At MIX 10, the first IE9 Platform Preview was released, which featured support for CSS3 and SVG, a new JScript engine called Chakra, and a score of 55/100 on the Acid3 test, up from 20/100 for IE8. On May 5, 2010, the second IE9 Platform Preview was released, which featured a score of 68/100 on the Acid3 test and faster performance on the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark than the first IE9 Platform Preview. On June 23, 2010, the third IE9 Platform Preview was released, which scores 83/100 on the Acid3 test and introduced support for "<nowiki><audio></nowiki>", "<nowiki><video></nowiki>", and "<nowiki><canvas></nowiki>" elements and WOFF. On August 4, 2010, the fourth IE9 Platform Preview was released, which features a score of 95/100 on the Acid3 test and a faster JScript engine than the third IE9 Platform Preview. The final build of IE9 is expected to be released in 2011. Support for the HTML5 video and audio tags was also promised.
Some industry experts predict that Microsoft will release IE9 as a major out-of-band version that is not tied to any particular version of Windows.
According to the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive page, the system requirements for IE9 are Windows Vista SP2 (with Platform Upgrade and IE8) or Windows 7.
On August 12, 2010, Microsoft announced that the IE9 Public Beta would launch on September 15, 2010 at a special event in San Francisco linked to the idea of 'beauty of the web.' It was also confirmed that the browser would only function with Windows Vista and Windows 7. On September 15, 2010, Microsoft launched the IE9 Public Beta.
Internet Explorer 10 does not work with Windows Vista, but only for Windows 7 and a future release of the Windows operating system.
Internet Explorer 10 was released together with Windows 8 in 2012. Users of Windows 7 can download this version from February 2013.
Internet Explorer 11 was released in October 2013. It is the final Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer has been designed to view a broad range of web pages and to provide certain features within the operating system, including Microsoft Update. During the heyday of the browser wars, Internet Explorer superseded Netscape only when it caught up technologically to support the progressive features of the time.
Internet Explorer, using the Trident layout engine:
Internet Explorer uses DOCTYPE sniffing to choose between standards mode and a "quirks mode" in which it deliberately mimicks nonstandard behaviors of old versions of MSIE for HTML and CSS rendering on screen (Internet Explorer always uses standards mode for printing). It also provides its own dialect of ECMAScript called JScript.
Internet Explorer has been subjected to criticism by W3C over its limited support for SVG promoted by W3C.
Internet Explorer has introduced an array of proprietary extensions to many of the standards, including HTML, CSS, and the DOM. This has resulted in a number of web pages that appear broken in standards-compliant web browsers and has introduced the need for a "quirks mode" to allow for rendering improper elements meant for Internet Explorer in these other browsers.
Internet Explorer has introduced a number of extensions to JScript which have been adopted by other browsers. These include the innerHTML property, which returns the HTML string within an element; the XMLHttpRequest object, which allows the sending of HTTP request and receiving of HTTP response; and the designMode attribute of the contentDocument object, which enables rich text editing of HTML documents. Some of these functionalities were not possible until the introduction of the W3C DOM methods. Its Ruby character extension to HTML is also accepted as a module in W3C XHTML 1.1, though it is not found in all versions of W3C HTML.
Microsoft submitted several other features of IE for consideration by the W3C for standardization. These include the 'behavior' CSS property, which connects the HTML elements with JScript behaviors (known as HTML Components, HTC); HTML+TIME profile, which adds timing and media synchronization support to HTML documents (similar to the W3C XHTML+SMIL); and the VML vector graphics file format. However, all were rejected, at least in their original forms. VML was, however, subsequently combined with PGML (proposed by Adobe and Sun), resulting in the W3C-approved SVG format, currently one of the few vector image formats being used on the web, and which IE is now virtually unique in not supporting.
Other non-standard behaviors include: support for vertical text, but in a syntax different from W3C CSS3 candidate recommendation; Support for a variety of image effects and page transitions, which are not found in W3C CSS; Support for obfuscated script code, in particular codice_2. Support for embedding EOT fonts in web pages.
The favicon (short for "favorites icon") introduced by Internet Explorer is now also supported and extended in other browsers. It allows web pages to specify a 16-by-16 pixel image for use in bookmarks. In IE, support was, and still is, provided only for the native Windows ICO format; in other browsers it has now been extended to other types of images such as PNG and GIF.
Internet Explorer makes use of the accessibility framework provided in Windows. Internet Explorer is also a user interface for FTP, with operations similar to that of Windows Explorer. Pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing were added respectively in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Tabbed browsing can also be added to older versions by installing MSN Search Toolbar or Yahoo Toolbar.
Internet Explorer caches visited content in the Temporary Internet Files folder to allow quicker access (or offline access) to previously visited pages. The content is indexed in a database file, known as Index.dat. Multiple Index.dat files exist which index different content - visited content, web feeds, visited URLs, cookies, etc.
Prior to IE7, clearing the cache used to clear the index but the files themselves were not reliably removed, posing a potential security and privacy risk. In IE7 and later, when the cache is cleared, the cache files are more reliably removed, and the index.dat file is overwritten with null bytes.
Internet Explorer is fully configurable using Group Policy. Administrators of Windows Server domains can apply and enforce a variety of settings that affect the user interface (such as disabling menu items and individual configuration options), as well as underlying security features such as downloading of files, zone configuration, per-site settings, ActiveX control behavior and others. Policy settings can be configured for each user and for each machine. Internet Explorer also supports Integrated Windows Authentication.
Internet Explorer uses a componentized architecture built on the Component Object Model (COM) technology. It consists of several major components, each of which is contained in a separate Dynamic-link library (DLL) and exposes a set of COM programming interfaces hosted by the Internet Explorer main executable, codice_3:
Internet Explorer does not include any native scripting functionality. Rather, MSHTML.dll exposes an API that permit a programmer to develop a scripting environment to be plugged-in and to access the DOM tree. Internet Explorer 8 includes the bindings for the Active Scripting engine, which is a part of Microsoft Windows and allows any language implemented as an Active Scripting module to be used for client-side scripting. By default, only the JScript and VBScript modules are provided; third party implementations like ScreamingMonkey (for ECMAScript 4 support) can also be used. Microsoft also makes available the Microsoft Silverlight runtime that allows CLI languages, including DLR-based dynamic languages like IronPython and IronRuby, to be used for client-side scripting.