The technology was introduced by Microsoft so events can be handled in a hardware agnostic way it doesn’t matter whether you’re using a mouse, pen, touchscreen - or perhaps a certain motion sensor on a particular soon-to-be-released games console!Ĭurrently, Pointer Events are only supported in IE but Microsoft has been working with the Mozilla, Webkit and Blink communities to bring the API to Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. IE11 also complies with recent changes to the W3C Pointer Events Recommendation. Microsoft has been working hard on touch support to ensure HTML5 controls work well on tablets and smartphones. The general order is the HTML, CSS, fonts, scripts, images, synchronous Ajax requests, asynchronous script requests (Web Workers, indexedDB, File API, etc), asynchronous Ajax requests, audio/video and deferred scripts. IE11 prioritizes individual network requests by type to provide the fastest user experience and ensure the page is usable sooner. Network prioritization is an interesting optimization. DNS-prefetch add rel='dns-prefetch' to any link so DNS queries are resolved in the background to ensure requests can be handled faster.Pre-fetching a rel='prefetch' attribute identifies resource files (not necessarily used on the page) which can be downloaded and stored in the cache.Pre-rendering add rel='prerender' to any link and the page will load in the background so it’s available when the user proceeds to it.

Improved Windows integration such as phone number recognition, live tiles and reading view.

High DPI support - enhanced scaling for high-resolution screens.

IE11 has some innovations you won’t necessarily find in other browsers yet. It may not be essential, but it’s very useful. You should also note that legacy APIs such as document.all and attachEvent have been binned in IE11 (see Compatibility below).įor me, the only disappointment is the continued omission of transform-style: preserve-3d when applying 3D transformations to multiple elements.

the Web Cryptography API (to send secure data without requiring SSL).

JavaScript enhancements such as block-scoped variables, container objects, an Internationalization API and the _proto_ property.

the Fullscreen and Screen Orientation APIs.

There are some excellent demonstrations of the technology at.

First impressions are good and performance appears to be better than Chrome and Firefox. The big new feature is WebGL … it seems Microsoft has overcome their security risk concerns. In practice, you’re unlikely to encounter more issues in IE than you would with any other browser. While IE remains below the levels achieved by Chrome and Firefox, the missing facilities are mostly recent, niche or deprecated HTML5 features such as the Web Audio API, Web SQL Database and codec support (which may appear if you have them installed in Windows). As you’d expect, IE11 surpasses IE10: Browser

Explorer 11 mac