Software : In Depth: What IE10 tells us about Windows 8

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In Depth: What IE10 tells us about Windows 8 Posted: 13 Apr 2011 03:30 AM PDT Why did Windows senior vice president Steven Sinofsky interrupt the IE10 demo at the MIX conference to wave around a slinky Samsung notebook and announce a Microsoft developer conference this autumn? It's not just because IE10 will only run on Windows (and only on Windows Vista, 7 and 8 at that). It's because IE10 is trying, like IE9, to straddle the two worlds of open, ever-evolving web standards and the power in Windows that makes you want to use the operating system. And it's also because by the time IE10 arrives next year, almost certainly at the same time as whatever the next version of Windows gets called, the Windows platform will mean something rather different from what it does today. Sinofsky isn't just taking the opportunity to say that PC hardware can be slim and sexy too; he's subtly tying IE10 to Windows 8 - and to Windows 8 on ARM. Although he flourished an x86 PC, the IE10 platform preview he demoed was running on an ARM chip on what Sinofsky has previously called "the next version of Windows"; a 1GHz ARM Family 7 Model C09 Revision 100 to be exact, which is an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. So the hardware acceleration of IE10, which he showed outperforming a nightly build of Chrome - at least on Microsoft's own tests - is already working on ARM GPUs as well as on PC GPUs. There are other hints in the IE10 platform preview about Windows 8 and the way Microsoft wants to make it the best place to run web apps. THAT'S NATIVE: HTML5 geolocation in IE10 gives web apps like the Foursquare Playground the kind of tools you used to need to build a Windows app to get The two main complaints about IE9 have been not running on Windows XP (which isn't going to change in IE10) and not supporting a wider range of web standards (which will). When IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch says that "the native experience continues to be better" he isn't saying that people want Windows apps; he's claiming that building IE9 and 10 on the new technologies in Windows 7 and 8 gives you better performance (and better security) than running on XP - and maybe better than running on Mac or Chrome OS as well. "Someone spread too thin across too many different operating systems, and too many different versions of too many operating systems, can't deliver the best on all of them," he says. IE on Windows can have jump lists that let web apps feel more like Windows apps; the World's Biggest PacMan anniversary game in HTML5 shows how many ghosts you've eaten in a dynamic jump list on the Windows task bar. Expect IE10 to integrate into the Windows 8 experience natively in similar ways. LIKE AN APP: Jump lists with your PacMan scores in Windows IE10 release date Microsoft hasn't talked at all about an IE10 release date; that's less because the IE team has only been working on it for three weeks and more because being too precise would give more clues about the Windows 8 timeline (which we should learn about at the unnamed September developer conference). In a sense, the IE team has actually been working on IE10 since it started IE9 a few weeks after Windows 7 was finished; the IE banners at the convention centre show the IE9 timeline through the different stages - and the timeline continues on past release with an initially blank next stage, which was labelled as IE10 Platform Preview after the announcement. As principle program manager Jason Weber put it, "IE9 didn't really stop; we just got it stabilised and then carried on." That means that Microsoft isn't resting on its laurels and waiting until IE9 is obsolete; it's going to carry on adding new features and new web standards support, it's going to keep previewing the next version of the browser engine for web developers - but it's not going to bring out a new beta of IE with a new interface for quite some time. By the time we see the new IE10 interface, we might have already seen the Windows 8 interface it's going to live inside. If you're thinking of the minimal 'immersive' interface for IE on tablets that has been leaked recently, that ties up well with some of the new standards coming in IE10 like CSS3 grid, flexbox and multicolumn layout features which make it easier to lay out web pages that adapt to different size screens - like tablets (and TVs). IE10 AND CSS: Hardware acceleration on Windows and ARM, plus the standards that will make for good tablet Web apps IE10 Platform Preview Platform Preview 1 is out now; the next platform preview will come in eight to twelve weeks, rather than the eight weeks between IE9 platform previews. Hachamovitch saying faster releases "just means bigger version numbers and more updates of incomplete standards" is presumably a jab at Chrome (there were a number of those in the keynote, proving that Microsoft is taking Chrome and Chrome OS seriously). More interestingly, he also says taking more time between previews is "just more effective for making real progress with community given the time it takes to work through the issues you report." It's not just a question of bugs to fix (although Sinofsky made a point of showing that some other browsers still don't implement the CSS3 browser radius standard correctly). THINK TILES: The multicolumn standard will make resizable web apps fit well on Windows 8 ARM tablets Some new standards going into IE10 like flexbox and grid layout are still under development. Instead of waiting until the other browsers have implemented them and the feedback from developers has gone into a final standard the way it has often done in the past, the IE team is implementing these prospective standards, getting the feedback and working with the W3C to get standards that suit the direction Microsoft wants to go in. Web developers and browser vendors who once lamented that Microsoft didn't engage with web standards may feel you should be careful what you wish for. Microsoft isn't ignoring web standards in IE10 and Windows 8; it's helping drive them.

