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Happy Holidays from the IE Team!

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In the spirit of the season, we wanted to share some GPU-powered HTML5 and CSS3 holiday cheer. Check out Holiday Lites to brighten your screen and test your browser’s layout and rendering performance. This demo shows how IE11 updates content incrementally rather than needing to layout and render the entire page after every DOM manipulation. It uses a broad range of technologies including HTML5, CSS3, Border-Image, Flexbox, MP3 Audio, Power Efficient timers, and more.

Check out Holiday Lites to test your browser’s layout and rendering performance

Check out Holiday Lites to test your browser’s layout and rendering performance

Looking Back

As we reflect on the last year, it’s exciting to see how far the Web has come. It’s been a fun year for the IE team, as we shipped IE11 on both Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 less than a year after shipping IE10. IE11 is 30% faster for real-world Web sites, and is packed with improvements including touch, security, networking, and editing. Not to mention the brand new F12 developer tools.

We’re excited about the work developers are doing. WebGL brings new possibilities like GlacierWorks to life, and a fresh take on classic experiences like Hover. Support for the latest media streaming standards enables smooth, glitch-free video that adjusts to current network conditions (try it out at Netflix). And of course, with the launch of modern.IE it’s now easier than ever to test Web sites across browser versions.

Thank you!

Your participation and feedback is an important part of how we build IE. Today we want to say thank you to everyone who browses the Web with Windows 8.1, is using IE11, runs the test drives, and shares your feedback with the IE team. We also want to thank the people and groups who make the standards process work, the broad community of Web developers, and enthusiastic consumers who work to move the Web forward.

From the entire IE team, we wish you a Happy Hardware-accelerated Holiday Season, and we look forward to another exciting year and more progress on the Web in 2014.

Jon Aneja

Program Manager, Internet Explorer

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2013
    Auto playing music that can't be disabled? What's next, flashing scrolling marquees?

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2013
    Happy Holidays!

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2013
    Happy holidays :) Wish list for IE12: keep up the great work :)

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2013
    Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year. Keep up the great work.

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2013
    Wish list for 2014, which won't happen: IE 11/12 for Vista and Server 2008.

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2013
    @Really?, ever heard of WebVtt. See this ie.microsoft.com/.../VideoCaptions

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2013
    Happy Birthday to Internet Explorer! --_-- IE rocks!!

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2013
    It is very fast. Though on Windows 7 IE 11, I'm getting graphical artifacts -- specifically little horizontal and vertical lines at the edges of where it is drawing.

  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2013
    Happy Holidays! I'm looking forward to 2014! Let's hope it's another year of growth!

  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2013
    Happy Holidays to all IE team members! Here is a gift for you from masses connect.microsoft.com/.../ootb-sharing-options-in-internet-explorer  8-)

  • Anonymous
    December 24, 2013
    take an hour then fix IE11 please

  • Anonymous
    December 26, 2013
    @Sardoc NOOOOOOoooooooooo... Vista is on its way out and Server 2008 shouldn't be used for general web browsing anyway.

  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2013
    @Jo So what? It has more market share than 8.1 at the moment.

  • Anonymous
    December 29, 2013
    @Sardoc Yeah, of course. The last stats we've got on that front where from 1.5 months after the launch of 8.1, of course it had more market share... Anyway, you should count 8 and 8.1 together, since 8.1 is just an update for 8, not a new OS.

  • Anonymous
    December 31, 2013
    Sorry to say this (since you obviously don't care) but with IE11 you broke hh.exe (your CHM viewer) which was pretty much broken before you start messing with it, but this time you have REALLY broken it. It can't even display images... Will you ever improve your CHM viewer (not to mention your abandoned CHM compiler, hhc.exe...)? IE11 bugs:

  • Sometimes it doesn't restore its window when minimized and I click its button on the taskbar (Windows 7 OS). It makes a system beep (like the one made by modal dialogs when clicking on their parent) and it restores on the 2nd try.
  • In one machine, I get an app freeze when opening the network tab from dev tools.
  • I got into SERIOUS problems (IE froze) when I started playing with a performance demo of yours (it was a 3D map of the Himalayas that let you navigate around with satellite images).
  • When I restore my old opened tabs (restore session), some tabs don't load (their state indicator spins forever). I don't care if they don't load IMMEDIATELLY (in fact it would be GREAT to load ONLY after I click on it to view it -- for memory consumption reasons) but the current behavior is a bug.
  • Funny enough, I couldn't connect to "IE Connect" site. IE kept redirecting me to nothing... I don't know if it works with other browsers or if it doesn't work at all...
  • It this comment makes it to your site, this would be another bug, since IE11 failed to post it, while Chrome didn't. :D
  • It misses a "Paste & Go" in the address bar context menu.
  • Perhaps it would be nice to have a more advanced "session restoration" (meaning, restoring old opened tabs) with saving named sessions, session preview before loading it, etc.
  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2014
    Links to connect bug reports and I will happily cast votes. Posting complain here can make sense and effect only when you have bug report number.