On Wednesday, the IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 released for download, bringing with it performance improvements that make it more than 30 percent faster than the nearest competitor (WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark), updates that support the latest Web standards and new high-octane F12 tools that enable developers to build high-performance Web experiences, faster and more efficiently.
Beginning with performance, the IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 is fine-tuned so that sites download and display fast, and are highly responsive and interactive. You can see benchmarks in this post on the IE Blog. But the developer tools are nothing to sneeze at.
“Having fast and reliable Web apps is more critical than ever,” write Sandeep Singhal and Rob Mauceri, group program managers for Internet Explorer. “IE11 includes a completely re-designed and enhanced suite of in-browser F12 developer tools. These tools help Web developers diagnose and optimize their apps quickly and efficiently.”
Tools enhancements in IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 include:
- Console: IE11 makes it easier to debug WebGL content by mapping WebGL errors to the corresponding JavaScript location. Developer productivity is improved because primitives have been added to Intellisense. With IE11, developers can debug multi-threaded websites with full console access while targeting Web workers.
- Debugger: An improved file picker allows faster access to files in a complex Web project.
- DOM Explorer: With IE11, developers can tune websites more quickly by editing CSS property values and seeing those edits in the Live DOM without having to press the enter key.
- Memory: To make it easier to narrow down the source of memory leaks, the F12 tool now identifies what operations were performed on allocated data between memory snapshots.
- Networking: A new “always refresh from server” option creates reproducible performance results while developers rapidly iterate to tune their site performance. The tool also includes new Search Next and Search Previous functions for analyzing complex network traces.
IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 includes key updates that support the latest and emerging Web standards. One example is the Pointer Events specification, which is a Candidate Recommendation at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). With Pointer Events support across the range of Windows devices, developers can easily build experiences that work equally well with mouse, keyboard, pen and touch.
If you’re a developer, confirm now that your websites are ready for slew of Windows devices and customers moving to IE11. You can start by checking out the IE11 Developer Guide.
For more details, resources, plus a video that shows some of the performance and developer tools enhancements in IE11, take a look at the IE Blog.
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Deborah Pisano
Microsoft News Center Staff