Internet Explorer 11, which shipped with the recently released Windows 8.1 includes new F12 tools, WebGL and Hardware 3D support in addition to faster HTTP transport. The F12 tools enables you to identify and report about elements on the page such as links and image reports including a new user interface and functionality to make development and debugging faster and easier and contains eight tools such as DOM Explorer, Console, Debugger, Network, UI Responsiveness, Profiler, Memory and Emulation. Each of these tools has their own tab in the F12 tools interface and feature a Windows 8 minimalist interface.
IE 11 includes support for WebGL after Microsoft got satisfied with the measures taken to address security issues. It also provides support for HTML Full Screen API to give a quality full screen video playback, TTML, SPD standards for closed captioning, latest HTML5 video media streaming standards, including Dynamic TextTracks, Simple Delivery Profile, Streaming XHR cache control, Media Source Extensions (MSE) and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), SPDY in addition to WebCrypto.
IE 11 also includes support for ECMAScript Internationalization API which handles international date and time formatting in addition to the possibility to download video data without caching to disk, which results in extended battery life.
It also provides support for simulated hover with touch. Moreover, developers will be able to programmatically trigger pan and zoom through the new msZoomTo() API, which scrolls or zooms into and out of an area with animation. Microsoft has also touch enabled HTML5 drag and drop, which are previously introduced in IE 10.
According to reports coming in the final version of IE 11 will have support for unprefixed pointer events. Microsoft has removed few old features such as all existing isIE() code branches in addition to removal of MSIE and compatible tokens. Moreover, Microsoft has removed document.all and make use of document.getElementById() including removal of following IE specific handlers.
- attachEvent()
- detachEvent()
- window.execScript()
- window.doScroll()
- document.fileSize
- img.fileSize
- script.onreadystatechange
- script.readyState
- document.selection
- document.createStyleSheet
- style.styleSheet
- window.createPopup
Internet Explorer 11 is also available for Windows 7 but many touch oriented features have been disabled since they work only with Windows 8.