RELEASED - Download Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7

Just about a month ago the IEBlog published a post to allow business to manage the update schedule for Internet Explorer 10. It says "this approach lets organizations control when they are ready to deploy IE10 to their Windows 7 users." I took from this that IE10 on Windows 7 was imminent.

Today it's out. You can download IE10 for Windows 7 now. The details are over at the IE blog.

In the next few weeks and months Windows 7 machines will get automatically upgraded to IE10. For Web Developers like me, that means that between Windows 8 which already has IE10 and all these Windows 7 users who will now have IE10, that more people will have a modern browser than ever before.

IE10 was faster on my machine than IE9, and they say it is smarter about battery life. It also has IE10's upgraded JavaScript engine and includes spell check with auto-correct (finally!). Benchmarks are benchmarks but SunSpider implies about 40% faster than IE9, while PeaceKeeper looks like 25%. The V8 benchmark looks more like 100% faster. Point is, it's faster. How much faster? Depends on who you ask. Your mileage and machines will vary.

Once you've upgraded to IE10, go check out some of these sites. Be sure to view the source!

• http://ie10bethethief.com - Robert Kirkman from Image Comics (You know him from The Walking Dead) also has a great comic I get each month on Comixology called Thief of Thieves.
  • This new site for Thief of Thieves not only has some great art (lots of SVG!) but also is a good example of using touch and the W3C Pointer Events standard. According to the IE blog, it also uses:
    • CCS3 animations for some of the larger scene transitions on the site
    • MSGesture API for handling more advanced pointer interactions like the safe cracking exercise
    • pageVisibility API to detect when an open page isn’t being actively used so we can control audio appropriately
    • setImmediate API to improve performance and power consumption on tablet devices. SetImmediate, like setInterval and setTimeout, is a timing API and requests the CPU to process the instruction as soon as it’s possible to.
• Atari Arcade - Lots of classic Atari games, remade using HTML5 and Touch on the web.
• Pulse - Very cool news aggregator done entirely in HTML5 with support for swipes and multi-finger gestures. Also works nice on mobile phones with responsive design.
• Contre Jour - The 2011 iPad game of the year is now written in HTML5/JavaScript and CSS3. It works really well on touch systems like my Ultrabook. This originally came out in October but they've just added 20 new levels and it's free!
  • I interviewed the HTML5 developers of Contre Jour on my podcast! They gave a behind the scenes look at developing a game like this in HTML5 and JavaScript.

Developers

• If you're an ASP.NET developer, make sure you're ready for IE10. The easiest way is to upgrade .NET 4 websites to .NET 4.5. It's an in-place upgrade. You also get the major CLR performance improvements as well.
• There was a bug about 18 months ago with _doPostBack that was pushed out on Windows Update long ago but it is always good to double check.
• ASP.NET 4 sites can have trouble with the ASP.NET Web Forms ImageButton control and IE10. You can fix this issue in one of three ways.
  1. Update to ASP.NET 4.5
  2. Set the page with Image Buttons to IE9 mode:
  3. Request the ASP.NET 4 Hotfix here. It's number 2783767. The fix for ASP.NET 2/3/3.5 is 2784147
• Check out http://www.modern.ie for regularly updated Virtual Machines and test tools. I try to use BrowserStack whenever I can, as it integrates into Visual Studio with the new ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2.

Enjoy!

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