Site-ready HTML5: Second IE10 Platform Preview Available for Developers

IE10 Platform Preview 2, the same HTML5 engine seen in the recent public “Windows 8” demos, is now available for download. With this update, IE10 continues to deliver support for site-ready HTML5 technologies as well as improving performance:

This video shows some of the HTML5 technologies in the second IE10 Platform Preview in action.

With the second Platform Preview, developers can start working with several site-ready HTML5 technologies for building beautiful, interactive Web applications with great performance and security. You can read the full list here in the IE10 developer guide:

• Beautiful and interactive Web applications are easier to deliver with support for several new technologies like CSS3 Positioned Floats, HTML5 Drag-drop, File Reader API, Media Query Listeners and initial support for HTML5 Forms.
• HTML5 Application performance improves across the board, as well as the ability to deliver better performance with more efficient use of battery life with new technologies like Web Workers with Channel Messaging, Async script support, and others.
• Web application security improves using the same markup with support for HTML5 Sandbox for iframe isolation.

IE10 continues IE9’s precedent of enabling Web applications to do more in the browser without plug-ins. It also continues the pattern of offloading work to the parts of a PC that are best suited for them, like the GPU for graphics, and different processor cores for background compilation of JavaScript.

Beautiful and Interactive Web Applications

Beautiful and interactive Web applications are easier to deliver with IE10’s support of HTML5 technologies. For example, IE10 supports CSS3 Positioned Floats to enable text flows around figures on a page, building on the first Platform Preview’s support for CSS3 grid, multi-column, and flexbox:

Click here to try Positioned Floats and see how text lays out around floating elements for a more natural reading experience.

Beauty starts with reliable, consistent parsing behavior. This IE10 Platform Preview includes parsing improvements from the W3C HTML5 spec, reflecting that developers can now expect the same behavior in all compliant browsers even for imperfect or invalid markup. HTML5 is the first version of HTML to define the behavior of invalid markup. Rather than relying on “fix-up” rules that vary from browser to browser, HTML5 parsing behavior is now specified in a way that developers can count on it. IE10 now supports the File Reader API and HTML5 Forms validation, as well as advanced hit testing for more complex selection scenarios like graphics editors, games, and other applications that typically use multiple graphics layers.

This test drive illustrates how different browsers today give different results when running the same Web pages even though they all claim support for the same standards. The quality and correctness of different browsers’ HTML5 engines vary widely. To fulfill the goal of interoperability and same markup, the test suites under development at standards bodies continue to grow in importance for the Web developer community. This test drive also illustrates the performance differences between different implementations of hardware acceleration.

This shows the results in IE10 Platform Preview, Firefox 5, and Chrome 13. Click here to try the How Stuff Works demo and see how hardware accelerated HTML5 canvas works together with CSS3 gradients.

Web Application Performance

You can see additional differences in performance between the different browsers in the Fireflies test drive. Having HTML5 video, and audio, and canvas, and CSS3 gradients work well together is important because developers will combine technologies in real-world Web applications.

IE10 is the first browser to support several new performance APIs coming out of the W3C’s working groups. The test drives for setImmediate, requestAnimationFrame, and PageVisibility illustrate how these APIs enable developers to make the Web faster and more responsive even while Web sites make better use of battery life on mobile devices.

Web workers enable a host of new programming scenarios for the Web. With them, Web applications can be more responsive by offloading complex JavaScript to run in the background. For example, casual games might choose to run the logic for the "computer player" in a Web worker while users take their turn. This test drive (link) demonstrates the performance benefit of offloading work from the page to a Web worker. (Note that FF5 does not support Channel Messaging, an additional feature of this technology that the test drive can use.)

Click here to try the Fountains demo and see how Web Workers delivers more responsive experience and consistent frame rates.

With support for Async script, developers can control the impact on Web page performance of their scripts downloading from their sites.

Web Application Security

This IE10 Platform Preview now supports HTML5 Sandbox and iframe isolation, an important component to Web application security:

Click here to try the HTML5 sandbox demo. Note that Firefox 5 does not support this.

We have communicated specific privacy concerns (link) about the design of one aspect of Web Workers (link) to the W3C working group, along with a proposal for how to resolve the issue.

Looking Forward

Developers will be able to build even more amazing sites and applications (beyond these, or these) with IE10’s improved HTML5 support. As different browsers support developers using the same markup to achieve the same results with great performance, we can all realize the promise of HTML5 applications. To this end, we have posted over 270 new tests to the IE Test Center and submitted them to the standards bodies.

With Platform Previews, developers and technology enthusiasts can try out new technologies and provide feedback without any confusion about which technologies are site-ready and which are experimental. This approach enables the technical community to work through safety issues (for example, the privacy one above, or this one) before putting any consumers at risk, and minimizes wasted effort re-writing consumer-facing sites. This post HTML5, Site-Ready and Experimental offers more detail on this topic. For example, initial support for the FileAPI started with HTML5 Labs; based on feedback there, we have added it to the IE Platform Preview.

