IE 10 for Windows 7 released

ie-10-logo Some four months after the release of Windows 8 and its browser, IE 10, Microsoft today has made IE 10 for Windows 7 available for download. In two blog posts, one on the IE blog and another on the Windows blog, Microsoft touts !E 10’s 20% increase in “real-world site performance” over IE9, and a 60% increase in supported modern web standards.

IE 10 has also significantly improved security and privacy, and includes the Do Not Track setting on by default. Do Not Track capabilities, which increase privacy and security but make it harder for web advertisers to gather information about consumers and potential consumers, has been somewhat controversial for IE, but is now being adopted more widely. An upcoming patch to Firefox will include similar on by default cookie privacy settings.

IE 10 brings significant advances in web standards over its predecessor IE 9, adding 30 not standards, some of which the IE Blog post lists:

Create rich visual effects with CSS Text Shadow, CSS 3D Transforms, CSS3 Transitions and Animations, CSS3 Gradient, and SVG Filter Effects
More sophisticated and responsive page layouts with CSS3 for publication quality page layouts and responsive application UI (CSS3 grid, flexbox, multi-column, positioned floats, regions, and hyphenation), HTML5 Forms, input controls, and validation
Enhanced Web programming model for better offline applications through local storage with IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache; Web Sockets, HTML5 History, Async scripts, HTML5 File APIs, HTML5 Drag-drop, HTML5 Sandboxing, Web workers, ES5 Strict mode support.
Beautiful and interactive Web applications with support for several new technologies like CSS3 Positioned Floats, HTML5 Drag-drop, File Reader API, Media Query Listeners, Pointer Events, and HTML5 Forms.
Improved Web application security with the same markup and support for HTML5 Sandbox for iframe isolation.

You can learn more about IE 10 and web standards from the IE Developer Center and the updated IE10 Guide for Developers.

IE 10 for Windows 7 is available now from these download links: