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 Internet Explorer 11Internet Explorer 11 and Windows 8.1 let users, developers, and IT professionals experience the state-of-the-art immersive and desktop browsers, enabling the creation and use of next generation web apps, games, and media. Internet Explorer 11 continues our vision of allowing users to experience the web in a fast, fluid and seamless way that is perfect for touch. New and updated features include: Faster web browsing. Allows network requests to prioritize content, connecting users to information faster than ever before. Plus, with the new SPDY/3 support, Internet Explorer 11 Preview can provide faster and more efficient browsing, even over slow networks. Fast and fluid navigation. Back swipe feels instant with smarter web page caching, and with prefetch and prerender, many forward navigations (like getting to search results) feel instant as well. Rich, hyper-fast 2D and 3D experiences. Supports the emerging Web Graphics Library (WebGL) standards, lighting up games and other interactive content, while still maintaining security, reliability, and performance. In addition, the interactive content in Internet Explorer 11 is now hardware-accelerated for DirectX 9 and later, including a software fallback option. Great on all your screens, large and small. Supports gyroscope input and display orientation lock, making Internet Explorer 11 great for tablets. And, with side-by-side browsing, multi-monitor support, and high pixels per inch (PPI) scaling, Internet Explorer 11 is also great for large screens. Improved compatibility. Internet Explorer 11 improves compatibility with web standards, other browsers, and real-world websites. There's updated support for popular web standards and changes that prevent older websites from displaying incorrectly. Features for users Internet Explorer 11 lets users interact with the next generation of web apps, games, and media, through these key features: Perfect for touch. Includes enhanced support for consumers using touch-based devices, including touch-based drag-and-drop, hover, and active link highlighting. Grouping together the navigation and tabs provides better control, with support for up to 100 open tabs per window. Pinned sites. Enhances pinned sites to support Live Tiles, letting your content update dynamically and creating a more personalized Startscreen. Using Live Tiles with Internet Explorer 11 blurs the line, creating an active and seamless experience between apps and web apps. Seamless integration. Internet Explorer 11 seamlessly integrates with Windows 8.1, enabling new ways to experience websites, including being able to use the Search charm to accelerate web searches. Syncing across devices. Syncs your open Internet Explorer 11 tabs across multiple devices, so that when you open Internet Explorer on another device, you see the same tabs. You also have the option to sync your browsing history and typed URLs, favorites/bookmarks, user-configured settings, and passwords. Click to call. Automatically changes phone numbers into clickable links for apps that work with phone numbers, such as Skype. Features for IT professionals Internet Explorer 11 supports the needs of enterprises, helping to reduce deployment, management, and support costs, through these key features: Enhanced Protected Mode (EPM) and AppContainer turned on by default. Prevents pages from reading or writing to the protected parts of the operating system in both the immersive and desktop environments. For more information, see Enhanced Protected Mode (EPM) on desktop IE. Adobe Flash included in the platform. Adobe Flash is available out-of-the-box for Windows 8.1 Preview. It can run on both Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer for the desktop, with management happening through Automatic Updates and Group Policy, so you can use one update mechanism for all of Internet Explorer. New Group Policy settings. Introduces these new Group Policy settings, while still supporting all of the previous Group Policy settings back to Internet Explorer 9. Turn off Page Prediction Turn on the swiping motion for Internet Explorer for the desktop Allow Microsoft services to provide more relevant and personalized search results Turn off phone number detection Allow Internet Explorer to use the SPDY/3 network protocol Do Not Track (DNT) exceptions. Enhances user privacy by not allowing websites to track users, by default. Internet Explorer 11 lets websites ask for an exception from the user based on the DNT exceptions API, which if granted, creates an exception that allows headers to be sent to the website to allow tracking. This relationship allows users to develop a trusted relationship with the site, regarding privacy. For more information about Internet Explorer 11, see the Internet Explorer 11 FAQ for IT Pros. Features for developers Internet Explorer 11 is optimized to support all of the popular web standards, to offer premier security, and to provide new and updated developer tools that'll help you code across browsers and web-based apps, using these key features: Modern web standards. Internet Explorer 11 supports more web-based standards than ever before, including: WebGL Canvas 2D L2 extensions Full screen API Encrypted media extensions Media source extensions CSS flexible box layout module Mutation observers like DOM4 and 5.3 With these new standards you can use the same markup language across the multiple browsers that are available New F12 Developer Tools. These tools have all been completely rebuilt. You can use them to debug code, solve display issues, improve performance, and increase the stability of your webpages. All of the tools have a cleaner user interface, improved functionality, and an easier and faster overall workflow, including the new Responsiveness, Memory, and Emulation tools. Perfect for touch. Internet Explorer 11 introduces the msZoomTo method for animated scrolling effects, even more finely-tuned controls for panning and zooming on sites or in Windows Store apps, and several updates to Pointer Events. Improved HTML5 video. Internet Explorer 11 also takes HTML5 video to new levels with support for new and emerging standards-based features in the areas of adaptive streaming, content protection, and captioning. |
