NetMarketShare’s browser stats for April 2013. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 saw a meteoric rise in market share last month, jumping from 2.93 percent in March to 6.22 percent in April, according to NetMarketShare.

Some of IE 10′s growth might be attributable to more Windows 8 machines coming online, but it also comes close on the heels of the release of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7.

As we noted in our review, IE 10 is a huge step forward for Microsoft’s oft-maligned browser, bringing much better web standards support and considerable speed improvements over IE 9. And there’s plenty to like even on Windows 7 where Microsoft claims users should see a 20 percent increase in performance over IE 9, as well as better battery life on Windows 7 laptops.

While web developers should be happy to see IE 10 gaining some ground given its vastly superior web standards support and speed compared to previous releases, looking at the bigger browser share picture is still disheartening. While IE 10 use may have doubled last month, it still trails IE 6 use worldwide.

The most widely used version of IE on the web remains IE 8, which, while much better than IE 6, still has next to no support for modern web development tools like HTML5 and CSS 3.

As always, progressive enhancement and feature-detection tools like Modernizr are your friends when it comes to older versions of IE.

Windows 8. Photo: Microsoft

Starting today Microsoft is ditching the whitelist, allowing Flash in IE10 to run by default on almost any site that needs it.

Previously Microsoft had announced that Windows 8′s Metro mode would not support Flash. By the time Windows 8 actually launched that had changed to allow Flash to run on websites that Microsoft had formally whitelisted. Flash always ran unfettered in IE10 when using Windows 8′s desktop mode.

Now Microsoft is reversing the whitelist, blacklisting “the small number of sites that are still incompatible with the Windows experience for touch or that depend on other plug-ins.” According to the IEBlog that’s fewer than 4 percent of sites using Flash.

According to web survey company W3Techs, around 20 percent of all websites still use Flash in some fashion. The HTTPArchive puts that number somewhat higher at 35 percent in general, but 42 percent for the top 1,000 sites on the web. Unfortunately neither of those sources track whether or not Flash is an integral part of the sites that use it, or just used in advertisements on the site.

Whatever the case, despite the fact that the number of sites using Flash is declining, it’s clearly still a big part of the web.

Whitelisting every site on a site-by-site basis was cumbersome at best and often frustrating since sites that might have worked just fine could not simply because they had not made the list. Today’s change of heart for IE10 eliminates that problem and makes Windows 8 a bit more consistent, offering nearly the same Flash experience whether you’re in desktop or Metro mode.

The proposed Pointer Events spec makes it easier to handle input from fingers, pens. Image: W3C.

The W3C recently moved Microsoft’s proposed Pointer Events spec to Last Call Working Draft. To help developers get up to speed, the IEBlog has published an overview of Pointer Events.

Microsoft has even helped to create a build of WebKit with experimental support for Pointer Events (for those not using Windows 8 or who’d prefer not to test in IE 10).

The goal of the Pointer Events spec is to provide a unified model for dealing with all the various input devices on today’s web, namely, the mouse, the stylus and the finger.

Pointer Events handle the various ways a user might be interacting with your site without requiring you to write unique code for each input method.

Currently most browsers register any input as a mouse event, even when it obviously is not (as is the case for most mobile browsers). It works, but it’s what you might call a blunt approach. Pointer Events adds some finesse to the equation, including details like the touch contact geometry size, the pressure applied or the tilt angle of a pen.

If you’d like to get your hands dirty with Pointer Events, either fire up IE 10 or download the experimental WebKit build and head on over to the W3C’s Web Platform docs. Microsoft’s Rob Dolin has a great overview tutorial with basic examples on how to get started. Also be sure to watch the video below from the recent W3Conf; Jacob Rossi, IE Program Manager gives a nice overview of Pointer Events and what you can do with them.

Right now only IE 10 supports Pointer Events, but Microsoft’s David Catuhe has developed a JavaScript polyfill, called HandJS, to support Pointer Events in browsers that don’t yet offer native support. Kudos to Microsoft for not just bringing pointer events to the W3C, but for working to add support to a competing browser and creating a polyfill for the rest.

