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...

As Web sites transition more and more into Web applications, working with files in meaningful ways is becoming increasingly important. Starting with Platform Preview 2, IE10 includes support for the File API , enabling developers to read and slice files on the client. Platform Preview 4 adds support for BlobBuilder , a way for developers to create new files. IE10 also has two new methods that allow the user to save blobs to their computer, enabling great end-to-end experiences when working...

IndexedDB is a W3C Working Draft that enables JavaScript developers to store, search, and retrieve data on the user's local client, even when Internet connectivity is disabled . This blog post describes IDBExplorer, a tool we use internally to debug IndexedDB applications. IDBExplorer lets you view database schemas, object store content, and index details. Exploring the tool with an example IndexedDB App To illustrate, I created an application that tracks my New Year’s resolutions...

In the last ten years Microsoft has invested heavily in user privacy. Just like security, privacy considerations are baked into every Microsoft product. It is almost a year since the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web, accepted and published Microsoft’s member submission for an Internet Standard to help protect consumer privacy. Last September I described how the W3C had announced...

Compat Inspector is now available for IE10. Use Compat Inspector to quickly identify if Internet Explorer platform changes affect your site. Whether you're preparing for IE10 or still updating for IE9, run Compat Inspector on any page experiencing problems. Then watch for messages explaining potential issues and steps you can take to resolve them. About Compat Inspector Compat Inspector is a JavaScript-based testing tool that analyzes your site while it runs. Compat Inspector...

With one of those rare Seattle snowstorms underway today, I feel this is a great time to publish this description of our Holiday 2011 Test Drive demo “Let It Snow.†—Editor When a browser effectively uses the underlying hardware, the possibilities are limitless. Over the holidays we released a demo that helps showcase the advantages of a fully hardware-accelerated, touch first browsing experience with Internet Explorer 10. This post takes a closer look at how the Let It Snow demo was created....

The bad guys didn’t take a holiday vacation: Internet Explorer’s SmartScreen service blocked nearly 2 million malware downloads per day on average from mid-December through New Year’s. December 25 saw a 30% spike in malware blocks— successfully preventing users from being tricked into giving their PCs an unwanted “present.†January is a great time to resolve to stay safer online. Microsoft works around the clock, year-round, to help. By following a few simple best practices , including opting...

Today we introduce seven new language versions of IEBlog— French , German , Portuguese (Brazil) , Korean , Japanese , Chinese (PRC) , and Russian . Links to these appear in the new “Languages†block at the top of the right column. We plan to publish translated versions five to ten days after their appearance on the English language IEBlog. We’ve worked hard to localize most of the language elements on the page and in the posts themselves. Text within images will remain in English though we translate...

IE10 Platform Preview 4 includes support for a new CSS property, -ms-user-select , which makes it easier for Web developers to control exactly what text can be selected on their Web sites. If you were to watch me all day at my workstation, you would notice that as I read on the computer, I select text. I’m not the only one who reads like this; selecting text on the Internet is important in many other scenarios. Consider a typical news Web site. Most pages will include a news article...

With cross-browser support for both the CSS3 @font-face rule and the WOFF font packaging format , modern Web typography has expanded far beyond the realm of ‘ Web-safe fonts .’ Well-known magazines such as the New Yorker use Web fonts to preserve the typographic personality of their headlines, while [US] President Obama’s re-election campaign uses Web font service Typekit to host their identity font. One remaining limitation prevents Web designers from using the entire font: the...

In the spirit of the holiday season, we offer a new HTML5 experience that makes the most of your PC hardware and the new touch capabilities in Windows 8. Check out Let It Snow and get ready for a GPU-powered snow storm. This experience brings together hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvas, SVG, CSS, and more. On Windows Developer Preview with support for multi-touch in IE10 , you can reach out and brush the snow off the sign and reveal a holiday message -or just use your mouse. If you think...

Today we introduce an updated look and layout for the IEBlog. Here’s an overview of the design and layout changes we made: New font family – We’re using the Segoe UI font to align with Windows 8 Metro style. New color scheme – We have a new color scheme inspired by the Windows 8 Metro style Start screen. Improved performance – The blog’s home page defaults to excerpt view. This substantially reduces load time since excerpts do not contain images or...

The fourth IE10 platform preview includes enhanced HTML5 support by using an interoperable quirks mode based on the behavior defined in HTML5. This HTML5-based quirks mode is the default quirks mode in IE10. Users and Web developers want sites to just work across browsers. A key part of this is making HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work in the same way across implementations. HTML5 facilitates cross-browser consistency by defining parts of the Web platform previously left unspecified...

The December 2011 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer is now available via Windows Update . This security update resolves three 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 this vulnerability could run a malicious application on the affected system. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer...

Last March, we released a prototype implementation of the audio portion of a working draft of the W3C Media Capture API on HTML5 Labs . This prototype publicized some proposed API enhancements described in section 6.1 of Microsoft’s HTML Speech XG Speech API Proposal . We have now updated the prototype to include the image and video capture features described in the proposal to support scenarios we’ve heard are important for Web developers, as well as incorporating your feedback on audio. As more...

Users expect to visit any site on the Internet with any browser and enjoy a similar quality experience. We first discussed Internet Explorer’s commitment to achieving the goal of consistent “same markup, same results” across browsers in a post on March 16, 2010 announcing the release of the IE9’s first platform preview. IE9 moved us a long way toward that goal and IE10’s HTML5-based Standards and Quirks modes largely completes that work. The post HTML5 Parsing in IE10...

With HTML5 comes many APIs that push the envelope on user experiences involving media and real-time communications. These features often rely on binary file formats, like MP3 audio, PNG images, or MP4 video. The use of binary file formats is important to these features to reduce bandwidth requirements, deliver expected performance, and interoperate with existing file formats. But until recently, Web developers haven’t had direct access to the contents of these binary files or any other custom binary...

An updated platform preview of IE10 for the Windows Developer Preview is now available for download . This IE10 preview adds even more support for HTML5 technologies, enabling richer Web applications with significantly improved performance. IE10’s hardware acceleration of technologies like SVG, CSS3 transforms and animations delivers faster rendering than other browsers, as highlighted in this short video. See some of the new HTML5 capabilities, performance improvements in...

For the Web and Web applications to keep making progress, the programming language of the Web must continue to improve. Today’s JavaScript standard lacks a few basic objects and library helpers that are vital for building rich, world-wide Web applications. Last week at the Ecma TC39 meeting at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Microsoft shared reference implementations of proposals to address gaps in Math, String, and Number functionality as well as Globalization . To ensure that others in the community...