Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is available worldwide in 95 languages for download today. We will begin automatically updating Windows 7 customers to IE11 in the weeks ahead, starting today with customers running the IE11 Developer and Release Previews. With this final release, IE11 brings the same leading standards support–with improved performance, security, privacy, and reliability that consumers enjoy on Windows 8.1—to Windows 7 customers.

And with Windows 8.1, IE11 delivers the best experience of your sites and apps together. IE11 on Windows 8.1 delivers an experience that is fast, fluid and perfect for touch – the best Web experience on any tablet.

30% faster for real world Web sites

With IE11 we continue delivering the best performance for real world Web sites on your Windows device. IE11 on Windows 7 improves performance across the board with faster page loading, faster interactivity, and faster JavaScript performance, while reducing CPU usage and improving battery life on mobile PCs.

You can experience IE11’s leading performance first hand with demos on the IE Test Drive site where you’ll find examples of hardware accelerated rendering, interactivity, touch, and real world site patterns. EtchMark is a new test drive demo that’s an entertaining HTML5 retro-drawing experience, one that also enables you measure your browser’s performance.

Enjoy a fun, retro-drawing experience and test your browser’s performance with EtchMark

EtchMark shows some of what is possible on the Web today, using a broad range of technologies available to developers in IE11, including HTML5, CSS3, SVG Filters, touch, orientation events, pointer events, power efficiency, and more. EtchMark shows how IE11 makes the most of the device you have, enabling control with one or two fingers for touch as well as with the mouse. On tablets with device orientation support, you can shake the device to erase, or use orientation lock to keep EtchMark locked in the same position independent of how you are holding it.

EtchMark uses standards-based mark-up for interoperability across browsers and makes the most of fully hardware-accelerated browsers like IE11 on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, with consistent performance across a wide range of Windows devices including tablets like the Surface 2.

Leading JavaScript performance

IE11 advances JavaScript performance, while ensuring compatibility, interoperability, and security. On Windows 7, IE11 is 9% faster than IE10, which is nearly 30% faster than the nearest competitive browser.

IE11 extends its leadership in Javascript performance, so real-world sites are faster

The updated Chakra JIT compiler in IE11 supports more optimizations including inline caches for polymorphic property access, in-lining of functions at polymorphic call sites, and compilation support for specific ECMAScript5 constructs like getters/setters, so even more code is JIT’ed and less time is spent in JavaScript computation. Garbage collection utilizes the background thread much more efficiently, substantially reducing the frequency and amount of time the UI thread is blocked doing garbage collection.

You can experience these improvements in the new Popcorn test drive demo, which uses getters/setters to enforce types and mutate properties. In the past we’ve seen developers shy away from getters/setters because of the belief that they incur too high a cost on performance. With the improvements in IE11, getters/setters are now fast enough for many use cases.

Fast, world-ready Web applications

IE11 includes support for the well-defined and commonly used features of the emerging ECMAScript 6 standard including let, const, Map, Set, and WeakMap, as well as __proto__ for improved interoperability. IE11 also supports the ECMAScript Internationalization API (version 1.0), which enables culture aware sorting, number formatting, date and time formatting to be performed efficiently in JavaScript without having to round-trip to the server.

IE11's new internationalization APIs enable rich, world-ready Web applications without plug-ins

The World Data demo showcases how developers can utilize some of the new internationalization APIs for displaying and converting data to use native currencies, and date and time formats to create and deliver rich, world-ready Web applications without taking dependencies on plug-ins for delivering such experiences to users.

In addition to raw performance improvements of real world sites, IE11 includes improvements to make common browsing activities faster. IE11’s improved frequent sites algorithms make getting to your favorite sites faster. Similarly, improvements in form editing controls to preserve formatting make copy-paste from Office and other apps faster and more accurate.

Faster development with 25 new and improved modern Web standards

For developers, IE11 brings increased support for modern Web standards powered by hardware acceleration to enable a new class of compelling applications and fast and fluid Web browsing. IE11 adds support for over 25 new or improved modern Web standards beyond IE10.

Developers can build next-generation experiences with professional-quality Web video, and hyper-fast 2D and 3D Web technologies that make the most of the underlying hardware. IE11 supports real world standards and compatibility, and new developer tools enable developers to build high-performance Web experiences on Windows devices. Here are just a few examples of how the Web is better for developers with IE11:

Debug faster with new F12 developer tools. IE11 supports the latest standards and frameworks actively used by Web developers. Brand new F12 tools in IE enable iterative, visual debugging and tuning of Web sites. Modern.IE enables cross-browser testing, no matter where you choose to develop.

Hardware-accelerated 3D Web graphics. Interoperable WebGL experiences run on all devices, taking advantage of GPU acceleration. IE11 scans for unsafe WebGL content and implements a software-based renderer to complement the GPU. With Windows, graphics subsystem failures are not fatal, and WebGL continues to run. With IE11, your 3D experiences can access device orientation to create new interaction opportunities for immersive Web content.

The existing Web continues to work – even better: IE11 is interoperable with existing sites, which just run faster and look better in IE. Of course, intranet sites and apps continue to run in IE11, which supports Compatibility View.

Enable professional-quality video experiences on the Web. IE11 enables HTML5 video without plugins. IE11 supports the latest standards for closed captioning, streaming that adapts to available network bandwidth, and rights management—so all your video content can be as good as the professionals. Power-efficient video streaming in Windows 8.1 extends battery life for Web video.

You can read more at the IE Developer Center and the updated IE11 Guide for Developers about the full set of new and improved Web standards supported in IE11 – listed below with links to the specifications.

Best experience of your sites and apps together

IE11 puts your Web sites first, delivering the best Web on Windows across a full range of devices and screen sizes that is equally great for touch, mouse, and keyboard. You can have as many open tabs as you want, and side-by-side browsing with your favorite sites and Windows Store apps together. Here’s a quick look at some of the thinking behind the user experience of the browser from a few of the engineers who helped build IE11 for Windows 8.1.

See some of the thinking behind the browser experience in IE11 and Windows 8.1

The opportunities continue for HTML5 to make both Web sites and applications better. Those opportunities are exciting for everyone on the Web. As with IE11 on Windows 8.1, this release brings high performance HTML5 development to Windows 7.

For developers building on HTML5, now is time to ready your sites for IE11. Developers can use the recently updated modern.IE to test and verify your sites, using a wizard that scans a Web page URL for common interoperability problems and suggests ideas for how to address those issues to improve the user experience across modern and older browsers.

On behalf of the individuals and companies who have worked with us to deliver this product, and the many people at Microsoft who have built it, thank you for your feedback and for using IE11.

Source: MSDN Blog