As of Tuesday, Internet Explorer 10 is also available for Windows 7 users. It will appear on Windows Update first for those who have installed IE10 Release Preview, but it will gradually be rolled out to all Windows 7 users (except for those whose administrators have installed the IE10 Blocker Toolkit). The tenth version of the browser brings significant improvements in many areas – web standards, performance, security, anti-tracking and reliability.
Installing IE10 on Windows 7 requires the presence of a KB2670838 update. It’s called Platform Update, and if I remember correctly, IE9 required a similar update. Internet Explorer is an integral part of the operating system. It renders on the GPU and uses DirectX to do so. Platform Update updates this interface along with associated components and codecs, such as H.264.
Improvements that contribute to faster rendering, less hardware usage, and thus longer battery life for a portable device are not limited to rendering. The javascript engine has also undergone a huge optimization, which is currently the fastest if we consider the SunSpider test to be something conclusive. The speed of page loading depends primarily on the skill of the developer. This graph shows how many milliseconds SunSpuder version 0.9.1 ran on a computer with an Inter Core i7 CPU clocked at 2.67 GHz and a 64-bit operating system with 6 GB of RAM. The magnitude of the deviation is shown by a lighter shade.
Another interesting comparison is the browser’s ability to automatically win the Minesweeper game, with progress in the game being rendered continuously. The machine is the same as in the previous case and I also closed all applications running in the background. Firefox 19 was excluded from the test because it could not load the page correctly. The graph shows the game solution time in seconds. Interestingly, while IE10 Platform Preview achieved a time of 2.2 seconds, IE10 RTM improved to 1 s.
Microsoft tests are usually very different from other tests that focus only on a specific area. They usually render frantically, load large files, use XmlHttpRequest, edit the DOM – in short, what a normal page does, if, for example, it loads comments under an article only when you scroll under the article.
If you have a souped-up computer and you don't consider performance improvements to be very important, you'll certainly appreciate the integrated spell checker. It is migrated to Internet Explorer from Microsoft Office. A word that is not in the dictionary is underlined in red. In Windows 8, the Win + Space key shortcut, which is a system function, is used to change the control language. In Windows 7, the language is changed via the context menu in the browser.
For developers, it is important that IE10 brings support for 29 (according to other sources over 30 – it is difficult to determine what can be considered a separate standard) new standards. You can find a brief overview of them in my separate article. For a more comprehensive overview, see the IE10 Guide for Developers.
Usually, these lines are mentioned when an update of a game is released, but given that Internet Explorer renders via DirectX, I can't forgive myself. Make sure you have the latest WHQL drivers installed for your graphics card. You can download from the NVIDIA or AMD website.
I wrote the article for TechNet Blog CZ/SK.