Get Ready for IE 10

If you’re one of the 50% of PC users with Windows 7, be prepared for an essential update coming your way very soon. Internet Explorer 9 has been officially retired to make way for IE10. The new browser will be installed as part of the standard Windows Update unless you explicitly prevent it.

This is also an an important milestone for web developers. While IE9 was a radical step up from IE8, it was missing features that many of us take for granted in Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera: CSS3 gradients, text shadows, animations, transitions, column layouts, flexbox, ECMAScript strict mode, media query listeners, the file API, web workers, local storage, etc. IE10 plugs many of the HTML5 gaps.

There’s another vital feature in IE10: automated updates. While Microsoft has yet to use it, IE10 can receive smaller incremental tweaks over time. I’m not expecting a Chrome or Firefox-like six-week delivery schedule, but two or three times per year would be significantly better than the current 18-24 month delay.

IE9 is likely to die rapidly especially since system administrators will not experience the upgrade issues which dogged previous versions.IE9 will remain the default browser on Vista but that OS currently holds only 6% of the PC market and it is dropping fast.

IE6 and IE7 are dead. They still roam zombie-like across certain sectors of the web but, for most of us, the days of IE-specific hacks and fixes are long gone.

It would have been great had Microsoft released a version of IE10 for XP and Vista but it’s probably not worth their effort. IE8 will die a natural death regardless of Microsoft’s aging OS platforms.

Be assured that IE10 does much to catch up with the competition. As is typical with Microsoft it has taken too long to arrive but now that it is here I believe it will become the most dominant version of IE within a few short months.