On Wednesday Microsoft announced the launch of the Release Preview of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7. Consider yourself lucky, as Windows 8 users are still stuck with Internet Explorer 10 unless they've installed the preview build of Windows 8.1. The latest browser isn't slated to officially land on Windows 8 until October 18, so expect the final Windows 7 build to arrive sometime after that.
Internet Explorer 11 Release Preview arrives just two months after the Developer Preview, and promises 30 percent faster performance than other browsers on Windows 7. The company also claims that this Release Preview build is around 9 percent faster than Internet Explorer 10 and 5 percent faster than the preview Developer Preview build.
"IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 includes updates to reflect the latest emerging Web standards," the company said on Wednesday. "For example, now that the Pointer Events specification is a Candidate Recommendation at the W3C, IE11 supports an un-prefixed version of the emerging standard. With Pointer Events support across the full range of Windows devices (and soon to other browsers), Web sites can easily build experiences that work equally well with mouse, keyboard, pen, and touch."
The company has also upgraded the developer tools to make it easier to diagnose and optimize web apps used within the Internet Explorer environment. This includes mapping WebGL errors to the corresponding JavaScript location, an improved file picker for faster access to files in a complex Web project, and an updated F12 tool that now identifies what operations were performed on allocated data between memory snapshots.
"IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 adds new user controls for the Standard Delivery Profile for Closed Captioning," the company said. "With the new control, accessible from the Internet Options menu, users can customize how captions appear in the browser, even overriding the default styling provided by the video source. This customization further advances IE11 as the best browser for professional-quality online video without plugins."
Web surfers on Windows 7 can download the Release Preview of Internet Explorer 11 directly from Microsoft here. Virtual Machine images of Internet Explorer 11 Release Preview for Windows 7 will also be available on modern.ie later this week, the company said. Microsoft has also made available the Internet Explorer 11 Developer Guide here.
After installing the new browser, Internet Explorer 11 users can visit the IE Test Drive site and check out a few demos including Levitation, Lawnmark and Lite-Brite. The company has also added PirateMarrrk, which tests the browser's HTML5, JavaScript, and Scalable Vector Graphics performance, in celebration of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
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