Developers complain that IE10 for Windows 7 was long overdue

After teasing users since April 2011 with previews, Microsoft has at long last released a complete version of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7. While the company promises that the browser loads “real world” Web pages up to 20 percent faster, developers are likely more interested in the broader Web-standards support, particularly HTML5 — assuming they’ve exercised enough patience for IE10 to come to Windows 7.

In a blog post, Microsoft’s Rob Mauceri, group program manager for Internet Explorer, announced the availability of IE10 for Windows 7 and detailed the browser’s superiority over IE9. His post received mixed responses from the MSDN community, ranging from “Hurray!” to “Why the heck did this take so long?”

Back in 2011, Microsoft unveiled its first preview version of Internet Explorer 10, which ran on Windows 7 and later. The second preview also run on Windows 7, but all that followed were Windows 8-only until last November. IE10 for Windows 8, meanwhile, reached general availability last September.

IE10 for Windows 7 adds support for 30 new Web standards, including the latest HTML5, CSS3, DOM (Document Object Model), Web Performance, and Web Application specifications, wrote Rob Mauceri, group program manager for Internet Explorer. Support for CSS Text Shadow, 3D Transforms, Transitions, and Animations enable developers to create rich visual effects, according to Mauceri. Developers also can create more sophisticated and responsive page layouts with CSS3 and HTML5 forms, enabling UI tricks like flexbox, positioned floats, and regions.

Support for local storage via IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache will help developers create better offline applications, he said. IE10 also supports HTML5 Drag-drop, File Reader API, Media Query Listeners, and Pointer Events, which can aid in building more interactive Web apps.

On the security front, Mauceri said that IE10 offers superior Web-app security with the same markup and support for HTML5 Sandbox for iframe isolation.

There are differences between IE10 for Windows 7 and for Windows 8, all of which involve touch-related APIs. For example, IE10 on Windows 7 will not fire certain DOM events, such as MSPointerHover, MSPointerMove, MSGestureStart, MSGestureTap, and MSManipulationStateChanged. IE10 for Windows 7 also doesn’t support certain CSS scrolling, zooming, and touch properties, as well as aria-haspopup, a DOM property supported on Windows 8 that simulates mouse hover functionality in touch-based scenarios.

Developers can use Microsoft’s recently launched modern.IE tool to test and verify their sites. It offers providers a wizard that scans a Web page URL for common interoperability problems and suggests some ideas for how to address those issues.

Mauceri said IE10 on Windows 7 improves performance with faster page loading, faster interactivity, and faster JavaScript performance; it also reduces CPU usage and improves battery life on mobile PCs.

The browser boost hardware acceleration performance of SVG and HTML4 constructs, he said. Additionally, improved drawing performance enables faster rendering patterns. The brower also yields improvements to the Chakra JavaScript engine, including profile-based, type-specialized JIT machine code, faster floating point operations, and faster object and property access.

IE10 comes with DNT (Do Not Track) signal turned on by default. It offers integrated spell checking and auto-correct, along with a retuned tabs bar to speed up the process of closing multiple tabs.

Responses to Microsoft’s announcement were mixed, with much of the criticism focused on how long it took for the company to deliver IE10 to Windows 7. “Over a year ago, when you started showing IE10, I was excited. But now, you are way behind, again,” wrote MSDN user RobCannon. “Why did it take so long to deliver this? Waiting for this release is literally holding back the Internet as too many people are still using older versions of IE. If Microsoft truly wanted to advance the Web, this would have been released months ago. I used to be a Microsoft fan, but you guys are making it too hard.”

A couple of users called on Microsoft to support WebGL, which has earned a reputation for being potentially insecure. “Why not have an opt-in?” asked user dd26. “If you really think these are vulnerabilities, why not give the user the option to take on that risk if it indeed exists? … When it comes to networking, nothing under the sun, alas, is fully secure.”

Finally, user MgSm88 provided a laundry list of desired features for improving IE’s developer tools:

• Source map support
• Better way to explore objects in the JS console. (See how Chrome has collapsible nodes and can handle nested objects.)
• Better way to log objects. (See how Chrome’s console.log() behaves, it allows you to explore the object, printing “[object Object]” is entirely useless.)
• Better JS console user interface (I hate the behavior of it. Why is there a single line and multi-line mode? It should just work. I don’t want to think about how I’m supposed to use it. Horrible UX design.)
• Thinner header (3 lines of stuff before you get to the content of the debug tools?)
• Ability to break on DOM modification of specific elements (a la Chrome).
• “Refresh page to see messages that may have occurred”/Start capturing network traffic. Why does this all need to be explicit? I should just turn on Developer Mode in some setting somewhere and it should capture/log all this by default.
• Ability to see applied vs. defined styles and how styles are overriding each other.

I also wish you guys would move to a more frequent release schedule with more incremental updates. If every other tech company can be agile with their browser releases, why can’t MS? Just have milestones with long-term support, like Firefox has adopted, and you can make corporate customers happy while not hampering innovation.

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