Internet Explorer 12 Release Gets Closer: Many Upcoming Features Revealed by Microsoft

On its official Internet Explorer blog, Microsoft has outlined some of the upcoming features that are going to make their way into the next version of IE, that is, Internet Explorer 12. Read more on this below. 

Internet Explorer 11 represents a huge step forward over previous editions, some of which have actually been creating big security risks for the users, but many Windows users are looking forward to the release of Internet Explorer 12, which is said to come with plenty of awesome features. And now Microsoft has decided that it’s about time they’d give us a sneak peek. Here’s what Microsoft said:

The current list of features “in development” is not an exhaustive representation of what we will deliver in the next version, but an indication of what we currently have highest confidence in delivering. There are several other features that we realize are very important and are working on a plan to support

There are quite a lot of upcoming features enlisted on the official website, but we’ve “translated” the technical language and here are the most important ones, along with possible launches:

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Most important features in Internet Explorer 12

These are features that have been confirmed and we know that they are in development and will make their way for sure in Internet Explorer 12. But this doesn’t mean these are all of them.

• Open Sourced – thanks to many developers who expressed their interest in contributing to the project, Microsoft has decide to make the entire site and even the data that backs it, available on GitHub under the Apache V2 license.
• Improved Search & Filter: thanks to the new upcoming “Interop” menu, it will be much easier to enter in your browser support interests to find available features
• Deep Linking – thjs concerns developers and lets them enable a deep link to a feature you want to share with others thanks to HTML5 History and Angular routing
• Better Mobile Support & Performance – mobile is the hottest word right now and it comes as no surprise for Microsoft to improve this aspect. Around 20% of IE visitors have come from mobile devices and that number is going to increase even more with the rise of smartphones and tablets. Microsoft will further optimized it to make it faster and easily adaptable to all kinds of screens.
• Media Capture API – this features enables for the web content to manipulate audio and video streams from microphones and webcams. Cortana on Windows 8 desktop, anyone?
• HTTP/2 – this is a major revision of the Web’s protocol and is aimed at decreasing the wait time spent loading web pages. And this is probably the most expected feature of them all for many of us. The major revampe is based on Google’s SPDY open networking protocol and is currently being standardized by the IETF.
• HTML 5 improvements – Microsoft also said that it will also focus on improving security and backwards capability and interoperability thanks to the latest HTML5 features.
• Web Audio – this is a technical specification that describes a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. So, does this mean browser-based games with awesome audio are incoming? Let’s hope so.
• HTTP Strict Transport Security – this is an upcoming security feature that helps prevent “man-in-the-middle attacks” on secure connections. In simpler words, this prevents against certain hacker attacks and is a feature which Chrome and Firefox browsers have long supported.
• JavaScript Promises – this is a feature for developers get a standardized way to make asynchronous calls in their code

And here are some more smaller upcoming features (which make some sense to most of us) that we’ve extracted from the entire list:

Content Security Policy

Allows you to create an allow list of sources of trusted content, and instructs the browser to only execute or render resources from those sources.

GamePad API

Gives JS access to a game controller via USB.

Media Capture and Streams

Provides access to the user’s local audio and video input/output devices (getUserMedia API).

WebGL Instancing Extension

A way to use the GPU to quickly draw a lot of copies of a single object. In some scenes (like a forest with a lot of trees) it is a great way to get a huge performance improvement. Requires a compatible GPU.

Cross-Domain Font Loading

Increases interoperability with the web by relaxing domain and licensing metadata restrictions for EOT, WOFF, and TrueType fonts.

Mouse Lock

Gives access to raw mouse movement, locks the target of mouse events to a single element, eliminates limits of how far mouse movement can go in a single direction, and removes the cursor from view. Obvious use cases are for first person or real time strategy games.

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