Windows 7 users, the wait is over. Microsoft has finally released Internet Explorer 10 — which debuted with Windows 8 four months ago — for Windows 7.

For now IE 10 is an optional update, though Microsoft will be adding it as a silent background update for IE 9 users in the next few weeks. If you’ve been using the preview version released late last year, Windows Update should give you an “Important Update” message, prompting you to install the final version.

As we noted in our earlier review, IE 10 is a huge step forward for Microsoft’s oft-maligned browser, bringing much better web standards support and considerable speed improvements over IE 9. Microsoft claims Windows 7 users should see a 20 percent increase in performance over IE 9, as well as better battery life on Windows 7 laptops.

IE 10 also brings better support for modern web tools like CSS 3, HTML5 and related APIs, making life considerably easier for web developers everywhere.

Of course, while IE 10 is launching strong, Microsoft’s browser typically has a very lengthy release cycle compared to Chrome or Firefox, which both release smaller updates more frequently. Indeed, both IE alternatives are likely to see dozens of updates and improved web standards support before IE sees anything similar.

The good news is that Microsoft seems as anxious as anyone to get IE 9 users updated to IE 10 as soon as possible. Gone are the days when browser updates required active participation on the part of users. These days IE 10 will just slide into the background without so much as an EULA pop up (unless of course you want to stop the update process, which is possible). It’s a start, but until IE begins updating more frequently it will likely always be behind when it comes to web standards support.

For complete details on everything that’s new in IE 10 for Windows 7, check out the Windows blog post.

Nokia Windows Phone 8. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.

Unfortunately, if you’ve been building WebKit-centric sites IE 10 users won’t be able to properly view your site, which is why Microsoft has published a guide to adapting your WebKit-optimized site for Internet Explorer 10.

If you’ve been following CSS best practices, using prefixes for all major browsers, along with the unprefixed properties in your code, then there’s not much to be learned from Microsoft’s guide (though there are a couple of differences in touch APIs that are worth looking over).

But if you’ve been targeting WebKit alone, Microsoft’s guide will get your sites working in IE 10, WebKit, and other browsers that have dropped prefixes for standardized CSS properties.

Sadly, even some the largest sites on the web are coding exclusively for WebKit browsers like Chrome, Safari and Mobile Safari. The problem is bad enough that Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera are planning to add support for some -webkit prefixed CSS properties.

In other words, because web developers are using only the -webkit prefix, other browsers must either add support for -webkit or risk being seen as less capable browsers even when they aren’t. So far Microsoft hasn’t carried through and actually added support for -webkit to any versions of IE 10, but Opera has added it to its desktop and mobile browsers.

Microsoft’s guide to making sites work in IE 10 for Windows Phone 8 also covers device detection (though it cautions that feature detection is the better way to go) and how to make sure you trigger standards mode in your testing environment, since IE 10 defaults to backward-compatibility mode when used on local intranets.

For more details on how to make sure your site works well in IE 10 for Windows Phone 8, head on over to the Windows Phone Developer Blog (and be sure to read through the comments for a couple more tips).

Microsoft has delivered a new preview release of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7, bringing the company’s next-gen web browser to its previous-gen operating system.

If you’d like to try out IE 10 on Windows 7, head on over to the IE 10 downloads page and grab a copy for Windows 7 (requires SP1).

This release is still technically a preview, but given that installing it replaces IE 9, clearly Microsoft is a little more confident about its stability and polish than with previous platform previews.

For most users the experience of IE 10 on Windows 7 will be very similar to that of Windows 8′s desktop mode. (Obviously on Windows 7 there is no “Metro” or “Modern” mode for IE 10.) And under the hood you’ll still find the same web standards support, faster JavaScript engine and, of course, the same controversial “Do Not Track” header turned on by default.

While for the most part IE 10 for Windows 7 looks and quacks like IE 10 for Windows 8, there are a couple of differences. The most noticeable is the appearance of IE 10, which uses Windows 8 scrollbars even on Windows 7, making it look out of place alongside other Windows 7 apps.

