At last year’s MIX conference, we got our first taste of what would become the current version of IE: Internet Explorer 9, Platform Preview 1, which was available for download at TestDriveIE.com.
It’s a bit over a year later, and IE9 is now in “RTW” form – that’s “Release to World”, and it’s now time to talk about the version of IE to follow: Internet Explorer 10, which you can download now in the form of IE10 Platform Preview 1.
We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best Web experience on Windows. IE10 continues on IE9’s path, directly using what Windows provides and avoiding abstractions, layers, and libraries that slow down your site and your experience.
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We’re about three weeks into development of IE10, and based on the progress we’ve made, we want to start engaging the development community now. At the MIX conference today, we showed the new browsing engine along with several new browser test drives that anyone on the Web can try out. You can run these at www.ietestdrive.com to see emerging standards like CSS3 Multi-column Layout (link), CSS3 Grid Layout (link) and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout (link), CSS3 Gradients (link), and ES5 Strict Mode in action. We also demonstrated additional standards support (like CSS3 Transitions (link) and CSS3 3D Transforms (link)) that will be available in subsequent platform previews of IE10, which we will update every 8-12 weeks.
Also available are new test drive samples for today’s production browsers. For example, Fishbowl is an update to the original FishIE tank that now uses more HTML5 technologies. Paintball is another great demonstration of what fully hardware accelerated HTML5 Canvas delivers.
Get your hands on IE10 Platform Preview 1 and take it for a spin!