Exciting news for all web developers and mashup freaks: Microsoft just released its fourth overall preview of their Internet Explorer 10. Especially aimed at you, new features and better HTML5 functionalities improve possibilities for the creation of Web applications. However, there is one caveat: The new release only works on the Windows 8 preview release which Microsoft released in September.
Most notably among the new functionalities: CORS, the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing tool that defines ways for a web server to allow its resources to be accessed by web page from a different domain, thus enabling broader cooperation between developers; JavaScript typed arrays, which provide mechanisms to allow more efficient access to raw binary data; and HTML 5 video subtitling which makes videos more accessible and provides more options to the viewer. CORS especially proves to be a crucial tool in the creation of mashups, which, as you know, combine Web services from various different providers.
The problem remains the fact that IE 10 will not run on Windows 7, which is an interesting choice from Microsoft, especially since IE 10 will eventually work fine with Windows 7 once its released. IE 10 will be fundamental to Windows 8, more so than any earlier version of the browser has been. HTML and JavaScript make it possible for developers to create so-called touch-friendly Metro-style applications, and this support rests on the shoulders of IE10. However, while Metro-style applications may be important to Microsoft, the browser will still have a substantial user base on Windows 7, those that use regular non-Metro Web applications. The last thing Microsoft wants to do is exclude this group from the preview. So we are not sure what the entire purpose of the scheme is.
