Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7
- Web : http://netm.aq/IElO-win7-237
- Price : Free
A big improvement, but far from perfect
With the move to a new user experience in Windows 8, support for legacy operating systems was always going to be messy. Given this background, the prolonged ‘preview’ release for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 is almost to be applauded.
Why? Because IE10 promises a rapid, responsive and standards-compliant experience and designers unwilling to take the plunge with Windows 8 need a way to verify their code doesn’t kill it. IE10 is far from perfect, but it’s still an interesting product.
Improvements over IE9
The improvements over IE9 are numerous. Better JavaScript performance from the Chakra engine is the most impressive – probably not as impressive as the selective benchmarking on Microsoft’s Test Drive site suggests, but still noticeably faster.
Page rendering can justly be called snappy, even when compared with Chrome, making the basic surfing experience a pleasure. The interface is also
totally clutter-free, making IE 10 one of (if not the) best-looking browsers on the PC. That must be a first for Redmond.
New HTML5 features include Web Workers and WebSockets, both of which are extremely cool, providing devs with new ways to speed up their apps. Web Workers essentially provide a threading solution so that tasks can be split, ensuring that ancillary jobs don’t lock up the user experience.
There is a long list of CSS3 implementations too – not least font-feature-settings, which bring some of the typographic fine tuning that has long been a staple of print design to the web.
Good and bad, but never ugly
As it stands, IE 10 for Windows 7 is an uneven product. There are some great things about it, but there are also some odd development choices, such as Do Not Track being enabled by default.
And of course, there is that failure to support new technologies, at least when compared to the likes of Chrome. But given that it provides a way to test your work against next-gen Windows’ default browser, it will still be a useful addition to developers’ toolboxes.
Rating :
Positive :
- Super fast JS
- Clean UI
Negative :
- Behind on new functionality
- Do not track issue
Verdict : IE10 improves on 9, broadening the list of technologies which can be used crossplatform without hacks or fallbacks. But the list of things it doesn’t implement is perplexing.
