Microsoft Offers Up IE10 Preview For Windows 7

Microsoft is offering Windows 7 users the chance to get familiar with its Internet Explorer 10 browser after releasing a new preview version.

With the IE10 Release Preview for Windows 7, consumers can now enjoy a fast and fluid Web with the updated IE10 engine on their Windows 7 devices, said Rob Mauceri, Microsoft’s group program manager for Internet Explorer, in a blog post. The release preview of IE10 on Windows 7 is now available for download.

Stellar Experience?

“With this release preview, Windows 7 customers receive all of the performance, security, and under-hood changes that enable a stellar Web experience,” Mauceri said. “IE10 Release Preview also sends the ‘Do Not Track’ signal to Websites by default to help consumers protect their privacy.”

He also noted that IE10 shines on Windows 8, and with this release preview, IE10 brings the same powerful HTML5 engine to Windows 7 customers:

• Rich Visual Effects: CSS Text Shadow, CSS 3D Transforms, CSS3 Transitions and Animations, CSS3 Gradient and SVG Filter Effects;
• Sophisticated Page Layouts: CSS3 for publication-quality page layouts and application UI (CSS3 grid, flexbox, multi-column, positioned floats, regions and hyphenation), HTML5 Forms, input controls and validation; and
• Enhanced Web Programming Model: Better offline applications through local storage with IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache, as well as Web Sockets, HTML5 History, Async scripts, HTML5 File APIs, HTML5 Drag-Drop, HTML5 Sandboxing, Web workers and ES5 Strict mode support.

“Developers building on these capabilities in Windows 8 can run the same markup with the same performance and capabilities on Windows 7,” Mauceri said.

Moreover, IE10 on Windows 8 brings an entirely new browsing experience and set of capabilities to the Web, such as a new touch first browsing experience and full screen UI for your sites, security improvements that offer the best protection against the most common threats on the Web, improved performance, and support for the HTML5 and CSS3 standards developers need, Mauceri said.

In an interview with eWEEK, Ryan Gavin, general manager of Microsoft’s IE team, described the IE10 Release Preview for Windows 7 as a “high-quality release preview” that Microsoft is delivering to give users and developers a taste. He said the company will assess developer feedback about this release and use that to harden the product for general availability.

Critical Performance

Meanwhile, Mauceri said browser performance is critical for running today’s modern Websites and applications. “IE10 is all-around fast, bringing improved hardware acceleration and Chakra JavaScript engine to Windows 7. We continue to focus on improving real-world site performance and third-party recognition of IE’s leadership in this area has been consistent.”

Users can experience IE10’s leading performance firsthand with new demos on the IE Test Drive site with examples of hardware accelerated rendering in the Aston Martin 3D visualisation for high frame rates, and interactivity, touch and media with Audio Explosion.

The Mandelbrot test drive is another example of how IE10 runs real-world sites fast, particularly sites with computationally intensive JavaScript and graphics, Mauceri said. Microsoft showed Mandelbrot test results for 21 presets run in IE10, Chrome 23 and Firefox 16 that demonstrated that IE10 on average is more than twice as fast as Chrome and about 20 percent faster than Firefox.

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