Sharing a link to a Web page is a common activity on the PC, and it gets better with IE10 on Windows 8. One of the new features on Windows 8 is the Share charm, which allows you to seamlessly send content between apps on your PC. Previously, if you wanted to share an interesting article with your friend, or post a funny picture on your blog, you’d copy the link from the address bar, switch to a different site or app, and then paste it. Now, with the Windows 8 Share charm, you can share directly from...

IE10 in Windows 8 Consumer Preview includes support for Error.stack , which enables Web developers to diagnose and correct bugs faster, especially those that are difficult to reproduce. Developers can build amazing apps with the capabilities of Web platforms that power today’s modern browsers. In Windows 8, we expose that power through both Internet Explorer 10 and Metro style apps in JavaScript . The increasing power and complexity of these apps means developers need better tools like Error.stack...

We've talked about how the transition to a plug-in free Web is happening today. Lots of Web browsing happens on devices that simply don’t support plug-ins. Web sites that use plug-ins need to understand what their customers experience when browsing plug-in free . In case you missed it, check out Rey Bango’s blog post where he lays out clear guidance for developers on building cross-browser plugin-free experiences and addressing issues like cross-browser CSS, media playback, and touch. -- John...

In Windows 8 Consumer Preview , IE10 enables fast and fluid multi-touch experiences on the Web. Most sites work fine with touch in IE10 with no changes to the site. This post provides four simple guidelines to ensure your customers who use touch can most effectively use your site. We’ve written before about how new input devices and touch screens make the Web more fun, interactive, and immersive. We’ve also talked about the importance of ensuring a no compromise browsing experience...

The April 2012 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves five privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user visits a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user...

The Windows 8 Start screen is the best place to find and stay connected to all your favorite apps and content. App tiles are alive with activity and show you fresh and tailored content so you know what’s new in your world. We’ve written about Internet Explorer 10’s Metro style browsing experience on Windows 8. This post describes in detail IE10’s pinned sites and their availability on the Windows 8 Start screen—complete with site-centric visuals and badge notifications to let you...

IE10 is a new browsing experience built in lockstep with Windows 8 to give you all the advantages that Metro style applications offer. We built that experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other Web standards. IE10 also includes a desktop experience for when you are using desktop tools and wish to continue using them in your existing workflows. Following last September...

This week begins face to face meetings at the IETF on how to approach HTTP 2.0 and improve the Internet. How the industry moves forward together on the next version of HTTP – how every application and service on the Web communicates today – can have a positive impact on user experience, operational and environmental costs, and even the battery life of the devices you carry around. As part of this discussion of HTTP 2.0, Microsoft will submit to the IETF a proposal for “HTTP Speed...

The Internet Explorer team along with the broader Web community has continued to make improvements to the IndexedDB specification. IndexedDB is a W3C Working Draft that enables you to store, search, and retrieve data on the user's device, even when Internet connectivity is disabled .  IndexedDB is a feature of the Web platform shared by IE10 and Metro style apps in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. This blog post describes changes we made in Internet Explorer 10 Consumer preview to implement the...

In Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Server Beta, IE10 and all other Microsoft WebSocket client and server features now support the final version of the IETF WebSocket Protocol . In addition, IE10 implements the W3C WebSocket API Candidate Recommendation. WebSockets are stable and ready for developers to start creating innovative applications and services. This post provides a simple introduction to the W3C WebSocket API and its underlying WebSocket protocol . The updated Flipbook demo uses the latest...

Today we updated on HTML5 Labs the previously released Media Capture prototype to better align it to the latest W3C editor draft . The HTML Media Capture working draft continues to evolve alongside related discussions in the Web RTC workgroup, and we have blogged previously about why this feature is important and how our Media Capture prototype implemented it in the past. Because the API surface for this feature is far from final, we are supporting a simple capture...

Another holiday brings us another opportunity to celebrate it with you. We’re pleased to mark the transition into spring as well as St. Patrick’s Day with Irish Spring , a new hardware-accelerated HTML5 experience that shows the benefits of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 Consumer Preview . Irish Spring incorporates HTML5 canvas and CSS gradients, opacity, transforms, and animation along with HTML5 audio. With the Windows Consumer Preview and IE10’s support for multi-touch you can propel the...

