The Internet Explorer team has announced Second Platform Preview for IE10. The Preview showcases new IE features like Positioned Floats, HTML5 SandBox, HTML5 Forms, setImmediate API, Page Visibility API, Async Scripts and more. It uses the same HTML5 engine seen in the recent Windows 8 demos.
Some of the notable features showcased are
- Positioned Floats – this allows designers to wrap content around other elements on the page
- HTML5 SandBox – a security feature to sandbox third party content on the website, to prevent malicious behavior like cookie stealing, form submission or page redirection
- HTML5 Forms – basic validation for HTML forms
- HTML5 Drag and Drop
- setImmediate API – a better performing alternative to setTimeout API for breaking apart long running JavaScript operations
- Media Query Listeners – enables running a script in response to a change in the media query (for eg switching between low and high res image sources depending on window size)
- Async Scripts – to enable asynchronous downloading of scripts without blocking the rest of the page
- requestAnimationFrame API for smoother and more efficient animations
- Web Workers – containers for running JavaScript independently of the code on a web page in background (thereby keeping web page responsive)
All these features are explained with demos and examples in the Platform Preview. Developers can go through the developer guide and start working with site-ready HTML5 technologies.