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.
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:
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.
Webmonkey.com in IE 10 on Windows 8. Photo: Screenshot/Webmonkey
Internet Explorer 10′s “Modern” (or “Metro”) mode includes limited support for Adobe’s Flash Player plugin — websites approved by Microsoft can access Flash, unapproved sites cannot. Fortunately, intrepid Windows 8 users have already found an easy way to extend Flash support to any website.
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.
People who walked in snow also bought jackets, would you like a value proposition jacket? Image: rabiem22/Flickr.
Microsoft continues to take a beating for its decision to enable the Do Not Track privacy setting by default in the company’s brand-new Internet Explorer 10.
IE 10 has only been on the web for a few days (see Webmonkey’s IE 10 review), but Yahoo has already released a statement saying that the company will ignore the Do Not Track header when broadcast by IE 10 users. Yahoo is not the first to take exception to Microsoft’s decision to turn Do Not Track on by default — the Apache web server may ignore IE 10′s DNT header as well — but it’s the biggest site so far to square off against Microsoft.
This most recent squabble comes despite the fact that Microsoft and Yahoo are partners and that Yahoo has previously said it would support Do Not Track.
The Do Not Track header is a proposed web standard for browsers to tell servers that the user does not want to be tracked by advertisers. DNT is supported by all the major web browsers, but only Microsoft has elected to make DNT part of the browser’s default setup. That means that all IE 10 users will be telling advertisers to back off, which some argue is not what DNT was intended to do.
The problem for Yahoo is that it risks ignoring not just a coming web standard, but the wishes of those users who would have opted in to Do Not Track even if it were off by default. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s VP of Legal & Corporate Affairs, recently said that turning on Do Not Track “reflects what our customers want: 75 percent of the consumers we surveyed in the U.S. and Europe said they wanted DNT on by default.”
On the first count Yahoo’s jargon-laden policy announcement seems to be saying that the company believes Microsoft is violating the W3C draft of Do Not Track. “Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction,” says the Yahoo Policy blog. “In our view, this degrades the experience for the majority of users and makes it hard to deliver on our value proposition to them.”
The latter statement seems to be a blanket argument against DNT existing at all — a common argument from companies that make the majority of their money from advertising — rather than anything specific about IE 10, especially given that Microsoft appears to be conforming to the current draft of the spec. I contacted Yahoo asking for clarification about the company’s position on web standards support, but the company did not respond before this story was published. [Update: Yahoo's Sara Gorman tells Webmonkey that "Yahoo does not consider the current Microsoft Internet Explorer 10 or Windows 8 install flows to represent explicit user consent with respect to Do Not Track."]
Yahoo’s complaint, along with similar complaints from Apache and others comes down to this: Is Microsoft violating the DNT spec by turning it on by default?
Here’s what the spec says: “The goal of this protocol is to allow a user to express their personal preference regarding tracking … key to that notion of expression is that it must reflect the user’s preference, not the preference of some institutional or network-imposed mechanism outside the user’s control.”
That certainly sounds like it backs up Yahoo’s decision, and puts Microsoft in the wrong. But the spec continues:
We do not specify how that preference is enabled: each implementation is responsible for determining the user experience by which this preference is enabled.
For example, a user might select a check-box in their user agent’s configuration, install a plug-in or extension that is specifically designed to add a tracking preference expression, or make a choice for privacy that then implicitly includes a tracking preference (e.g., Privacy settings: high) (emphasis mine).
For Internet Explorer 10 Microsoft’s setup dialog offers the user two choices: Express settings and Customize. Choosing the Express option clearly states that it turns on the DNT header and would appear to comply with the wording of the current spec since it gives users a choice.
The cynical might be tempted to say Yahoo and other ad companies are nervous that DNT is actually going to catch on and may well hurt their bottom line, but to be fair Yahoo isn’t alone in saying that Microsoft is violating the proposed spec. Mozilla, which originally created Do Not Track, has argued in the past that Microsoft is abusing DNT with IE 10.
In the end it might not matter. The DNT specification has become a joke. It has seriously been proposed that one of the “Permitted Uses for Third Parties and Service Providers” be “marketing.” So one of the permitted uses for Do Not Track might be to allow advertisers to track you.
If that’s not crazy enough for you consider that most online ad companies are not planning to interpret the “Do Not Track” header to mean “stop collecting data.” Instead most advertisers plan stop showing you targeted ads, but continue to collect data and track what you’re doing on the web.
If that sounds insane, well, it is. But the reality is you are being tracked and you will continue to be tracked unless you do something about it.
If you’d like to be in charge of which data is collected about you and you’d like to actually stop advertisers from tracking you, you’re going to have to do it yourself using add-ons like Ghostery or Do Not Track Plus. See our earlier post, Secure Your Browser: Add-Ons to Stop Web Tracking, for more details on how to stop tracking without worrying about who supports or doesn’t support a still unfinished, potentially heavily compromised web standards proposal.
Microsoft has delivered a new preview release of 
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