Every release of Internet Explorer includes new security enhancements to help keep you safe as you browse the Internet. The new Enhanced Protected Mode in Internet Explorer 10 helps keep your data safe even if an attacker has exploited a vulnerability in the browser or one of its add-ons. There is no single thing that can keep you secure by itself, so we pursue multiple strategies, including: Protection from socially-engineered attacks There are a variety of miscreants that want to steal...

Internet Explorer 10 introduces significant improvements in memory protections to help make vulnerabilities harder to exploit, helping to keep users safe on the sometimes-hostile Web. These improvements will increase the difficulty and development cost of exploits, making life harder for the bad guys. While socially-engineered malware is the primary way that bad guys get their code onto victims’ computers, that is largely because browser vulnerabilities have become less common and harder...

Internet Explorer 10 in the Windows Consumer Preview introduces a number of new or updated Web platform features when compared to the IE10 in the Windows Developer Preview released September 13, 2011. Some of these shipped in the fourth IE10 platform preview released November 29, 2011, and have been blogged about since; some are new in the Consumer Preview. New or Updated Web Platform Features The following Web platform capabilities in the Consumer Preview were not in the Developer 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...

This morning in the United States, the White House announced a new “ Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights ” as part of the effort to improve consumers’ online privacy. As I’ve mentioned before , Microsoft is actively participating in the industry initiative for Tracking Protection at the W3C to produce Web standards for online privacy. The Tracking Protection Working Group is chartered to work on two complementary initiatives: Tracking Preference Expression (Do Not Track) and...

When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies. Below we spell out in more detail what we’ve discovered, as well as recommendations to IE users on how to protect their privacy from...

With Windows 8, you have an unprecedented choice of devices for browsing the Web, from large desktop screens to small slates. In order to accommodate this range of devices, the browser must be able to scale and layout the Web at many different screen sizes and dimensions. We've previously blogged about some of the features in IE that support these scenarios. Sub-pixel positioning (of text and layout) is one of the core platform technologies which enable Web pages to look beautiful and consistent...

To help celebrate Valentine’s Day, we’re pleased to offer another new HTML5 experience that makes the most of your PC hardware and touch on Windows 8. Check out Love is in the Air and feel the warm embrace of hardware accelerated HTML5. This experience brings together hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvas, SVG, CSS transforms & transitions, WOFF, audio, and more. On Windows Developer Preview with support for multi-touch in IE10 , you can reach out and swipe to reveal a special message of love...

The February 2012 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves 5 privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user visits a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user...

The fourth platform of IE10 simplifies building cross-site scenarios that work consistently across browsers by supporting Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for XMLHttpRequest (XHR) . CORS for XHR makes sharing data across sites simple and flexible. In the most basic scenario CORS enables creating data sources accessible from any site, and with a few small tweaks you can choose to constrain allowed sites, support data modification, and even allow authentication. Most importantly CORS keeps existing...

Metro style apps in Windows 8 have all the performance benefits of IE10 when showing Web content. In Metro style apps, Web content is always JIT compiled and hardware-accelerated. Other platforms do not provide the same level of performance in apps. For example, Cocoa apps on iOS offer significantly worse JavaScript performance (via the UIWebView control) than the same content running in Safari. These Cocoa apps do not enjoy JIT compilation, and these apps cannot show and use Web content the same...

CSS3 features make it easier to build rich and immersive Web experiences. A recent post described how Web developers add personality to their sites with CSS3 Transitions and Animations. CSS3 3D Transforms add another dimension (literally) for developers to enhance their sites. For example, the Windows 8 Metro style Start page uses subtle 3D transforms to highlight pressed tiles, as shown below. Internet Explorer 10 tile shown not pressed (left) and pressed (right) Adding a...

The transition to a plug-in free Web is happening today. Any site that uses plug-ins needs to understand what their customers experience when browsing plug-in free. Lots of Web browsing today happens on devices that simply don’t support plug-ins. Even browsers that do support plug-ins offer many ways to run plug-in free. Metro style IE runs plug-in free to improve battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Previously, we wrote about how we use IE’s Compatibility...