Microsoft launches 2nd pre-release of Internet Explorer 10

San Francisco, Jun 30: The software giant Microsoft has released the second preview of its latest version of the popular web browser Internet Explorer. The second pre-release of the IE10 offers support for a bunch of new features and specifications.

The second preview release of the Internet Explorer 10, which is expected to launch in 2011 along with Windows 8 operating system, includes support for major platform features like HTML5 Parser, HTML5 Sandbox, Web Workers, HTML5 Forms, Media Query Listeners and more.

The new release also includes support for the new Web File API, which gives browsers controlled, restricted access to the local file system. With this new features, the IE web browser will take advantage of computers' hardware to load complex images in sites, thus making the loading process faster than ever.

Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview contains:
1. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

• CSS3 Flexible Box (“Flexbox") Layout
• Positioned floats
• CSS3 Gradients (on all properties that accept images)
• CSS3 Grid Alignment
• CSS3 Multi-column Layout
• Removal of style sheet limits

2. Document Object Model (DOM) support

• Advanced Hit testing APIs
• CSSOM Floating Point Value support
• Media Query Listeners

3. ECMAScript 5 (ES5) support

• The strict variant of ECMAScript (“ES5 strict mode")

4. HTML5 support

• Asynchronus Script Execution
• Drag and Drop
• File API
• Forms Validation
• Sandbox
• Web Workers

5. Web performance APIs

The Internet Explorer Platform Preview requires Windows 7 (x86 or x64) Operating System. Users can test the HTML5 performance on www.html5test.com.

With the new IE 10, Microsoft is planning to continue its domination in the internet browser market. Recently, Microsoft has been facing threats from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Mozilla has released the Firefox 5 with more than 1000 improvements and Google rolled out Chrome 12.

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