Internet Explorer 10 Previewed for Windows 8

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Microsoft has released a developer preview of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 8. Currently in beta, this platform preview of the upcoming IE10 includes betters support for HTML5 and metro style apps for Windows 8.

Microsoft has announced a new preview release of its upcoming Internet Explorer 10 for the Windows 8 platform. Dubbed Platform Preview 4 (different from Platform Preview 2 for Windows 7). This updated platform preview enables developers to build richer Web apps with “significantly improved performance.” IE10 will include hardware acceleration that takes advantage of different CPU and GPU platforms to deliver faster rendering than other browsers.

Microsoft is still working with more site-ready HTML5 technologies, and a few highlights include the following:

• Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), for safer use of XMLHttpRequest across different domains;
• Manipulation of large binary objects in script within the browser;
• Support for JavaScript typed arrays, for better storage and manipulation of data;
• CSS user-select property, which lets users select elements in a webpage or web app;
• Support for HTML5 video captioning.

Microsoft touts its use of CORS to enable web app developers to safely request, share and move data across different applications and domains. Coupled with other new features, this lets developers build better HTML5 apps, which can run on desktop and mobile platforms as if they were local apps. For end-users, this means a richer resource of apps that can either run within the browser or as a stand-alone application within Windows 8.

IE10 will also support Metro Style apps in Windows 8, which mean those tiled apps that Windows Phone 7 users will be familiar with. IE10 is expected to be integrated in Windows 8 once released by mid-2012, although Microsoft has also promised an IE10 release for Windows 7.