Internet Explorer 10

Internet Explorer hasn't been really popular in the past few years. Firefox and Chrome became much more popular due to better performance and the lack of advertisements in browser windows.

That popularity also reflected on the market share. Internet Explorer 9 was built in the hopes of getting some of the market value back.

Although I'm still a strong supporter of Firefox and Chrome, IE9 seems to work better than earlier versions. The next version should come out included in the new Windows 8, so for now it's still in the testing phase.

But Microsoft is committed to future platform preview releases every 12 weeks or so. Currently the 2nd platform preview is available. It's designed especially for developers to give them access to the new technologies that Internet Explorer 10 will deliver. Some of the features of this release are:

• positioned floats


• CSS3 gradients


• HTML5 drag and drop


• HTML5 Sandbox


• improved hit testing APIs


• CSSOM Floating Point Value support

It seems that we can have fairly high expectations of Internet Explorer 10.
You can check out the platform preview guide of Internet Explorer 10 here.

What will be the main difference between Internet Explorer 9 and Internet Explorer 10 once it will be released?

There are rumors that Internet Explorer 10 will only be a slightly better version of IE9, you know, like IE8 was in comparison to Internet Explorer 7. But there will actually be some bigger changes for the better. It should be faster and thus finally outrank Chrome and Firefox.

Internet Explorer 9 is faster than earlier versions and Microsoft is finally not ashamed of his software anymore, but it still wasn't faster than Chrome. IE10 should change that. Also we will finally get support for CSS3 Gradients and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout.
Support for HTML5 Web Workers will be included too.

Well, is it?
We don't know yet, but if we look at the testing version, it could come pretty close. Like Internet Explorer 9 it will support most web standards, which is a very big relief for web developers.

Untill version 9, we often had to add many lines of code to make a web page look good in all browsers. There were even situations where we had to build two versions, one for Internet Explorer and one for all other browsers.

IE10 also promises to become faster. This could be the icing on the cake which would finally catapult IE to the same level like Chrome or Firefox. It could even help it become the best, although I doubt that.