet Explorer continues to launch.

Option 3: Keep using this add-on anyway
When the user selects this option, the dialog box is dismissed and Internet Explorer continues to launch with the add-on enabled until the next refresh of the Upgrade Advisor list which occurs approximately every 8 weeks.

Many thanks to the teams that have made changes to follow the guidelines and requirements. We will continue to work with add-on vendors to help them release new versions of add-ons that have better stability, compatibility and performance.

Herman Ng
Program Manager