Release Preview of IE10 for Windows 7 now available

One of the biggest things released alongside Windows 8 was the latest version of Microsoft’s web browser – Internet Explorer 10. According to Engadget, IE10 has made its way to Windows 7 in the form of a Release Preview.

The Windows 7 version of the web browser comes with all the features of the Windows 8 version, including fullscreen browsing, hardware acceleration, support for multitouch gestures, and predictive ‘Flip ahead’ feature that guesses what page you want to see next, for example, the next set of search results, or the next page of a story. The browser even shares the general look and feel of its Windows 8 counter-part.

IE10 makes its way to Windows 7

Back in October, the Xbox 360 got Internet Explorer as part of a major dashboard update. In the update, Microsoft had removed the Facebook and Twitter apps from the Xbox 360 dashboard, as the company wants users to use the browser to access these services. “We are retiring the Facebook and Twitter apps,” Microsoft confirmed in a statement. “Xbox Live subscribers will have the ability to access these sites through Internet Explorer on Xbox, available through the Web Hub located on the new dashboard.”

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When it comes to other browsers, it was recently revealed that through some quiet tweaking by Google, Chrome has become faster than it originally was. Google has shared its Octane test scores. Elaborating on Octane, a post on the Google blog shares that an Octane is a JavaScript benchmark that Google has designed to measure performance of real-world applications on the modern web. “Stability sometimes takes higher priority, but we’re still manic about improving Chrome’s speed,” the post adds. Going by the Octane scores, one can view that there has been an overall improvement of more than 26 percent over the last year.

Elaborating further, the post adds, “Speed isn’t just about JavaScript performance, so in other areas of Chrome, we strive to minimize wait times. For example, we recently made some server-side changes to Google Cloud Print so that Chrome’s printer selection dialog loads twice as fast.”

On the other side of the fence, it was revealed earlier this month that the latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox will come with click-to-play enabled by default. This feature is meant to deal with vulnerable or outdated plugins, and plugins that are blocked with the click-to-play flag will not be loaded by default — you will have to click on the plugin to run it in your browser. The click-to-play plugins will accompany a blocklist, which is essentially a list of addons and plugins that are disabled to prevent users coming to harm. This includes vulnerable and outdated versions of popular plugins.