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LAS VEGAS-Just four weeks after the release of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft unveiled the first platform preview of Internet Explorer 10 at the MIX11 conference here.
In his April 12 keynote kicking off the show, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, outlined how the next version of Microsoft’s Web browser builds on the performance breakthroughs and the deep native HTML5 support delivered in Internet Explorer 9. With this investment, Microsoft is leading the adoption of HTML5 with a long-term commitment to the standards process, Hachamovitch said.
“It’s great to be here with the people who build the Web and make it work-developers,” Hachamovitch said in greeting the crowd as he opened his keynote. Hachamovitch also drove home the importance of native technology. “Native experiences are the best experiences,” he said.
“The only native experience of HTML5 on the Web today is on Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 9,” Hachamovitch said. “With Internet Explorer 9, Websites can take advantage of the power of modern hardware and a modern operating system and deliver experiences that were not possible a year ago. Internet Explorer 10 will push the boundaries of what developers can do on the Web even further.”
Joining Hachamovitch onstage to demonstrate some of the power and advances in IE10 was Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows and Windows Live at Microsoft, who showed off some of the new features in IE10 and how it compares with competing browsers such as Google’s Chrome.
Sinofsky also announced an upcoming Microsoft developer conference to be held in Anaheim, Calif., Sept. 13-16. “Save the date,” Sinofsky said. “This will be Microsoft’s next developer conference. We have a lot of exciting things to talk about there, including HTML5, power of the Web, same markup and a lot more.”
Consumers and developers face an important technology challenge today: With the majority of consumers using multiple devices, the performance and rich experience of native applications demand the time and investment of rewriting applications from device to device. As a result, technology standards such as HTML5, which deliver superior performance through Web-connected devices, play an increasingly important role. This dynamic creates a clear catalyst for developers to gravitate toward technologies that not only comply with standards, but also exploit the power of the local device to offer rich, immersive, next-generation Web experiences.
Hachamovitch said Internet Explorer 9 is the only browser with hardware-accelerated HTML5 spanning all graphics, text, audio and video. It was the first browser to introduce innovations, such as hardware acceleration, built on deep HTML5 support, to enable fast and immersive Web experiences. The first platform preview of Internet Explorer 10 builds on these innovations and includes support for additional standards, such as CSS3 Gradients on background images and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout.
Developers can download the Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview here and provide direct feedback through new code refreshes approximately every 12 weeks.
“We’ve changed the cadence from every eight weeks to every 12 weeks,” Hachamovitch said. “There’s a difference between progress and cadence.”
Internet Explorer is designed to bring sites to the forefront, enabling a more immersive, more “beautiful” Web experience, Microsoft said. At MIX11, Microsoft demoed sites and applications from many leading companies, including foursquare, Namco and Sparkart Group’s new site for Bon Jovi, to demonstrate how companies are using Internet Explorer to create richer experiences.
“We love foursquare playground because it combines our API with interesting new technologies like HTML5 and Internet Explorer 9 to extend foursquare to the desktop and deliver beautiful visualizations of where users are gathering,” said Holger Luedorf, vice president of Mobile and Partnerships for foursquare, in a statement. “We are excited to unveil new features in the experience, including an ‘add venue’ function and photo sharing.”
Examples of these rich demos can be seen here.
Microsoft Leading the Adoption of Web Standards
Microsoft is leading the adoption of Web standards with its long-term commitment to the HTML5 standards process and platform investments spanning Internet Explorer, Windows Phone and Windows 7. Hachamovitch highlighted projects from the Microsoft HTML5 Labs site, where the company provides prototypes of early specifications from standards bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Microsoft also is focusing on standards and cloud development, helping developers more easily scale their apps to multiple devices and platforms. In his keynote, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform, discussed how the Windows Azure platform empowers developers to use their existing skills to build, host and scale Web applications in the cloud.
Microsoft announced the commercial availability of new Windows Azure capabilities, including services that accelerate application performance and enable secure and open access to Web applications through popular identity providers, including Microsoft, Facebook and Google. A new community technology preview of traffic management capability for Windows Azure is also available today, enabling developers to more easily balance application performance across multiple geographies. In addition, Guthrie announced a preview of a Windows Azure content delivery network for media-streaming capabilities, available at the end of June. More information about these updates is available here.
In addition to its commitment to HTML5, Web standards and cloud interoperability, Microsoft discussed its commitment to sponsoring open-source projects, such as the Orchard project, a free content management system (CMS) project in the Outercurve Foundation’s ASP.NET Open Source Gallery. Orchard 1.1 is available today, along with new Amazon.com, UserVoice and DISQUS modules that contribute to the growing number of community-authored extensions for Orchard.
Microsoft also announced a refresh of ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update, which enables Web developers to innovate quickly and easily via new HTML 5 markup support, Entity Framework 4.1 with Entity Code First now built in for easier database Web solution development, and expanded NuGet capabilities for finding and installing community components.