Microsoft, which is only three weeks into the development of Internet Explorer 10, revealed not only some of its native HTML5 work but its goal of building a powerful and more robust web.
Writing on the MSDN Developers’ blog, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice-president, Internet Explorer, provided a downloadable preview of IE10 Platform Preview 1, which he described as the first step in delivering Microsoft’s next wave of progress in native HTML5.
“Websites and HTML5 run best when they run natively, on a browser optimised for the operating system on your device.
“We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best web experience on Windows. IE10 continues on IE9’s path, directly using what Windows provides and avoiding abstractions, layers and libraries that slow down your site and your experience,” he said.
Native experience of HTML5
Hachamovitch said the only native experience of the web and HTML5 today is on Windows 7 with IE9. He pointed to the kind of websites that are possible today using HTML5 on a website, ‘Beauty of the Web’.
At yesterday’s MIX conference, Microsoft showed the new browsing engine along with several new browser test drives that anyone on the web can try out.
You can run these at www.ietestdrive.com to see emerging standards like CSS3 Multi-column Layout, CSS3 Grid Layout, CSS3 Flexible Box Layout, CSS3 Gradients, and ES5 Strict Mode in action.
“We also demonstrated additional standards support (like CSS3 Transitions and CSS3 3D Transforms that will be available in subsequent platform previews of IE10, which we will update every 8-12 weeks,” Hachomovitch said.
“Many of us share the goal of a more powerful, native and robust web. We want actual progress, not just iteration and activity, toward that goal,” he said.
