
IE10 Platform Preview 2 Released - CurtHagenlocher
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukmsdn/archive/2011/06/29/ie10-platform-preview-2-released.aspx
======
dave1010uk
IE's rate of adopting new features seems to be catching up with the other
browsers. For technical details, see their Guide for Developers [1].

The interesting bits since the 1st preview (for me, a web developer) are:

    
    
        More CSS gradients
        Async script tags
        Form validation
        Web workers
        Drag and drop and File API
    

Things I'd really like to see in IE10 before its released (and are hopefully
realistic):

    
    
        More HTML5 form stuff
        CSS3 text shadow
        CSS3 animations and transitions
        History API
    

As I'm wishing away, I'll add: support for XP, WebM/Ogg video support and a
friendly public bugtracker.

[1] <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg192966.aspx>

~~~
kenjackson
I agree that those four items you mentioned I think would make IE10 a very
competent browser. Do you have any idea how hard they each are to implememnt
(since they've all been implemented in existing browsers)?

Regarding XP support -- I hope they never support it. I really wish the OS
would go away. They do support WebM today, just install the codec. Presumably
if you have Chrome on your machine, WebM will work with IE (I assume Chrome
installs the codec). Given that IE is not open source, you will almost
certainly never see a public bugtracker.

~~~
sliverstorm
Agreed on XP. It's just a complete dead-end waste of effort at this point. XP
is already 11 years old, and _two_ major releases have happened since. Even
RHEL2 is newer!

It was plenty good 6 years ago, but time marches on.

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rkalla
Big win here (for me) was the File API finally got added so you can do DnD
uploads now. IE has actually supported the DnD API for a while now, but didn't
have the File API component to make the upload happen.

Rendering speed didn't seem much different than 9 and slower than Chrome 12
for me; not by much though. Now adays it seems all these browsers are
rendering at insane speeds given what they could barely pull off 5 years ago.

I love the browser wars.

~~~
Jacob4u2
There is a polyfill out that handles the lack of File API in IE and earlier
versions of Safari; <http://sandbox.knarly.com/js/dropfiles/>.

Also, great list of polyfills available at the Modernizr github repo;
[https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-
brow...](https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-browser-
Polyfills) .

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yannis
You can run the examples at
<http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Views/SiteMap/Default.html> with your
favourite browser and sneak at the code. Great if you are familiarizing
yourself with HTLM5 and CSS3.

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zeddez
Some of the most interesting work is only hinted at in the blog. IE 10 PP2 now
leads on EcmaScript standards conformance.

IE 10 only fails 7 tests compared to 200 for Firefox 5 out of a total of 10000
tests.

I don't use Opera, but according to this page
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript> Opera lags the other browser and
fails 3000 tests. Does anyone have Opera and willing to run the conformance
test here: <http://test262.ecmascript.org/>

~~~
huhtenberg
FF5 is a production release, IE10 is a "platform preview". Not exactly a fair
comparison.

~~~
zeddez
That's a good point. It would be interesting to get a read on the latest
Aurora builds. I might install it and do it later today.

~~~
joenathan
I can help with that, I am running Nightly 7.0a1 (2011-06-29) My results:
Tests To Run: 10935 | Total Tests Ran: 10935 | Pass: 10732 | Fail: 203 |
Failed To Load: 0

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ck2
Still won't run on XP.

But all the other advanced browsers, Chrome, Firefox and Opera will (with
hardware acceleration).

(oh and Microsoft forced an OS update yesterday that installed .NET to the
useragent in Firefox, AGAIN)

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Andrex
Awesome, loving they added FileReader and drag-n-drop. Also definitely love
that they added media queries, but I thought that was crucial for IE9 so they
get no brownie points here.

Now, how about WebGL and WebM? Eh? Eh? Eh. Oh well.

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mdaniel
I really love the "selectable rendering engine" in the menus. It is a bit
quirky when trying to switch back and forth, but seems to switch okay from the
one used to render the page into the one of your choosing.

Also, it was via this release that I learned about the .exe.local directory.
There is a "iepreview.exe.local" directory which evidently supersedes the DLL
search path (and that is probably how they are able to package all the render
engines in a "live" copy of Windows).

------
ary
Has there been a formal announcement from Microsoft on what the IE release
schedule will be going forward? It seems the competition from the likes of
Firefox and Chrome has accelerated IE's roadmap.

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sliverstorm
I am loving this minimalistic window. Give me a little address bar, a half-
decent bookmark menu, and I'm sold.

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KeyBoardG
Glad to see the addition of the HTML5 input types. The lack of support in ie9
held back using them for me.

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skeletonjelly
Did they fix that godawful UI with regards to squeezing in the url bar next to
the tabs?

~~~
skymt
IE's platform previews are simply minimal-chrome wrappers around the rendering
engine. You'll need to wait until an IE 10 beta appears to find out what
they've done to the UI.

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amritayannayak
Spells good news for the web in general.

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chrisjsmith
Good work Microsoft for taking things seriously.

