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Windows Consumer Preview: The Fifth IE10 Platform Preview

With IE10 in Windows 8, we reimagined the browser. We designed and built IE10 to be the best way to experience the Web on Windows. Consumers can now enjoy more touch-friendly and beautiful, fast and fluid Web applications with the updated IE10 engine included in the Windows Consumer Preview. This fifth Platform Preview of IE10 delivers improved performance and support for more HTML5:

This video shows some of the touch-friendly HTML5 technologies in the fifth IE10 Platform Preview, included with the Windows Consumer Preview.
View this video on YouTube

You can read more about the improvements to the Metro style browsing experience on the Building Windows 8 blog. The remainder of this post discusses the underlying HTML5 engine.

Windows 8 includes one HTML5 browsing engine that powers both browsing experiences (the Metro style one and desktop one) as well as Metro style applications that use HTML5 and JavaScript. The common HTML5 engine provides consistently fast, safe, and powerful support for Web standards and the Web programming model, for both browser experiences as well as for Metro style applications.

Consumers experience this power with rich, beautiful visual effects that take full advantage of the underlying hardware safely. Some examples that you can try at the IE Test Drive site with the Consumer Preview include fast and fluid multi-touch support in Web pages and the latest database APIs, which enable you to take photos from a Web site offline. The Test Drive site demonstrates how much better the Web can be with rich visual effects, sophisticated page layouts, and the advances to the Web programming model. You can read the full list in the IE10 developer guide.

A Better Web Ahead

Working closely with the developer community, we see a much better Web ahead.

IE10 in the Metro style experience is plug-in free. Almost all phones and devices are already plug-in free and many sites already run plug-in free for them. To deliver the richest experience, and one experience that scales across different devices, we continue to recommend that developers detect when plug-ins are not available and rely on native browser patterns.

Similarly, we recommend that developers update their sites’ older, out of date libraries (like this one) that don’t work well with new browsers like IE10.

We also recommend that developers use feature, not browser, detection. Often, the compatibility problem reports we receive have more to do with sites detecting IE and sending it different content than they send other browsers than any particular issue in IE. You can see some examples of how IE makes up for certain sites by adjusting the information it sends to particular sites (e.g. sending an iPad identification token) based on the Compatibility View (CV) list in the post script to this blog entry.

Developers can find sample feature detection code patterns in several IE blog posts, including this one.

The quality and correctness of different browsers’ HTML5 engines continue to vary widely. We continue to contribute to the test suites under development at the HTML5 standards bodies to further the goal of interoperability and same markup. We’ve submitted 456 new tests to them that you can view at the IE Test Center as well. As different browsers improve their support of the same markup to produce the same results, we can all realize the promise of HTML5.

You can find a full list of new functionality available to developers in the IE10 developer guide here. Download the Windows 8 Consumer preview to try this update to IE10. We look forward to continued engagement with the developer community and your feedback on Connect.

―Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2012
    Yay!

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2012
    Second

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2012
    All well and good. But WHEN can we try IE10 on WIndows 7!

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2012
    Any word on if this preview will be available for Win7? I'm running Win7 in Parallels and can't install the Win8 preview.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Still no Windows 7 preview?  You can't continue to expect web developers to install Windows 8 just to test your browser.  I would have thought some widespread testing on Windows 7 would be beneficial to the quality of the final release.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Also can anyone state if there are any additions to standards support in the new preview, the linked developer guide does not make clear what is new and what was already in previous versions.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Windows 7?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Can we even expect IE10 to be released for Windows 7 in any form, or is it considered a dead platform now?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    http://nightly.mozilla.org/ Get Firefox, the superior browser, runs on any platform, any OS, doesn't look you into Windows 8.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Problem is, Firefox is slow and bloated. Chrome is a botnet, and IE is not updated anymore separate from Windows. That would leave Opera, except that it has too many rendering errors.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Hello guys, I'm loving your work with IE10 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview. IE10 is by far the best browser in the world right now. But I want to point out an issue you just mentioned. You have asked site developers to use feature detection and use standard features. But Microsoft themselves often don't follow that guideline. For example, Hotmail is broken on IE10, but works perfectly on IE9. Why should this be the case?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    this is ridiculous, still no new build for windows 7, we don't want to install win8 preview, we want to test our websites, now users will have hardly any time to test their sites to see if they are compatible with ie10, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Businesses will take forever to upgrade to IE10 this way. Release this preview with support for win7 already!