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IE 11 Review Faster and more standards-compliant than ever. Minimal interface. Excellent security and privacy features. Site pinning for frequently used Web applications. Graphics hardware acceleration. WebGL and SPDY support. CONS No syncing. No WebRTC support. Only installs on Windows 7 and 8.1. BOTTOM LINE This is not the Internet Explorer of five years ago: IE11 is fast, compliant and sports a lean design. BY MICHAEL MUCHMORE The makers of Chrome and Firefox used to regularly castigate Internet Explorer for not being a "modern" Web browser. Those days are over, with even Google admitting this by retiring its Chrome Frame product. IE 11 made its debut on Windows 8.1, but it's also available for the more widely used Windows 7, which still runs on the vast majority of PCs. Microsoft's latest Web browser is fast, has a lean interface, and is compliant with new standards. It even leads in some areas, such as graphics hardware acceleration and touch input. In fact, it's so much faster, leaner, and more secure than previous versions that former users who left it behind may want to give it another try. COMPARE SIMILAR PRODUCTS Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 Google Chrome 36 Opera 12 Firefox 31 VIEW ALL 17 PHOTOS IN GALLERY Installation Internet Explorer 11 requires Windows 7 with Service Pack 1; navigate to the IE download page to get the new browser. IE11 has low system requirements—a 233MHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a Super VGA graphics adapter, and 70MB of hard disk space—so it should run comfortably on older PCs. Unlike the other major browsers, an upgrade/install of IE does involve a reboot, since it's akin to a system update. But when you first run IE11, as with Firefox, you can simply start browsing; neither pushes you to sign into an online account the way Chrome does. The one thing you have to do is choose whether to use SmartScreen protection and send Do Not Track messages to sites. This is better handled than in previous IE versions; most people didn't bother running the initial settings wizard, so it would pop up every time the browser started. Interface Upgraders from IE10 or even IE9 will be hard-pressed to notice any changes in the browser's interface. It's actually even lower key than Chrome's, with the narrowest window frame across the top of any browser, since it places the search bar on the same row as the tabs. Window and Controls. IE 11's interface is as trim as it gets, giving more area to the webpage contents and the least to the browser's own interface features. The combined address and search box sometimes gets too small, but you can drag its edge with the mouse to enlarge it. I actually prefer Firefox's separate search boxes, since searching and address entry are, to me, two different operations. You can still enable IE's menus and toolbars by right-clicking on the top window border and checking the appropriate box. And you can temporarily enable the menu by hitting F10. Like Chrome, IE11 has just five buttons across the top of the browser window, not counting those inside the address bar. Tabs. IE's simple, squared-off tabs boast some nifty capabilities. As with other browsers, IE lets you drag a tab's position or even pull it out into a new window. But, unlike other browsers, an IE tab dragged to the side of the screen takes up exactly half the screen's real estate, in standard Windows behavior. A Web video even continues to play as you drag it. Another nice touch in IE is that you can close a slew of open tabs by repeatedly clicking the X in the same spot. Firefox works this way, too, but Chrome doesn't. New-Tab Page. IE's new-tab page is possibly the most useful of all such pages. Not only does it show tiles for your frequently visited sites (which you can edit or hide), but it also lets you reopen recently closed tabs, reopen the last session, or start InPrivate browsing. Firefox goes part of the way here, showing frequently visited sites. Opera deserves special mention in the new-tab page arena: Its Speed Dial extensions can show live info, such as weather or stock quotes. Pinned Sites. Instead of trumpeting its own branding, Internet Explorer gives the site you're visiting center stage. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the pinned-site feature. By simply dragging a webpage's icon down to the Windows taskbar, you create a pinned site. This gives the site equal billing with an application. Pinned sites can include taskbar jump lists for common site destinations or activities if the site developer supplies the necessary XML data. Pinned sites not only get their own taskbar icons, but their favicon is also used where a browser logo would normally be, in the upper left corner of the window. Even the back and forward buttons take on the color of the site icon. The browser automatically grabs the logo and colors for IE pinned sites for display in the window border. Finally, for pinned sites, the Home button disappears from the menu bar. The One Box. Internet Explorer's combined address and search box—the One Box—protects privacy better than Firefox and Chrome's corresponding boxes, by letting you turn on an off the autosuggest feature of your search engine. With IE you can also choose among search providers from icons at the bottom of its dropdown suggestions. Doing so with Chrome requires a visit to the Settings page, while Firefox's search box also lets you choose different search providers on the fly. The IE method means you can switch your searching scope to just Wikipedia or just eBay, for example, on the fly. Legacy Features. IE11 still supports unique features introduced way back in IE8, too, including Accelerators. These let you right-click on a page to do things like search, translate, or email the page. Another legacy feature, Webslices, lets you "subscribe" to specified spots on a Web page. For example, you might use Webslices for the price of an item, headlines in a news site, or a sports team's results. Extensions. Internet Explorer does have an extension capability, but there's nowhere near as rich an ecosystem for it as there is for Firefox's. You access IE's extension-related controls from the same menu as that for plugins like Adobe Flash and your PDF reader. Unfortunately, those standard Adobe plugins aren't built in as they are in Chrome (and in PDF reading for Firefox). IE does, however, have a nifty ability to tell you if an add-on is excessively slowing down your Web browsing. The browser includes a good download manager you can pause, an effective popup blocker, and capable Favorites, History, and Bookmark features accessible from the star icon. A couple of features you don't get: Syncing and multiuser capabilities. Opera, Firefox, and later Chrome have offered syncing of bookmarks, tabs, history, passwords, and settings for a few years. You do get IE11 syncing between Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs and tablets, but not with Windows 7. Chrome and Firefox allow sign-ins for separate multiple users, so each can get their own bookmarks and configuration. |