Because of this approach to productizing Web technologies, Microsoft will support IE10 for 10 years after its release, honoring the same product lifecycle commitments as Windows itself. This blog post (link) describes some of the scenarios and customers for which this is important.

We continue to recommend that developers use feature detection to accommodate the many, many browsers (for example on mobile devices) that do not support particular features:

// check if this browser supports channel messaging

if (window.MessageChannel) {

/* Use channel messaging in this browser */

}

You can find a full list of new functionality available to developers in the IE10 developer guide here. We look forward to continuing to engage the community and listening to your feedback.

Dean Hachamovitch

P.S. We encourage developers to try out the improved innerHTML support in this second Platform Preview of IE10.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Yay! so cool to see the progress.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Awesome work guys.... i hope W8 comes out at the earliest .. Though people  generally prefer chrome they're willing to listen to my why IE9 talks as it has substance.... but speed and usability hav to be enhanced.. Keep at it guys and  may u come out on top :)

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
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• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  I and many others hope that text-shadow will finally come to IE10 like in the other browsers :)

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Please improve DevToolbar experience. It will be nice to have margin/border/padding highlighting like in Firebug, live DOM refresh in HTML tab and 0.availability of Cookies tab.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Can the text-rendering engine in IE be so poor that text-shadows are beyond its capabilities?  I mean this is about the most basic-of-basic CSS3 features that every browser EXCEPT IE has supported for ages.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  From the HTML5 Web Camps please access starter files here http://bit.ly/wcir-rocks

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  IE doesn't like me, why oh why can't Microsoft and I be friends :(

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  When I minimize IE (9 or 10 previews), and do some work, then go back to IE, page scrolling by holding the scroll bar is really slow (happens for sure on hardforum.com , not sure if happens on all other sites or just some though.)  Other browsers don't have this problem..

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Nice. With columns support, text-shadow is the most important missing thing. Then you guys can work on a GOOD, customizable UI. Also, user features. IE already allows sites to be viewed with a custom CSS (can do this since at least IE5.5, but probably way longer), you could easily expand this to set up per-site rules - and add not just css but javascript support too, thus adding support for two of the most popular plugins on any other browser.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Good job guys. I wonder why IE10 PP2 doesn't support CSS3 animations and transitions, which were seen working in Internet Explorer from leaked Windows 8 builds.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  It's hilarious how overt this article is about "yeah, well, Chrome and Firefox don't do this. :smug:" How about text-shadow? CSS animations? 2D transitions? History push? Web sockets? Border-image? It's awesome that IE10 is making big strides, and it's great to talk about what's new - but don't be so snide about the few things it does better, when it's still missing so much.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Sounds awesome, was happily surprised to see HTML5 forms mentioned =]  Downloading now =D

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Wohooo, floats have never felt that great since IE7 fixed the quirks of its predecessors.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Nice work you guys did there.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Cool feature for the lights  :) Is message channel w3c standard??

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  TTEEEXTTT SHHHAAADDDOOOOOWWW

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  @Miguel - MessageChannel is defined in the W3C Web Messaging spec here: dev.w3.org/.../postmsg

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  You are very keen to promote your own in-house benchmarks, and even the benchmarks of others when it suits you (e.g. Sunspider). But why have I not once seen Google's V8 benchmark mentioned on your site, despite it being considered an industry-standard benchmark for JavaScript performance? Is it because IE is still rubbish at it?

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Congratulations for the fast progress and the many improvements! I am glad to see HTML5 Forms starting to be implemented, and I look forward to some more widgets / GUI for them :-)

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The HowStuffWorks demo looks correct on Chrome 14 (dev channel). Why are you comparing a platform preview (alpha?) of IE 10 against a beta of Chrome?

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  HowStuffWorks renders correctly in Firefox 7.0, more like your demo is EPIC FAIL, Gavin. But nice try with the lies.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Please just stop making browsers...

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Excellent Javascript standards conformance on the IE10 preview IE10 preview scores only 7 fails on the 10935 test in the official Ecmascript standards conformance test at http://test262.ecmascript.org/ (v0.7.5)

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Will it be compatible with Helvetica font?  IE9 crashes on any site uses Helvetica, if you have the wrong version of Helvetica installed on your computer.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comments from "Noah" down till "evil" are excellent points.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  HTML5 Forms!!  Thank you so much.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Nice work on implementing WebWorkers. Are text-shadows implemented yet?

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  o, thanx guys! positioned floats alone are the reason to see this preview.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Cool. Look forward for the final version. I Especially like the GPU and javascript offload to another thread.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  So uh... no text-shadow still? Why all this emphasis on baking in new stuff that other browsers are only just starting to add, when you still haven't finished adding stuff that other browsers have had for years?

