18 months ago Microsoft released the 9th version of their web browser, Internet Explorer 9. IE9, for short, came with all new bells and whistles for the Internet as HTML 5 and CSS3. Microsoft may have been behind on adding HTML5 and CSS3 to IE9 but in this upcoming month Microsoft just announced brand new news on IE10.
Internet Explorer 10 will ship pre-installed with all Windows 8 machines and will be ready for download on Windows 7 in November. Similar to the release of IE9, IE10 has received a brand new User Interface along with key features such as full screen mode, easy pinning to the taskbar and home screen, an easy way to share via Facebook, Twitter, Mail, etc. and new customization settings.
When looking at IE10 you will notice some big UI changes when it comes for Windows 8. IE10 has been designed to include a touch interface version for tablet users. Pinning to the taskbar or Windows 8 Home screen has also become easier than normal. You’ll be able to rename links, change icons and colors to customize the thumbnail on the home screen. Microsoft has realized how popular social networking has become so they included a quick and easy way to share webpages right to Facebook or Twitter without even leaving the webpage you are on. Lastly we have full screen mode, as IE9 does have a full screen mode (F11) you need to turn it on and off. With IE10 you will have the settings to enable always full screen mode but keep the taskbar shown. Another plus is that IE10 will have a intergraded spell-checker. Similar to what is found on Safari, no longer will you need to install extra add-ons that slow down your browsing. For 64bit systems IE10 will automatically start in IE10 64bit mode. In IE9 there was a 64bit mode but it would disable all add-ons, such as Java, Flash, and Shockwave. IE10 64bit doesn’t have issue any longer.
In HTML5 testing IE10 has made a huge improvement over its predecessor, scoring 319/500 against 138/500 for IE9. HTML5 compatibility is generally regarded as an important feature for modern web browsers. Although still a new technology, many webpages are including new features that require HTML5 compatibility. Websites such as YouTube are beginning to phase out Flash videos, switching their content to a HTML5 video tag. IE10 may still be behind Firefox and Chrome in terms of HTML5, but it’s beginning to catch up and offer more support for developing web standards.
With CSS3 testing IE10 can decipher 54% of all new CSS3 tags; and it does all of that within 127ms. That is a big jump from IE9 which can only decipher 32% of all CSS3 tags within 110ms. CSS3 is just as important as HTML5 is for a modern browser. CSS is the “display” of the website as it holds coding for images, text, links, and so on.
One last benchmarking test would be JavaScript. JavaScrpits allows coders to do many different actions such as a submit button. When compairing how fast the two browser can read the JavaScript we used SunSpider. Side-by-Side testings shows that IE10 is 1.85 times faster at reading and preforming the JavaScript.
IE10 will not be available on Windows Vista, but will be included as a new add-on on for Windows 7 and 8. Internet Explorer has always been the world’s leading browser, with the new version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft intends to keep that lead.