Windows 8 wasn't the only widely used piece of software to be released in an early form this week. Internet Explorer 10 saw its third platform preview, Microsoft noted on its Building IE blog.
In Windows 8, IE is more than just a Web browser. Its underlying Web-rendering engine also powers the operating system's new Metro-style applications—central to Microsoft's plans for Windows 8's success. Not only does the IE engine power these apps, but it's also the backbone of the OS's two browsers—the Metro IE and the Windows Desktop IE, which looks pretty much identical to the current IE9.
The new Platform Preview 3 version of Internet Explorer adds a few key necessities for touch-capable Web apps. Microsoft has made some new demos available on the IE Test Drive site to show these off, including a few called Lasso Birds, Particle Acceleration, and Touch Effects.
The browser engine also implements some key HTML5 technologies needed by Web applications, not unlike what Google has done with its Chrome browser. One very important capability recently announced by Google was support for offline Docs apps, and IE10 now supports a similar level of support for offline Web apps. According to the blog post, these include, "local storage with IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache; Web Sockets, HTML5 History, Async scripts, HTML5 File APIs, HTML5 Drag-drop, HTML5 Sandboxing, Web workers, and ES5 Strict mode support."
But the adds aren't just about offline app support: the latest IE platform preview also implements a bunch of CSS features that let developers add style and polish to their sites or apps. The names of newly supported functions give a good indication of what they can do: CSS Text Shadow, CSS 3D Transforms, CSS3 Transitions and Animations, CSS3 Gradient, SVG Filter Effects. And for new layout capabilities, the IE team has added support for "CSS3 grid, flexbox, multi-column, figures, regions, and hyphenation), HTML5 Forms, input controls, and validation."
All of these go far beyond what was found on your father's Web. As Google has made a major push towards granting Web apps full app status, Microsoft is showing that it, too, is serious about making this happen. And the new Web as envisioned by Microsoft and Google is moving away from the need for plug-ins to do sophisticated Web-app stuff. In fact, the Metro version of Internet Explorer in Windows 8 doesn't even support plugins and relies completely on HTML5 for app-like capabilities.
For more, see PCMag's hands on with the developer preview and the Samsung testing PC and the slideshow below. Also check out our unboxing of the preview PC.