IE's rate of adopting new features seems to be catching up with the other browsers. For technical details, see their Guide for Developers [1].

The interesting bits since the 1st preview (for me, a web developer) are:

    More CSS gradients
    Async script tags
    Form validation
    Web workers
    Drag and drop and File API

Things I'd really like to see in IE10 before its released (and are hopefully realistic):

    More HTML5 form stuff
    CSS3 text shadow
    CSS3 animations and transitions
    History API

As I'm wishing away, I'll add: support for XP, WebM/Ogg video support and a friendly public bugtracker.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/gg192966.aspx

I agree that those four items you mentioned I think would make IE10 a very competent browser. Do you have any idea how hard they each are to implememnt (since they've all been implemented in existing browsers)?

Regarding XP support -- I hope they never support it. I really wish the OS would go away. They do support WebM today, just install the codec. Presumably if you have Chrome on your machine, WebM will work with IE (I assume Chrome installs the codec). Given that IE is not open source, you will almost certainly never see a public bugtracker.

Agreed on XP. It's just a complete dead-end waste of effort at this point. XP is already 11 years old, and two major releases have happened since. Even RHEL2 is newer!

It was plenty good 6 years ago, but time marches on.

Big win here (for me) was the File API finally got added so you can do DnD uploads now. IE has actually supported the DnD API for a while now, but didn't have the File API component to make the upload happen.

Rendering speed didn't seem much different than 9 and slower than Chrome 12 for me; not by much though. Now adays it seems all these browsers are rendering at insane speeds given what they could barely pull off 5 years ago.

I love the browser wars.

There is a polyfill out that handles the lack of File API in IE and earlier versions of Safari; http://sandbox.knarly.com/js/dropfiles/.

Also, great list of polyfills available at the Modernizr github repo; https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-brow... .

Just curious: what do you get from the DnD API that you don't get from an [input type="file"]? Is it just the flexibility in design?

I know a few (non-technical) people who are happy using a "choose file" dialog but would really struggle performing a drag and drop: opening Explorer, navigating to a folder, resizing Explorer and the browser so they're both visible on the screen (even fewer people know you can drag files to the task bar to activate another window) and then dragging files to the drop target.

You can run the examples at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Views/SiteMap/Default.html with your favourite browser and sneak at the code. Great if you are familiarizing yourself with HTLM5 and CSS3.

Some of the most interesting work is only hinted at in the blog. IE 10 PP2 now leads on EcmaScript standards conformance.

IE 10 only fails 7 tests compared to 200 for Firefox 5 out of a total of 10000 tests.

I don't use Opera, but according to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript Opera lags the other browser and fails 3000 tests. Does anyone have Opera and willing to run the conformance test here: http://test262.ecmascript.org/

Opera version 11.50 (most recent) on Win7:

Tests To Run: 10935 | Total Tests Ran: 10935 | Pass: 7061 | Fail: 3874 | Failed To Load: 66

The fast majority (80%) of the error log appears to be in section 15.2.3, with half of the rest also being in section 15. This would imply that around 1/3 of the entire test suite is just in that section of the specification; as the test itself describes, its coverage is currently incomplete.

I was pretty certain that Opera's reported score couldn't be that bad. I am definitely very suprised.

Overall, I have to say, I am a huge fan of having these thorough tests come to web standards. So that browsers can't just say "We support HTML5". I am really tired of the buzzword nature of standards recently. Hopefully, this will get all browsers to step up their game.

FF5 is a production release, IE10 is a "platform preview". Not exactly a fair comparison.

That's a good point. It would be interesting to get a read on the latest Aurora builds. I might install it and do it later today.

I can help with that, I am running Nightly 7.0a1 (2011-06-29) My results: Tests To Run: 10935 | Total Tests Ran: 10935 | Pass: 10732 | Fail: 203 | Failed To Load: 0

Then FF5 should fail less of the tests, right? Since a production release should be more stable than a platform preview?

Still won't run on XP.

But all the other advanced browsers, Chrome, Firefox and Opera will (with hardware acceleration).

(oh and Microsoft forced an OS update yesterday that installed .NET to the useragent in Firefox, AGAIN)

Awesome, loving they added FileReader and drag-n-drop. Also definitely love that they added media queries, but I thought that was crucial for IE9 so they get no brownie points here.

Now, how about WebGL and WebM? Eh? Eh? Eh. Oh well.

I really love the "selectable rendering engine" in the menus. It is a bit quirky when trying to switch back and forth, but seems to switch okay from the one used to render the page into the one of your choosing.

Also, it was via this release that I learned about the .exe.local directory. There is a "iepreview.exe.local" directory which evidently supersedes the DLL search path (and that is probably how they are able to package all the render engines in a "live" copy of Windows).

Has there been a formal announcement from Microsoft on what the IE release schedule will be going forward? It seems the competition from the likes of Firefox and Chrome has accelerated IE's roadmap.

I am loving this minimalistic window. Give me a little address bar, a half-decent bookmark menu, and I'm sold.

Glad to see the addition of the HTML5 input types. The lack of support in ie9 held back using them for me.

Did they fix that godawful UI with regards to squeezing in the url bar next to the tabs?

IE's platform previews are simply minimal-chrome wrappers around the rendering engine. You'll need to wait until an IE 10 beta appears to find out what they've done to the UI.

You can move the tabs to be under the address bar. I prefer to squeeze them. Gives me an extra 15 or so pizels.

I am not a fan of this UI myself, but it is just a default. You can change this behavior by right clicking on the bar and checking the "Show tabs on a separate row" option.

Spells good news for the web in general.

Good work Microsoft for taking things seriously.