Windows Dev Center: What’s new in Internet Explorer 11 Preview

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Hi. I’m Kristi Rasmussen and I work on content for the Windows Dev Center and Internet Explorer. I’m excited to tell you about Internet Explorer 11! With better compatibility, more responsive touch browsing, great developer tools, and support for WebGL for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics, IE11 is promising to be a great browser experience for web developers. I’ll give you some teasers here for IE11 Preview, but for the full story, check out the Internet Explorer 11 Developer’s Guide.

A few areas of interest include:

Compatibility:   Sites just work better in IE11 Preview. You get improved compatibility with web standards, other browsers, and websites. You can also update your sites to match the latest flexbox standard to simplify cross-browser code.

F12 developer tools:   With a new UI, the F12 Tools offer a more intuitive way to debug code, solve display issues, and increase performance and stability of your webpages.

Touch:   IE11 Preview offers more default and custom touch support for your websites and Windows Store apps. Consumers experience this support with default handling for touch-based drag and drop and hover, and the msZoomTo method enables animated scrolling effects and better control of the panning and zooming experience.

Pinned sites:   Support for Live Tiles helps make your sites more visually interesting when you pin them, save them as favorites, or display them as frequently used sites. You can customize pinned sites using metadata values. Pin your sites to the Start screen, name your pinned site, set up notifications, and more.

WebGL:   WebGL powers dynamic 2D and 3D graphics for games and interactive media content. You get new methods for implementing WebGL in your websites. The WebGL APIs give a powerful set of objects, methods, and properties that let you create 3D content for browsers using JavaScript. WebGL programs run directly on your computer's graphics processing unit (GPU), so they run very fast. Watch Frank Olivier's presentation from //Build to learn how to use WebGL to write content that works across browsers.

Video:   HTML5 video in IE 11 Preview supports standards-based features for adaptive streaming, content protection, and captioning. You can change closed-caption TextTrack objects and TextTrackCue objects for your HTML5 videos, without having to create a separate Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) or Web Video Text Track (WebVTT) file.

You can download the Windows 8.1 Preview and Internet Explorer 11 Preview to start playing with the new release. And we’ve got some great testing resources, as well. Testing your sites for IE just got easier!

Make your way to modern.IE and enter your site’s URL to launch a new set of tools to help you support modern and older versions of Internet Explorer. Use the Compat Inspector to determine if any IE 11 Preview changes affect your site.

You can find a lot more about what’s new in IE11 Preview and which features work with Windows 7, Windows 8, or both, by visiting the Internet Explorer Dev Center. Dig in there, and please use the feedback link to tell us what you think!