Windows 7 users, Internet Explorer 10 is now your very own shiny, new toy.
Microsoft’s latest release brings IE10, its most impressive browser to date, to the desktops of all the PC fans who haven’t made the switch to Windows 8 — in other words, pretty much every cubicle hero and normal consumer outside the sphere of nerdy early adopters.
The new version brings performance upgrades, faster browsing, and enhanced security and privacy features. IE10 is available immediately for download in 95 languages.
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Here are the requirements for running IE10:
- A Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows RT PC.
- Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2
- RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
- Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
- Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver
- Internet access (ISP fees might apply)
To show off some of the browser’s fancier features, Microsoft has also launched ExploreTouch.ie, an HTML5-based site where anyone can interact with and manipulate individual instrument tracks for an ad/song by Seattle musician Blake Lewis.
“We came together to work with Blake and director Keith Rivers, who directed last year’s A More Beautiful Web commercial, to showcase what is possible with a Windows 8 touch device and Internet Explorer 10,” Microsoft reps wrote in a statement on the spot.
Here are a few stills from the experience:
Currently, Microsoft says, around 700 million consumers are using either Windows 7 or Windows 8. Switching to IE10 will reportedly bring a 20 percent performance boost for web browsing and a 60 percent increase in the browser’s support of modern web standards.
Advances like that have helped Internet Explorer gain a bit of ground in the ongoing browser wars. Currently, IE claims 55.14 percent of the global browser market, its highest share in more than a year.
As our reviewer wrote of an earlier preview of the browser, “Arguably the biggest enhancement is support for the Web Worker API, which lets developers take advantage of things like multi-core processors when they work with JavaScript. Basically, when a website is rendering images or something complex, IE10 will take advantage of hardware to make the site load more smoothly or even run scripts that are more complicated than ever before. … IE10 is a step in the right direction.
Image crefit: Flickr
