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IE10: Can Finally Be Called A ‘Modern’ Browser!

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Srinivasan
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The first impression that IE10 gives is awfully good, especially when compared to its predecessors. Unlike its predecessors, it starts up real quick and is ready to go. Also, no more pesky notification asking you whether you want to `speed up startup and browsing by disabling add-ons' every time you open the browser! While there is also a metro app for IE10 that runs using the same rendering engine, we focus on the key features of IE10's desktop version.

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User interface

IE10 looks very similar to IE9, with a basic interface that obviously follows the footsteps of Chrome. There is just an address bar with a list of open tabs and three small icons for `Home',`Favorites' and `Settings'. Opening a new tab shows a set of tiles with frequently visited sites, along with options to open recently closed tabs which is useful. There is also a full-screen mode (F11) in IE10 that is similar to Chrome's feature. It is actually because the address bar appears as you hover over the top of the screen, so you can conveniently change pages within full-screen mode, whereas you have to exit the mode in Chrome to switch pages. One unsightly feature still apparent in IE10, is when multiple tabs are opened, they display in the taskbar as multiple windows of IE, and that is displeasing on the eye. Meanwhile, this issue isn't present in Chrome.

Functionality

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There have been several new features added to IE10. For starters, Microsoft has heard the call for providing support for open web standards, as IE10 supports HTML5 and CSS3 without any surprise tie-ins with the IE platform. IE10 also implements CSS3 transforms and transitions that are hardware accelerated, making smooth graphical rendering easy in the browser. Another new feature is a baked-in Adobe Flash player, so you won't have to deal with installing a plugin to render Flash content. However, one thing to note is that Metro version will not have all the features of Flash the desktop version has. Microsoft has also made `Do Not Track' as a default in the version of IE10, causing uproar among the advertising industry, as essentially this tells websites not to place cookies to track user activity. This is good for users though as websites cannot track you by default, so your browsing experience is more secure. Security has also been enhanced with the `Enhanced Protection Mode', which blocks the browser from accessing unauthorized parts of your file systems without your actions warranting it. For example, IE10 won't allow access to a file in your `My documents', unless you are specifically picking it through a dialog window. Although it does offer add-ons, IE10 definitely doesn't offer the expansive set of extensions that are available in Chrome or Firefox. One annoyance is that whenever a link opens a new tab, IE10 immediately blocks it regarding it as a pop-up,and you have to manually allow it to enable the new tab.

Performance

We ran a set of benchmark tests to find out how it compares to its competitors. Here are the results:

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  Browser Mark 2.0 HTML 5 Test Sun Spider Robo Hornet Mozilla Kraken
Internet Explorer 10 3222 320/500 134.7 ms 101.38 5138.4 ms
Google Chrome 24 3034 448/500 178.8 ms 126.13 2557.1 ms
Mozilla Firefox 18 3076 393/500 212.8 ms 85.05 2041.7 ms

*Test Environment: Windows 8 Pro 64-bit, Intel Core i5@2.50 Ghz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT630M

BrowserMark2.0: Test resizing, page load times, browser graphics, Javascript, Efficiency, HTML5 and CSS3 support (Higher score is better)

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HTML5Test: Tests level of support for HTML5, CSS3 according to W3C standards (Higher score is better)

SunSpider: Javascript benchmark made by Apple's WebKit team (lower time is better)

RoboHornet: Open-source benchmark that is normalized in comparison with other standard web browsers(High score is better)

Mozilla Kraken: JavaScript benchmark made by Mozilla (Lower time is better).

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