In Depth: Hands on: IE10 review (Platform Preview) Posted: 13 Apr 2011 01:43 AM PDT Want to know what IE10 will look like? Don't look at the first platform preview that you can download today. As with the IE9 platform previews, this first look at Internet Explorer 10 isn't a full browser with bookmarks and toolbars and settings; it's just a wrapper around the first version of the IE10 rendering engine (10.0.1000.16394), designed to let users try out the nine new demos on the IE Test Drive Site and to let developers see how IE10 will support the new Web standards it's going to include. Not only is there no new user interface, but like the IE9 platform previews you don't even get the interface of the current browser. That means to open a web page you have to click the Page menu and type or paste in the URL. To print a web page you have to choose Print Preview and the only option you can set is whether web sites that use geolocation can find out where you are. Everything else is tools to help developers see how their sites look in IE10 in its various document modes - and a link for submitting bugs and feedback. You don't want to do your daily browsing in the platform preview - and you don't have to, because it installs alongside IE9. In fact the install is so straightforward you don't even have to restart IE9 afterwards - the platform preview opens automatically with its own icon in the taskbar. 9 AND 10: IE10 Platform Preview isn't a full browser so it runs alongside IE8 or 9 You can use it with IE8, but Microsoft warns that the preview may crash and have to be killed from Task Manager. And unlike the IE9 platform previews, the IE10 preview doesn't work on Windows Vista (even with SP2), just Windows 7. Test driving IE10 If you don't have a bleeding edge website of your own to try out, the IE Test Drive site, which is set as the home page, showcases the first of the new web standards IE10 is previewing. The Fish Bowl demo updates the FishIE demo with HTML5 video (for the water), which IE9 can do, and CSS3 gradients, which it can't, all hardware accelerated; the Paintball game also shows off hardware acceleration. You can also play with making gradients using CSS and SVG using multiple colours, and angles; these are going to speed up web pages by replacing background images that have to be downloaded and tiled with script commands. GO FISH: Hardware accelerated HTML5 video and new CSS3 features swimming happily together COLOURFUL: CSS gradients can replace background images ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode is a version of JavaScript that forces developers to stop using shortcuts and hacks that can cause security problems; it's more about taking features away than adding them and unless you write JavaScript the demo isn't worth trying - but this is a feature that IE9 was criticised by ECMAScript architects like Douglas Crockford of Yahoo for not having, and it's a good sign that Microsoft plans to implement a wide range of web standards, not just the ones that support flashy effects. New standards support The three other new standards supported in the preview work together for page layout. The TweetFlow demo shows off CSS3 multi-column support; as new tweets arrive and you change the size of the page, the columns stay neat and text flows smoothly into the right number of columns to fill the page without leaving any words behind. This is a stable specification and other browsers like Chrome support multi-column but the column flow isn't always as smooth. LINE UP: The multi-column spec isn't new, but IE10 has an implementation that flows text into place neatly CSS3 Flexible Box Layout is a spec that's still changing but it's useful for resizing elements to fit different size pages. The flexible layout demo isn't very exciting, but it shows two columns that get resized in proportion and two that stay the same size as you resize the page. SCALE ME: It doesn't look very exciting but having a simple way for columns to resize correctly on web pages will be great for web apps Put that together with CSS3 Grid Alignment - a draft specification that senior lead program manager Markus Mielke calls "hot off the press" for laying content out in a grid on a web page - and you can get sites that reflow content and resize elements to fit different sizes of screens. You can see how that works with the Gridddle demo: as you resize the window, you see fewer columns, smaller menus and eventually a different layout - so the same page could automatically fit itself to a smartphone and rotate on a tablet as well as working a standard PC screen. Mielke calls IE10 "the world premiere of the first browser to implement this spec," which isn't surprising as Microsoft actually proposed it. MULTIPLE LAYOUTS: This is the same site, just in a smaller window, but it gets a completely different interface suited to a smaller screen "Other browser vendors are interested in grid layout, " he said "and we're working closely with them to make sure we have interoperability," but while lots of web designers will like being able to lay out web pages like print pages it's also going to be particularly useful for Windows developers switching over to making web apps. "If you're familiar with the Windows Presentation Foundation grid, some concepts should sound familiar," Mielke agreed. Hot on IE9's heels The most important thing about the platform preview of IE10 is that we're getting it now, three weeks after the release of IE9. That says that Microsoft is planning to keep IE up to date, at least on the web standards it deems to be ready for developers to use - or the ones it's particularly keen to get feedback on because they're strategic for things like tablets on Windows 8. None of the still-evolving standards that Microsoft is showing developers through its HTML5 Labs site have made it into the first preview, (although Microsoft is adding prototypes for the File API for accessing files on the PC and the Media Capture API for using webcams and microphones in the browser to the Silverlight plugin that adds WebSockets support to IE and IndexedDB local storage already on HTML5 Labs). It's a two-tier system; if those standards mature in time, they could be in the IE10 release along with CSS transitions and transforms (two features Microsoft has announced for future previews).

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