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    The Bayou tests show IE performing 15 fireflies with HW acceleration at 22 FPS, while my chrome performs at roughly 4x that. Furthermore, to promote IE, Microsoft has to do so by criticizing other browsers?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    I always have trouble finding the changelog for these things.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Vista SP2 is overdue. The PowerShell 3.0 team listened and is supporting Vista SP2. MS extended support as well. Only thorn is IE team.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    @Seydon, you can choose to remain ignorant about IE9/10's security all you like, but it has been proven again and again that IE9/10 running on Windows 7/8/Vista in Protected Mode with features like SmartScreen Filter, is the most secure browser in the world according to various metrics.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    It's a pity Microsoft, differently from competitors, doesn't have many groupies/fanboys, so it happens that even "good news" gets bad comments. I wanted to share some love for something I like from Microsoft. I hope to see IE10 final soon and also to see some big plan from Microsoft to remove IE6-7-8 (and later also IE9) from the planet. Timing is the key. IE10 previews are great compared to current browser, but given MS update policy you will have to make sure IE10 will be great until you will be ready with IE11. Or.. you put automatic updates to the browser like everyone else is doing these days.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Can you pls give us a releasedate for IE10 on Win 7?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Keep telling yourself that Prior Semblance.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    I'm playing with IE10 on Windows 8 Consumer preview right now. Interesting GUI, great SVG performance! Kudos! In my tests it appears that the SVG "animate" is not yet supported. Are there plans to add this support by the time of release?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Can someone point to a list of changes in this release VS the previous one? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Can someone help I have downloaded the windows 8 consumer preview but I do not have as promised IE10 can someone elaborate and perhaps tell me how to get it?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Wonderful.. from now on no FF no Chrome,, just IE10!! but please release the beta soon so I can run on Windows 7 as well.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    @Sven, please post the score for nontroppo.org/.../Hixie_DOM.html in IE10p5 @IE-team and all the audience: I tried my level best to report on every possible forum of Microsoft. Be it connect, blog-b8, blog-ie, msdn-social or windows-team-blog... but this particular microbenchmark was never addressed! If Safari can do insertion, indexing, append and prepend in ~130ms without fragmentation, why can't IE/Trident work swiftly on the live DOM ????? I am pretty sure this DOM rendering performance is the last hiccup for IE to achieve highest performance ranking.. but IEteam has reached fair-enough and they don't give a #!@% FWIW, pleaseeeeeeeeeee look into this and fix/rewrite the responsible modules for this performance nightmare!!! Connect bug report - connect.microsoft.com/.../a-dom-manipulation-test-ie-performance

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    all well and good one of the comments said little did He know he was using explorer 10 all along.....DUH!   lol

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Found the solution, few other people have been having it. If your default browser was different prior to upgrade it can fail, IE10 is installed correctly, just do the following and it sorts it:


Search for "Default Programs"... Make sure "Apps" filter is selected (Winkey+Q) Click "Set Default Program" Select "Internet Explorer" on the left Click "Set this program as default" on the right

Hope this helps, have a good one y'all

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    "Often, the compatibility problem reports we receive have more to do with sites detecting IE and sending it different content than they send other browsers than any particular issue in IE. " Which is exactly what http://crashie8.com/ is doing. It sends Firefox and Chrome a regular webpage, but for IE, it sends infinite data.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    i572.photobucket.com/.../TheBayouChrome17.jpg MS is lying about Chrome's performance, as you can see from the screenshot above Chrome isn't slow in the test. Nice try, MS.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    @Real McCoy, who asked for data from: nontroppo.org/.../Hixie_DOM.html Total elapsed time: 21988ms Breakdown (fraction shows time relative to append time): Append:  1.00; 154ms Prepend: 1.08; 167ms Index:   137.84; 21228ms Insert:  1.10; 170ms Remove:  1.75; 269ms Bad bad IE!

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    @Seydon do you really believe "IE has nothing but security holes"? according to a study funded by Google a few months ago : "Chrome is the most secured browser, followed closely by Microsoft IE. Mozilla's open-source Firefox came in third, largely because of its omission of a security sandbox that shields vital parts of the Windows operating system from functions that parse JavaScript, images and other web content." and the same study shows that IE had far less security flaws than Firefox and chrome, contraly to some popular belief among the poorly informed geeks.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    It seems the browse language preference is now tied to the Windows language settings. I want to set up different languages/order than I have in Windows. How can I do that?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    So I can't test IE10 with animation since I only have Windows 7. I have overhauled all of my demos here http://css-3d.org/ with -ms- prefixes. Just wondering, do they work?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    I should state one issue that I noticed that is a error in the video. The gradient effects that Chrome was rendering poorly was due to IE10 doing gradients in premultiplied space. Since the developer community at large does not know the difference between gradients done in premultiplied space or non-premultiplied space, then they will not know how to create nice gradients in non-premultiplied space or even know that premultiplied space give less possible gradient variations.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    The languages suffix you add in IE10 Internet Options for Ctrl+Shift+Enter is broken on Windows Consumer Preview. Setting doesn't get saved or doesn't work at all.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    will IE10 final have .webm and .ogg video and audio capability built-in or will we have to download those codecs seperately. It would be a lot better if they were built-in that way all browsers except safari could view webm html5 videos without plugins.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    "Warn when closing multiple tabs" option is also broken. I guess the bar was set pretty low for Consumer Preview?

