June, 2012

The Windows 8 Release Preview includes a new power-optimized, touch-friendly Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Flash content on compatible Web sites will now play in Metro style IE10. Metro style IE10 with Flash on Windows 8 enables people to see more of the Web working with high quality, especially compared with the experience in other touch-first or tablet experiences. On Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10 on the desktop and Metro style IE use the same integrated Adobe Flash Player with no need to download...

The quality and correctness of different browsers’ HTML5 engines continue to vary widely. We continue to contribute to the test suites under development at W3C to further the goal of web platform interoperability and same markup. In total, we have submitted 7573 tests that you can view at the IE Test Center as well. As different browsers improve their same-markup support, we can all realize the promise of HTML5. The title of this post refers to the week-end event hosted by Adobe on June...

Pinned Sites in Windows 8 describes how site developers can provide a site icon (favicon) for their sites’ pinned site tiles on the Windows 8 Start screen. Many of you shared feedback that you’d like to provide higher-resolution visuals to better depict your site brand on your users’ pinned site tiles. In Windows 8 Release Preview , you can to do that: we’ve added the ability for you to provide a PNG tile image and specify the tile’s background color. Example Below...

Thursday, May 31, 2012, we delivered the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Sixth IE10 Platform Preview . Windows 8 includes one HTML5 browsing engine that powers both browsing experiences (Metro style and desktop) as well as Metro style applications that use HTML5 and JavaScript. The release preview represents a major revision of the same modern JavaScript engine, Chakra, which first debuted with IE9. With each platform preview we make progress against our goals to create an engine that delivers...

As part of Windows 8 Release Preview planning, we reviewed all the W3C draft standards supported by IE10. In particular, we looked for those specifications that: Are stable, that is, there were no recent additions or changes and no renaming or major changes are expected; Are supported by at least two browsers other than IE10; Are interoperable across all these browsers for the features’ core use cases; Are already used on the Web, including in their unprefixed form; and Reached...

In an earlier post we discussed JavaScript performance improvements introduced in IE10. Today we published Bubbles , originally inspired by Alex Gavriolov’s simulation BubbleMark , to explore some of these advances. The current version has been greatly expanded to take advantage of the new features of the Web platform and includes characteristics common to HTML5 games. In this post we peek under the hood to see how the demo is constructed and examine the main factors that affect its performance...

Internet Explorer’s commitment to achieving the goal of consistent “same markup, same results” across browsers is evidenced, in part, by IE9’s and IE10’s addition of CSS3 features that enable Web sites to move to standards-based features for their graphical effects. Earlier we wrote that Internet Explorer’s legacy visual filters and transitions , first introduced in IE4, are not supported in IE10’s Standards and Quirks modes and noted their inferior performance compared to their standards...

IE10 in the Windows 8 Release Preview supports the width and height properties of the W3C Working Draft CSS Device Adaptation . This gives Web developers a simple tool to control automatic content scaling across various window dimensions. In particular, it enables Web sites to easily adapt to Windows 8 Metro style browser in the snapped view and portrait orientation. Auto-Scaling and When It Is Used Most websites have prioritized optimization for a 1024 pixel wide window. This ensures...

IE10 in the Windows 8 Release Preview supports the W3C Candidate Recommendation for CSS Gradients in their unprefixed form. IE10 also supports the older CSS Gradients syntax from the W3C Working Draft of 17 February 2011 behind the vendor prefix -ms- . This blog post describes the differences between the old and new syntax and behavior and provides some insight into the change. Key Changes Should you choose to simplify your CSS by making the move from vendor-prefixed CSS3 Gradients...

Based on your feedback, we’ve improved how sites can build advanced touch experiences using gesture events in IE10 on the Windows 8 Release Preview . Earlier we wrote about first steps Web developers should take to make sure their sites are touch-friendly and how to build new experiences that work well across input devices, including multi-touch, using hardware agnostic pointer events. This post covers IE10’s gesture events . An example of gesture events is the Browser Surface Test Drive...

The June 2012 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves one publicly disclosed and twelve privately reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views 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 current user. Users whose accounts are...