Web developers should also be aware that a few touch-related DOM events present on Windows 8 are missing on Windows 7. The user agent string is slightly different as well, with the Windows 8 version reporting “Touch” at the end of the string. For full details on the differences for web development, see the Internet Explorer Developer Center docs.

Should you decide that you don’t want to use this latest Platform preview, just use the control panel to uninstall IE 10, which also re-installs IE 9.

Web font support is just one of IE 10′s new mobile tricks. Image: Microsoft

Windows Phone 8 brings Internet Explorer 10 to mobile, which means Windows Phone 8 devices have much better HTML5 support than previous releases.

The version of IE 10 that ships with Windows Phone 8 packs in most of the improvements found in its Windows 8 desktop/tablet cousin, though there are a few exceptions web developers should be aware of.

First the good news. IE 10 on mobile is leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessors and supports web app essentials like the Application Cache API for creating offline apps and IndexedDB for storing data. There’s also support for Web Workers, WebSockets and several of the new HTML5 form elements. For more on the latter, be sure to check out developer Andrea Trasatti’s nice rundown of HTML5 form support in IE 10.

IE 10 on mobile has all the new CSS features found in the Windows 8 version as well, including CSS layout features like CSS Regions and Grid layout. The Windows Phone Developer Blog also touts Flexbox, but it appears that IE 10′s Flexbox support uses the older syntax, which effectively means it doesn’t support Flexbox (so far Chrome and Opera are the only browsers to support the new syntax). Hopefully Microsoft will add support for the new syntax in a future IE 10 update.

While IE 10 for Windows Phone 8 is very close to feature parity with the desktop/tablet release, there are a few things web developers need to be aware of. Here’s Microsoft’s full list of things IE 10 can do on the desktop but not on phones:

• Inline video
• Some of the new manipulation views APIs  for touch panning and zooming, with the exception of –ms-touch-action
• Multi-track HTML5 audio (simultaneous)
• ActiveX and VBScript
• Drag-and-drop APIs
• File access APIs with the
  exception of blobs which
  are supported on Windows Phone 8
• Windows 8 integration features: Link previews, pinned site icons & notifications and support for connecting sites to apps
• Also in Internet Explorer 10 for Windows Phone, Window.open does not return a valid window object. This is because on the phone each “window” is isolated in its own sandbox.

The lack of support for the File Access API is disappointing, but to be fair iOS has been around for over five years and it just recently added File API support. However, the biggest gotcha for web developers may well be the last item since it’s not so much a missing feature as an unexpected behavior and could affect applications that would otherwise work just fine.

For more info on what’s new in IE 10, check out Microsoft’s technical documentation. For IE 10 on Windows Phone specifically be sure to read through the entire post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog

Webmonkey.com in IE 10 on Windows 8. Photo: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Microsoft originally planned to leave Flash out of the tablet-friendly version of IE10, but later changed its mind. Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer VP, said at the time that Microsoft “believes that having more sites ‘just work’ in the Metro style browser improves the experience for consumers and businesses alike.”

But the only time Flash “just works” in IE 10′s Metro mode is when you visit sites Microsoft has approved. Developers can submit their sites to Microsoft for approval, but if you’d like to take matters into your own hands, user Marvin_S at the XDA Developer forums has figured out how to add whichever sites you like to Microsoft’s whitelist. To edit the whitelist, just open the file C:\Users\[USER_NAME]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\IECompatData\iecompatdata.xml in a text editor of some kind. Then add whichever domains you’d like to be able to access the Flash Player.

To make sure that your custom whitelist isn’t overwritten when Windows 8 updates the list, open IE 10′s Tools menu and select the Compatibility View option. Then uncheck the box labeled “Download updated compatibility list from Microsoft.”

Be forewarned that one of the reasons Microsoft has limited which sites can access Flash is to limit security vulnerabilities; editing the whitelist yourself and turning off updates may expose you to Flash-based attacks, especially given that during the testing phase of Windows 8 Microsoft was slow to apply Flash updates.