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    @Anti Open Source Fanatic, You said: "Windows 7 will be FULLY supported by IE10. IE10 hasn't yet reached even the BETA stage. It's still "preview"." But according to the Windows 8 blog, "consumer preview" is the new term for "beta".  So by this stage, IE10 should really be available for Win7.  Otherwise I don't see how it will get properly beta-tested before release.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
    Please finally relase a Beta, preview or test version for Win 7.

  • Anonymous
    February 29, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    No version for win7? Bad... very bad. You forget about cumunity?

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    @RP, IE10 is not in beta stage, Windows 8 is. IE10 is still in the Platform Preview (alpha) stage. @xpclient, I can confirm the issue on the language suffix but not the one related to the warning when closing multiple tabs. Works fine for me. Have you set IE10 to start the tabs from the last session? There are a new set of options in the Internet Options dialog and that is where you can define that setting. ;) @IE Team, can you guys remove Content Advisor from IE? The underlying features it uses have been dead since 2009 so the feature does not work. Furthermore, it has options that reek from the old Windows 95 days and that haven't been updated pratically since then. Also redesign the Properties dialog of web pages like I already proposed in Microsoft Connect for IE10 Developer Preview that was included with the Windows 8 Developer Preview.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    Hi, great work on IE 10 in Win8CP. I just want you to know, maybe you already, but when i zoom a webpage in MetroIE and want to make it normal again, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + 0  doesn't work.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    @Real McCoy These particular set of tests are written by Ian Hixie, a Google employee, which exercise a small and specific set of DOM patterns. These tests are one measure of performance and may not necessarily correlate with real site performance impact. There is one specific test in the set which exercises a backwards traversal pattern, a pattern not nearly used as frequently as the forward traversal pattern by web developers, where IE is slower than others. While we expect this issue will have a limited impact on developers and real sites, we are investigating performance improvements to address this issue. You can track the bug here: connect.microsoft.com/.../a-dom-manipulation-test-ie-performance.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    Это просто ппц худшего дизайна я невидел!!!

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    Windows 8 худшая по дизайну за всю историю Microsoft

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    So far only two WebM trolls. O: Anyway, keep up the good work.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    So the IE team decided to go from one extreme to the other on subpixel antialiasing. Now IE10 uses grayscale antialiasing everywhere except, well, in the F12 tools. Apparently this is a deliberate decision given the new fifth step in the ClearType tuner. The question is again why do you the IE team take away choice from the user. Mainstream display is nowhere close to the 400+ PPI retina resolution (of the human eye, not Apple's marketing hype) and is not approaching that figure any time soon. (From 80 DPI to 150 DPI it took like 30 years. From 150 to 400? I would not hold my breadth) Subpixel antialiasing provides extra sharpness. But this is now all gone, from the web to the apps. When it comes to typographic aesthetics, Microsoft should learn something from Apple.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    Will you please improve the bookmark bar in ie10? when i need to switch between folders in my favorite bookmark, i need to click twice with my mouse. can i just hover to switch the popup menu?

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    This Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/.../2012_ATP_World_Tour is consistently crashing desktop IE10 on Windows 8 Consumer Preview in standards mode. Doesn't crash in compatibility view. Can the IE team repro the crash? I have no addons installed.

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2012
    submit the bug report on connect.microsoft.com and attach the error-log if possible!

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2012
    While a huge improvement over IE 9, I had expected IE 10 to catch up or surpass Chrome and so far even PPV 5 is not up to that task.  html5test.com/index.html Alternatively maybe Microsoft IE team can contribute more tests so the accuracy of this likely tainted picture can be seen better.

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2012
    I'm REALLY missing that IE10 fully supports Color Management, e.g monitor profiles to show fotos / videos correct at wide color gamut monitors!

  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2012
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  • Anonymous
    March 05, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2012
    IE10 doesn't seem to support the 'pageshow' event therefore when using the History API content won't initially load. In Chrome you only need the 'popstate' event and with Firefox you have to add 'pageshow'. What gives?....in other areas it performs well, sorta... And if Web Audio API or some form of 3D canvas doesn't make it in I can't develop for IE anymore and I'm moving on.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2012
    @NewDev: The pageshow event is for a different purpose, the bfcache (for "Back-Forward Cache"), and is described by Mozilla at developer.mozilla.org/.../Using_Firefox_1.5_caching. The Chrome behavior you describe is out-of-date and does not comply with the current HTML5 spec. As per the current draft, you can read the history.state property at any time, including initial load. This allows you to restore state as your code initializes. Tony Ross describes this in more detail in his IEBlog post at blogs.msdn.com/.../html5-history-in-ie10.aspx.

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2012
    Wow a real reply, thank you for your concern! I want to develop for IE10 so seeing your response keeps me motivated. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2012
    How do I get Deal or No Deal on my phone?

  • Anonymous
    March 08, 2012
    www.zdnet.com/.../10621 So much for your overrated IE9 "sandbox".

  • Anonymous
    March 12, 2012
    Seems like the comment lists on MSDN these days are filled with the same loud-mouthed idiots who ruin the multiplayer experience on Xbox Live. Most of them can't even spell. A little quality control editing wouldn't go amiss, is what I'm saying.