Microsoft Releases IE11 Dev Preview for Windows 7
So far vanilla Windows 8 customers are left out of the IE11 club.
Microsoft launched on Thursday the developer preview of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7. It follows the release of Microsoft's latest browser in Windows 8.1 Preview, which requires Windows 8 customers to install the OS update before they can test-drive the latest Internet Explorer build. The company confirmed late last month that the browser would eventually be brought to Windows 7 customers although a time frame was not provided.
"In IE11, developers can build next generation experiences with professional-quality Web video, and hyper-fast 2D and 3D Web technologies that make the most of the underlying hardware," the company said. "IE11 supports real world standards and compatibility, and new developer tools enable developers to build high-performance Web experiences."
Microsoft said that Windows 7 customers will receive all of the performance, security, and under-the-hood changes that went into the Windows 8.1 version. These include natively decoding JPG images and text in real-time on the GPU – both of which are the heart and soul of the Internet. It also implements the W3C Resource Priorities standard enabling developers to specify which parts of the page are important and need to be loaded first.
"IE11 also supports HTML5 link prefetching and pre-rendering, so developers can help the browser anticipate where you’ll go next and get those pages ready," the company said. "On Windows 8.1, IE11 also supports the SPDY network protocol, the precursor to the HTTP 2.0 specification, enabling some sites to be downloaded faster."
Microsoft also pleads its case regarding IE11 supremacy and the new Chakra JavaScript engine, claiming that it's significantly faster than Chrome, Firefox and Opera. On Windows 7, IE11 is 4 percent faster than IE10, and nearly 30 percent faster than the nearest competitive browser – according to the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, that is.
The company points out that Internet Explorer 11 supports WebGL for GPU-powered 2D and 3D graphics, and plugin-free HTML5-based video. All the latest standards for closed captioning is supported as well as is the HTML Full Screen API and WebCrypto. The version on Windows 8.1 also supports the latest media streaming standards, Media Source Extensions (MSE) and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).
"IE11 includes a completely re-designed and enhanced suite of in-browser F12 developer tools," the company said. "These tools help Web developers diagnose and optimize their apps quickly and efficiently. Having fast and reliable Web apps is more critical than ever. The new F12 supports the fast, iterative workflow used by modern Web developers. F12 helps developers get from problem to solution quickly with actionable data, enabling fast and fluid Web experiences."
The full disclosure about Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 can be read here along with a link to the download.
I'm really happy for the kids.
The only problem with IE are those companies that built internal web applications dependent on IE6 and refuse to purchase the updated versions of the programs so they can use the updated IE versions.
These companies are stuck on Windows XP and IE7 at most IE8 which is why they still have such a huge market share.
Now if only I can stop wannabe tech heads from telling all their friends and family to disable automatic updates. :-/ If system updates are causing problems... chances are there's another problem that needs fixing on your machine first!
World's biggest software company can't even provide users with readable text on their PC screens. What a spectacular failure!
The 8.1 Preview has the IE11 Preview installed. Win7 isn't too far behind though, which is nice. The only ones "left out" (heavy emphasis on the quotation marks) are 8.0 users. But really, anyone who wants to test drive IE11 on 8 will just install the 8.1 preview. You can just update to final 8.1 when it is released. It's shaping up nicely, for the most part.
Otherwise, if you're not the test driving type, it doesn't matter if you're on Win7 or Win8. You'll just wait until final versions (of 8.1 and/or IE11) are released. They're not too far off now... 8.1 has a boatload of improvements. If you're a diehard drilll-down menu guy, I'm sure the various Classicwares will see updates by then.
Microsoft, stop being stupid and stubborn, do release this SP2 ASAP as it will help your Windows 7 users very much. We hate Windows 8 and we'll never use it.
not everyone wants to download an entire preview version just to preview IE11 I mean they should be able to download IE11 without having to download an entire preview of 8.1 to try it out.
a butt load of improvements to nothing that the avg consumer has been asking for which is an actual start menu and disabling metro along with an option to enable aero glass.
- New developer tools (IE9/10 kinda sucked)
- WebGL support (finally they realized they could never push 3D WebDX on mac/linux)
Bad:
- WebCrypto (here it comes, each browser vendor with it's own proprietary DRM that will require developers to write code against all of them)
Am I going to download it NO, because I have better thing's to do like fining something else to do but keep playing and raise bar in Windows.