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IE10 Platform Preview 2 Released

yannis 15y ago
You can run the examples at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Views/SiteMap/Default.html 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.
chrisjsmith 15y ago
Good work Microsoft for taking things seriously.
ary 15y ago
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.
dave1010uk 15y ago
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 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg192966.aspx
- kenjackson 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - dave1010uk 15y ago
      My problem with IE9+ not supporting XP is that XP users (still a fairly large % of visitors) will still be on IE8. Some of them can manually upgrade to a newer OS or a different browser but many will be "stuck" for a few more years. Even if IE10 was released today and (perfectly) supported more web technologies than Firefox and Chrome combined then IE would still be my biggest problem in front-end development. Microsoft have (likely) spend millions on getting XP users to upgrade to Vista / 7. Releasing IE9 / IE10 for XP seems to be the most feasible way to upgrade these IE8 users. An upgrade to Windows 7 through Windows Update isn't going to happen and I can't imagine MS bundling a 3rd party browser to replace IE8 on XP.
rkalla 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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/ 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-browser-Polyfills https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-brow... .
- dave1010uk 15y ago
  Just curious: what do you get from the DnD API that you don't get from an [input type="file"]? Is it just the flexibility in design? I know a few (non-technical) people who are happy using a "choose file" dialog but would really struggle performing a drag and drop: opening Explorer, navigating to a folder, resizing Explorer and the browser so they're both visible on the screen (even fewer people know you can drag files to the task bar to activate another window) and then dragging files to the drop target.
skeletonjelly 15y ago
Did they fix that godawful UI with regards to squeezing in the url bar next to the tabs?
- skymt 15y ago
  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.
- pjob 15y ago
  I am not a fan of this UI myself, but it is just a default. You can change this behavior by right clicking on the bar and checking the "Show tabs on a separate row" option.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  You can move the tabs to be under the address bar. I prefer to squeeze them. Gives me an extra 15 or so pizels.
ck2 15y ago
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)
Andrex 15y ago
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.
KeyBoardG 15y ago
Glad to see the addition of the HTML5 input types. The lack of support in ie9 held back using them for me.
zeddez 15y ago
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 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/ http://test262.ecmascript.org/
- huhtenberg 15y ago
  FF5 is a production release, IE10 is a "platform preview". Not exactly a fair comparison.
  - lovskogen 15y ago
    Then FF5 should fail less of the tests, right? Since a production release should be more stable than a platform preview?
  - zeddez 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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
- lmkg 15y ago
  Opera version 11.50 (most recent) on Win7: Tests To Run: 10935 | Total Tests Ran: 10935 | Pass: 7061 | Fail: 3874 | Failed To Load: 66 The fast majority (80%) of the error log appears to be in section 15.2.3, with half of the rest also being in section 15. This would imply that around 1/3 of the entire test suite is just in that section of the specification; as the test itself describes, its coverage is currently incomplete.
amritayannayak 15y ago
Spells good news for the web in general.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I am loving this minimalistic window. Give me a little address bar, a half-decent bookmark menu, and I'm sold.
mdaniel 15y ago
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).

You can run the examples at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Views/SiteMap/Default.html 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.

chrisjsmith 15y ago

Good work Microsoft for taking things seriously.

ary 15y ago

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.

dave1010uk 15y ago

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 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg192966.aspx

kenjackson 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - dave1010uk 15y ago
    My problem with IE9+ not supporting XP is that XP users (still a fairly large % of visitors) will still be on IE8. Some of them can manually upgrade to a newer OS or a different browser but many will be "stuck" for a few more years. Even if IE10 was released today and (perfectly) supported more web technologies than Firefox and Chrome combined then IE would still be my biggest problem in front-end development. Microsoft have (likely) spend millions on getting XP users to upgrade to Vista / 7. Releasing IE9 / IE10 for XP seems to be the most feasible way to upgrade these IE8 users. An upgrade to Windows 7 through Windows Update isn't going to happen and I can't imagine MS bundling a 3rd party browser to replace IE8 on XP.

rkalla 15y ago

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 15y ago
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/ 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-browser-Polyfills https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-brow... .
dave1010uk 15y ago
Just curious: what do you get from the DnD API that you don't get from an [input type="file"]? Is it just the flexibility in design? I know a few (non-technical) people who are happy using a "choose file" dialog but would really struggle performing a drag and drop: opening Explorer, navigating to a folder, resizing Explorer and the browser so they're both visible on the screen (even fewer people know you can drag files to the task bar to activate another window) and then dragging files to the drop target.

skeletonjelly 15y ago

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

skymt 15y ago
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.
pjob 15y ago
I am not a fan of this UI myself, but it is just a default. You can change this behavior by right clicking on the bar and checking the "Show tabs on a separate row" option.
kenjackson 15y ago
You can move the tabs to be under the address bar. I prefer to squeeze them. Gives me an extra 15 or so pizels.

ck2 15y ago

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)

Andrex 15y ago

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.

KeyBoardG 15y ago

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

zeddez 15y ago

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 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/ http://test262.ecmascript.org/

huhtenberg 15y ago
FF5 is a production release, IE10 is a "platform preview". Not exactly a fair comparison.
- lovskogen 15y ago
  Then FF5 should fail less of the tests, right? Since a production release should be more stable than a platform preview?
- zeddez 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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
lmkg 15y ago
Opera version 11.50 (most recent) on Win7: Tests To Run: 10935 | Total Tests Ran: 10935 | Pass: 7061 | Fail: 3874 | Failed To Load: 66 The fast majority (80%) of the error log appears to be in section 15.2.3, with half of the rest also being in section 15. This would imply that around 1/3 of the entire test suite is just in that section of the specification; as the test itself describes, its coverage is currently incomplete.

amritayannayak 15y ago

Spells good news for the web in general.

sliverstorm 15y ago

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

mdaniel 15y ago

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).