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Is it possible to announce a roadmap for planned features? I'm sure, somewhere in depths of your dev team there is a tracker list of features to implement. Why don't you share it? This will drop the inevitable questions "When is ____ going to be implemented?"

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  No spell check?, it is ok, back to Google Chrome :-)

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  For the love of web devs everywhere... just implement Webkit and be done with it!!!

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  What's with the speed (or lack of) in IE10PP2? I mean on my i7 950 IE9 is 17.4x FASTER than PP2!

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Why is IE still around? Oh awesome much better frame rate! </sarcasm> Why don't you (IE) focus on how to make developer's lives easier. Play nice Microsoft, be better.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  webkit! webkit! webkit!

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  This is completely irrelevant while you insist on freezing the web in the last century for XP users. If you're really serious, make a standalone version that uses the same rendering. These are features that DO work on decent browsers anyway, it's thanks to your lock-down that developers can't implement them.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  IE10? IE will become irrelevant in the next 5 years as market share continually falls. Next time build a browser for all Windows customers including XP and Vista. Otherwise, good job.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Great to see progress on HTML5 Forms - thank you

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Great job, looking forward to the release of IE10 :-) And for all the people shouting for WebKit, why do you want to use a slower browser? IE9/IE10 is much faster when it comes to hardware accelerating.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  A lot of fantastic additions here, good work! Bit confused by what you mean by 'site ready' though? I mean, has float positioning even been accepted as a CSS3 module by the W3C working group yet? Seems a little premature to be saying it's non-experimental.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  Please include a way to delete DOM Storage items in the Delete Browsing History dialog. This is really important for the user's privacy.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  I wonder how the "Positioned Floats" (strange name BTW) react to scrolling. Could you maybe extend the demo for that?

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  @g.t.: Spell check is not part of the rendering engine so no, it's not in a preview that's only for that. If they do include it, it will be in the beta or Release Candidate for the first time.

• Anonymous
  June 29, 2011
  FormData doesn't seem to be implemented or enabled? Please confirm!

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  @Zkal: spell check in the beta release? are you sure? which beta release? IE 2025? or IE 2030?

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  Why don't you put the IE9 interface on the Platform Previews? It would make them useable, and you could include any interface changes at the Beta stage.

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  Hello. I would love to watch those HTML5 videos you post in full screen. Don't tell me it is that difficult to implement. Thanks

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  @g.t.: Do note how I said "If they do include it". We will not find out if it is included or not until beta is out. Before that, it's best to wait since Platform Previews aren't meant for UI features like those.

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  If you want a Beta, wait for Beta.  Preview is designed for a different purpose. blogs.msdn.com/.../about-the-platform-preview.aspx

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  Can it beat Firefox 7? No way! www.facebook.com/.../177360802319901

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  Years later and we're still waiting for IE to support text-shadow...

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  How about adding support for .apng (animated PNG : en.wikipedia.org/.../APNG) images in IE10 ???

• Anonymous
  June 30, 2011
  @"Checked Firefox 7?" And...that Facebook group composed of FF fanboys proves what?

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2011
  +1 for Text-Shadow There are real world uses for this and I have posted this as a request on Connect for every IE9PP and IE10PP. Awesome work overall.  Spell check and border-image would also be pretty sweet. Text-Shadow should be a no-brainer though. For everyone wanting text-shadow open a bug up in connect and log the bug again.

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2011
  I've been exploring the initial HTML5 forms support, and have to say I'm very impressed.  There's more there than the current developer docs suggest (e.g. datalist support).  Congratulations to the IE team!

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2011
  @Dean Hachamovitch [MSFT] > we have posted over 270 new tests to the IE Test Center and submitted them to the standards bodies. Some of those Microsoft tests have been rejected but they are still listed (with results for other browsers) at IE Test Center. Why? This IE blog software is buggy and dysfunctional.

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2011
  @Dean Hachamovitch [MSFT] <img> element does not have a border attribute in HTML5: www.w3.org/.../embedded-content-1.html <object> element does not have a border attribute in HTML5: www.w3.org/.../the-iframe-element.html Gérard Talbot

• Anonymous
  July 01, 2011
  Gérard, please. We know you're French. You can take a day off.

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2011
  Any plans to support window.applicationCache and offline apps?

• Anonymous
  July 03, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 06, 2011
  You are making great work in IE10! Awesome! But we expecting steps forward in HTML5 Web SQL Database feature. It's a important feature that's can empowering HTML5 apps. We all are waiting this feature.

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2011
  File API works great! Please, add FormData API too :)

• Anonymous
  July 11, 2011
  i have been using ie for 8 years .i only know ie before i use other browsers .chrome and firefox don't fit to me .yeah, they are fast, special and  own lots of big fans .but they also have a lot of bugs  .i'm using avant browser .at first,i don’t like it .no beautiful skins, no add-ons. Now, I love it so much , for its autofill, online storage, backup/restore files, downloader…and so on