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IE 10 Preview for Windows 7 Released

IE 10 for Windows 7 uses the same Chakra engine and native HTML5 graphics rendering as its Windows 8 counterpart.

• By Kurt Mackie
• 11/14/2012

Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 has taken a great leap forward after many months in which Microsoft reported little about its progress. On Tuesday, the company announced that a "release preview" of its latest browser, which is already available for Windows 8, can now be downloaded for Windows 7.

Last month, the company indicated that it would issue a test release, but the details up to that time have been sparse. The last release of IE 10 for Windows 7 was an Platform Preview Build 2 alpha release on June 29, 2011.

Installing the release preview of IE 10 on Windows 7 will replace IE 9, according to Microsoft. Developers may want to consider running it on test equipment. The release preview requires Windows 7 "Service Pack 1 (SP1) or higher," which suggests that another service pack for Windows 7 might be coming. However, an October Register article claimed to have inside knowledge that Microsoft is not planning to issue a second service pack for Windows 7. A Microsoft spokesperson had no comment on the Register story's claim when asked about it at the time.

IE 10 on Windows 7 uses the same Chakra engine as its Windows 8 cousin, and the same native HTML 5 graphics rendering capabilities are available across both Windows versions, according to Microsoft. The Windows 7 version supports Cascading Style Sheet 3 visual effects and layouts, Web Sockets, Web Workers, IndexedDB, HTML 5 drag-and-drop, and sandboxing.

IE 10 on Windows 7 blows past Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers on some speed tests, according to Microsoft, in particular, on Mandelbrot graphics rendering tests. And while Microsoft has sometimes backed away from its browser speed claims, it is once more asserting first place. According to a blog post by Roger Capriotti, director of Internet Explorer marketing at Microsoft, IE 10 and IE 9 "have the fastest browser response time on Windows."

While the Windows 8 version of the browser comes with a preinstalled Adobe Flash Player, it's not clear from Microsoft's announcement if the Adobe Flash Player is also built into the Windows 7-based IE 10 release preview. Plug-ins were supposed to be forbidden for IE 10 on Windows 8, but apparently they are still OK to use if the browser is used on the "desktop" side of Windows 8, rather than on the "Windows Store app" side (formerly known as the "Metro" side). Presumably, that circumstance may imply that plug-ins are OK to use with the IE 10 release preview on Windows 7, although Microsoft hasn't explicitly said as much.

Microsoft did what it said it would do and turned on the "do not track" function by default in its IE 10 release preview for Windows 7, just as it did for the Windows 8 version of the browser. This decision has been opposed by some Web advertisers, as well as some stakeholders and browser makers at the World Wide Web Consortium. However, Microsoft officials have said that its customers want this privacy protection.

IE 10 users will get a notification that the do-not-track feature is on when the browser first starts up, as well as instructions on how to turn it off, if wanted. The privacy protection is entirely based on the honor system. Browsers with the do-not-track feature turned on send out a header message indicating a preference that third-party advertisers should not track the user's clicks, but nothing prevents advertisers from ignoring the request.