Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 Consumer Preview introduced their latest version of the Trident based web browser, Internet Explorer 11. Today the company has released the developer preview of IE11 for those still on Windows 7.
Internet Explorer 11 promises to bring improved performance, faster page load times, new standards support for next generation sites, and a completely redesigned “F12” developer toolkit.
A faster browsing experience is thanks to new technologies such as Internet Explorer 11’s ability to natively decode images in real-team using a machine’s GPU; this ability plus the browser’s additional capability to render text on the GPU is said to also use less memory usage, reduce energy usage, and improve battery life.
In addition, the latest version of Microsoft’s browser is the first to implement the World Wide Web Consortium’s Resource Priorities, allowing web developers to pick which parts of a web page need to be loaded first.
A little bit of artificial intelligence also never hurts (except in every Sci-Fi movie ever), which is why Internet Explorer 11 supports HTML5 link prefetching and pre-rendering; this allows the web browser to try and anticipate where you will visit next and load those links before you click on them.
Microsoft has been putting a lot of their cards into the “Hardware-Accelerated” category for the past few Internet Explorer releases. Internet Explorer 11 includes support for WebGL technology to render 2D and 3D content using the machine’s GPU.
To protect a user’s machine against malicious intent, Internet Explorer 11 scans all WebGL content for unsafe content. In addition, the hardware-accelerated WebGL content will only run on verified safe GPU drivers and hardware.
Lastly, Internet Explorer brings improved developer tools allowing web developers to profile sites and fix performance faster than ever. The new F12 toolkit includes a UI Responsiveness and Memory Profiling tool, Live DOM Explorer, CSS inspection tool, and JavaScript debugging support.
If you currently use Internet Explorer, go ahead and download Microsoft’s latest developer preview here. Otherwise, just stick with whichever browser you are probably using instead.
Any Internet Explorer fans in our audience?
Source: IE Blog
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