In a new Building Windows 8 blog post, Microsoft details the improvements made to Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8. On top of that, the company reveals how IE10 will bring a metro style web experience to the operating system.
“We built a new browsing experience in lockstep with Windows 8 to give you all the advantages that Metro style applications offer. We built that experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other web standards,” Microsoft states in an official blog post.
According to Microsoft, Internet Explorer 10 is designed to make website interaction via touch or keyboard/mouse input not only fast, but also fluid. Users are able to experience a Metro style browsing that offers a full-screen, immersive site experience. Metro IE10 will place the focus on the website itself, rather than the tabs and window management activity that we are so used to with other browsers.
The Navigation bar in IE10 is pretty cool as it only appears when you need it and only showcases controls for common operations such as back, forward, stop/refresh and pinning sites to the Start Screen. On top of that, you can swipe up or right click to view your website tabs.
Windows 8 users can also utilize the Charms bar to search within IE10 using a search engine of your choice.
Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 contains the following features:
- Full, independent composition enables responsive, fast and fluid behavior on real websites (including pages with fixed elements, nested scrolling regions, animations, and video)
- Back and forward swipe navigation with preview
- Double-tap to zoom in on content
- Fast back and forward navigation controls for mouse
- Mouse (CTRL+scroll wheel) and keyboard methods for quickly zooming in and out to mirror touch interactions
- Automatic domain suggestions for faster navigation and less typing
- Share charm support for URLs, snippets, images and selection with Mail and other apps
- Search charm with visual search suggestions
- Devices charm for printing, projecting, and playing video to external devices like TVs
- Plug-in free support: notifications for sites requiring activeX
- Background notifications for pinned sites and other tile improvements
- Jumplists for pinned sites
- InPrivate tabs that are easier to open
You can read the full blog post here, which goes in-depth with IE10’s features.