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You can turn off the notification bar by deselecting the Show Information Bar For Pop-Ups option. If you turn off the information bar, the pop-up blocker will display an icon in the status bar to notify you of blocked pop-ups.
Tech TipThe information bar is also used for providing information or options that were previously displayed in dialog boxes, such as asking users whether they want to download active content. Turning off the bar for pop-ups does not turn it off for other notifications. If you want to turn off pop-up blocking (it's on by default), you can do so from the pop-up notification bar's context menu, or if you have the bar turned off, click Tools | Pop-up Blocker or click Tools | Options and select the Privacy tab. Deselect the Block Pop-ups check box at the bottom of the page. If you click the Settings button here or from the Tools | Pop-up Blocker menu, you can enter the URLs of sites from which you want to allow pop-ups, as shown in Figure A. You can also select whether to play a sound when a pop-up is blocked (that "click" I mentioned earlier) and whether to show the information bar. Finally, you can set the filter level to one of three settings:
Tech TipIE doesn't block pop-ups from sites that are in the Local Intranet zone or the Trusted Sites zone. To block these pop-ups, you'll need to remove the sites from those zones. IE Add-on ManagerAnother welcome addition to IE is the add-on management feature. This allows you to see a list of browser add-ons that have been installed. Many add-ons enhance browser functionality (such as third-party pop-up blockers or search engine toolbars), but many spyware programs are installed as add-ons, sometimes without your knowledge. To open the Add-on Manager, click Tools | Manage Add-ons. In the Add-on Manager window, shown in Figure B, you can view a list of the add-ons that have been used by Internet Explorer (all those that are installed, whether currently loaded or not) or just those that are currently loaded. You make this selection from the Show drop-down list.
To disable an add-on, you only need to highlight it in the list and then click the Enable or Disable button under Settings at the bottom-left side of the dialog box. You can also update an ActiveX control by highlighting it in the list and clicking the Update ActiveX button under Update at the bottom-right side of the dialog box. A closely related feature added by SP2 is Add-on Crash Detection. If an add-on causes IE to shut down, this feature will present you with options to disable or upgrade the add-on. Additional security featuresOther IE features installed by SP2 might not be as visible to the user, but they make the Web browsing experience safer and more secure. These include:
Local machine zone lockdownWeb sites are assigned to different security zones that have different levels of restrictions, based on how safe the sites are assumed to be. The local machine zone is an implicit zone that encompasses all the content on the local computer. On XP computers without SP2, the local machine zone has minimal restrictions because files located on your local hard disk are presumed to be safe. However, hackers can exploit this presumption, so SP2 locks down the local machine zone. By default, the local machine zone is even more restricted than the Internet zone. This might affect the functionality of some scripts and applications that host Internet Explorer. Active content may not display as expected. However, the information bar should provide a notification that the file has been restricted, and you can click it to remove the lockdown. Object cachingWeb objects (HTML pages, graphics files, sound files, scripts, etc.) are cached on the user's hard disk for better performance. When a user attempts to access Web content that has been cached, it's downloaded to the browser from the local cache, rather than from the Web server, speeding up access to the content. Without SP2, it was possible for a Web page to access objects that had been cached from a different Web site. This created a security hole that could be exploited. SP2 changes this, so that when you go to a site in a different domain, that site cannot access objects cached from a site in the original domain. Access to scriptable objects is also blocked within the same domain if the context has changed because you have navigated to a different site. According to Microsoft, this might affect a few applications, causing Access Denied errors. Changes to download, attachment, and Authenticode handlingMore information has been added to the dialog boxes that appear when you download files and attachments. The Authenticode dialog box now gives you information about the publisher of a signed file before opening the file type. Better browsingThese are not the only changes that have been made to Internet Explorer by SP2, but they are the ones that will have the most impact on end users. The pop-up blocker and the Add-on Manager, in particular, greatly improve the user experience. Other changes make browsing safer and more secure.
Also see: Windows XP SP2 | Windows XP Theme | Windows XP SP3| Windows XP Tips | ||||||||||||||||
