Internet Explorer 11 New Features and APIs

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Internet Explorer 11 is the default Windows 8.1 browser and is available in two different flavors in the modern OS:

 • Desktop Environment

 • Metro Environment

On Windows 8.1 and Windows 7, it boasts a clean design with some powerful developer tools. To bring these tools up, you are required to press the F12 key on your keyboard. There are in all eight distinct tools, each with their own tab in the F12 tools interface. Here’s a list of some of the tools that helps developers diagnose and fix performance issues or make development or debugging tasks easier. All these tools are categorized under New API’s and features.

Internet Explorer 11 New Features and APIs

UI responsiveness tools

The tool helps you find different sources of CPU activity that cause a slowdown in rendering a page. The tool is new to F12 tools in IE 11 Preview. Some interesting features it includes

 1. Insight into your webpage’s frame rate

 2. Setting labels on the timeline to isolate user scenarios

Memory profiling tool

The tool tracks memory use of your webpage, helping you identify where memory use is growing, why it’s growing, and how to fix it. Interesting features that can be found in this tool

 1. A timeline displaying progressive changes in memory use

 2. Snapshots to examine the details of memory use at specific points

 3. Snapshot comparisons to identify specific points of growth



Live DOM explorer

Shows the structure of your webpage being rendered in the browser and makes it possible to edit your HTML and styles in a live page.



CSS Inspection Tool

Updates with your page so you can explore in a series of iterations how dynamic content is affecting layout or styles

Networking Improvements

Internet Explorer aims to offer the users experience to enjoy the web in a fast, fluid and seamless way and thus incorporates many improvements. It is the first browser to implement the W3C Resource Priorities standard that enables developers to specify which parts of the page are important and should therefore be loaded first. Besides, there’s

SPDY Network Protocol

Pronounced as speedy, SPDY is an open networking protocol developed primarily at Google for transporting web content. Internet Explorer 11 has support for SPDY version that enables some sites to be downloaded faster.

HTML 5 Pre-fetch and Resource Priorities

HTML5 link prefetching and pre-rendering, enables the browser to anticipate where you’ll go next and get those pages ready for you in the first place.

CSS Changes

This covers CSS Border Image and Flexbox Support improvements

Web GL

Internet Explorer 11 supports more web-based standards than ever before. This includes WebGL. It allows creating dynamic 2D and 3D graphics for games and interactive content. The browser also supports rendering WebGL pages including those written with three.js, a popular WebGL library.

Touch Improvements

IE 11 has introduced a new improved Link Highlighting feature for fast visual response to your touch.

Pinned Sites Enhancements

Changes to pinned sites in Internet Explorer 11support Live Tiles to make your sites more visually engaging when you pin them, save them as favorites, or display them as frequently viewed sites.

Video Improvements

Internet Explorer 11 until now did not support the full capabilities required for Professional Quality Video, so there wasdependence to install browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. However, things started to change following the association of Microsoft with W3C HTML Working Group, the Timed Text Working Group & the Web Cryptography Working Group. Result, it now supports

Standard based Closed Captioning

Captioning is an intrinsic part of any professional-quality video experience. To achieve the experience of a broadcast television, the Web needs to provide captioning capabilities. This task is fulfilled by IE 11 browser. IE11 Preview offers closed-caption text that can be styled and positioned on your video screen with Simple Deliver Profile support (SDP), as defined by the W3C TTML Simple Delivery Profile for Closed Captions specification. With SDP, you can control things like foreground and background colors, font styles, and text alignment and position.

Encrypted media Extensions

The fast and fluidic browser also introduces support for HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME extends the video and audio elements to enable Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected content without using plug-ins. EME is supported in IE 11 Preview,and Windows Store apps via JavaScript using Windows 8.1 Preview.

Media Source Extensions (MSE)

Support for MPEG-DASH media streaming through HTML5 Media Source Extensions (MSE) exists in IE 11. The extension extends the video and audio elements that you can dynamically change for a media stream without using plug-ins.



Fixes and Tweaks

Some fine adjustments have been made to existing features and settings. It includes

Improved History

Behavior of the history list has somewhat changed in IE 11. The browser’s history list logs pages now regardless of their caching directives.



Other improvements have been added to the Password Manager and Favicon Support.

To see the list of some more improvements, visit MSDN.