Re: Strange behavior of showModalDialog/showModelessDialog on WinXP SP2/IE 6 SP2.

From: Dave Methvin (news0110_at_methvin.com)
Date: 09/28/04 

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 10:40:40 -0400

This has a good summary of all the XP SP2 changes for developers:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/sp2brows.mspx

The status bar tells users a lot of important things that can help them
determine if the page is legitimate, like the security zone, blocked
publishers, blocked add-ins, and blocked popups. If you're trying to build
an application out of a browser, I agree that it lets more of the browser
show through and spoils the façade somewhat. But given how much social
engineering is going on I think they made the right choice.

If you want to use browser technologies but need total control over the
look, you can host the WebBrowser control in your own application rather
than using IE directly. That way, whatever security holes you might create
are limited to your own application, rather than distributed to every IE
user.

"Manuel Vázquez Acosta" <manu@chasqui.cu> wrote in message
news:OUOyavKoEHA.3556@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
Hum, ok, I won't make any comments or questions on how this could avoid such
a threat, I would rather make my point on the design effects this issue
brings up.

When making a web-driven application, some time we use showModalDialog to
display unavoidable messages the user should be aware or response to; ok?
It's quite common to put some buttons on the bottom of the window; you
expect the window to have no status bar, so you make your numbers to match
some well defined width and heigth values; now MS changes UI behavior and
all your buttons shows just its top halves.

Solutions:
    1. MS should change this to the former behaviour or check whether we
(their customers) wanted to show the status bar, in order to ADD the status
bar's height to the specified height.
    2. Designers are wrong, so they should have always showed the status
bar; so remake your numbers and always show statusbar; maybe next month you
will not be allowed to hide scroll bars - who knows?
    3. Move to Flash and forget all about worring about browser's
differences.

Regards,
Manuel.

"Michael Harris (MVP)" <mikhar at mvps dot org> wrote in message
news:esQY$b5nEHA.3908@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> > When I add the site to the Trusted Zone, then it behaves as expected
> > (a loose meaning of "as expected" - I expect it to work for all
> > zones).
>
>
> I would assume that the behavior is the result of recent IE security
> patches. There have been many changes in UI behavior over time with
respect
> to less than trusted security zones, all focused on making it more
difficult
> for malicious code to masquerade as something than other than web page
> content.
>
>
> --
> Michael Harris
> Microsoft.MVP.Scripting
> Sammamish WA US
>