Microsoft today made available
Internet Explorer 11 Release Preview to Windows 7, offering faster JavaScript performance as well as support for standards like WebGL.
IE11 Release Preview signals the final preview release before general availability of IE11 for Windows 7 later this fall. IE11 for Windows 8.1 will coincide with Windows 8.1 GA (October 18).
One of the basic features of the latest browser is its enhanced touch functionality. With just one finger (or all five), users can reach out and touch the internet - snapping, zooming and swiping to a new page, at will. With the built-in page prediction and pre-rendering features, pages load nearly instantly with Flip Ahead or a swipe back. With Snap and press-to-call integration, users can resize windows and make calls from inside the browser. In addition, IE11 supports up to 100 tabs per window and a favorites folder that syncs across your Windows 8.1 devices.
Microsoft claims that the Release Preview is 5 percent faster than the Developer Preview, and more than 30 percent faster than the nearest competitive browser on the Webkit-based JavaScript test SunSpider.
Microsoft also has removed the prefixes from the Pointer Events API for HTML5. That means the API will no longer need an IE-specific flag to work in non-IE browsers.
Further changes in the new Release Preview include more customization options for fonts in closed-caption video playback, and support for the latest draft of the W3C's Do Not Track specification.
For developers specifically, Microsoft is also releasing virtual images of the IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 on its developer site modern.ie, this week, along with updates to the F12 developer tools.