Microsoft recently released the company's new test build for Internet Explorer 10 which would fully function on Windows 8 platform.

For the past years, Microsoft has exerted a lot of effort in updating Internet Explorer as it faced tough competition with other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. This newly-released preview is just part of the company's plan to reclaim its prestige in this category.

The new preview released is not an update for Platform Preview of IE10 on Windows 7 since it is still under the Platform Preview 2. The Platform Preview (PP4) release is only for IE10 which would be on the Developer Preview pre-beta build for Windows 8 only. Microsoft mentioned that IE10 includes the company's new Metro UI but still maintaining the option for traditional desktop interface. In this blog post written by Rob Mauceri, a program manager for the IE group, he was able to point out the different features available for IE10.

These notable features include the following:

  • Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for safe use of XMLHttpRequest across domains.
  • File API Writer support for blobBuilder allowing manipulation of large binary objects in script in the browser.
  • Support for JavaScript typed arrays for efficient storage and manipulation of typed data.
  • CSS user-select property to control how end-users select elements in a Web page or application.
  • Support for HTML5 video text captioning, including time-code, placement, and captioning file formats.

Full list of IE10 features could be viewed here.

These IE10 updates were described as "more consistent and interoperable with the way quirks modes works in other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera." Mauceri also mentioned in his blog post that "these foundational capabilities are what developers building native applications depend on: working with binary data and files, controlling selection and hit testing in application UI, and providing accessible video content with captioning."

Microsoft is planning that IE10 would be available for Windows 7 and be integrated with the release of Windows 8 sometime next year. Microsoft released the IE10 platform preview 3 last September and the company indicated that IE10 will not be available in Windows Vista or Windows XP. The PP4 could be accessed through Microsoft's test drive site.