The dream of the ’90s is alive not just in Portland, but in Internet Explorer as well.

As part of its series of self-mocking advertisements, Microsoft has launched a new ad, though this one is less mocking and more nostalgic. If you miss 56K modems, fanny packs or a time when trolls were little dolls with pink hair, check out the video above (at the risk of dating ourselves, a few of the things supposedly from the ’90s seem a bit more ’80s).

We’ve said it before; we’ll say it again: Internet Explorer, for all its many faults, really was a great browser at one point. And with IE 10 Microsoft is getting back to those halcyon days of the 90s, making a browser that once again bests the competition in many ways.

IE logos through the ages. Images: Microsoft.

It’s the web browser developers love to hate, but while Internet Explorer may have gone through some dark times — IE 6, 7 and 8, we’re looking at you — Microsoft’s once ubiquitous browser deserves some credit for more than a few things web developers take for granted today.

Ajax, the Document Object Model (DOM) and CSS are all things that early versions of Internet Explorer helped to popularize.

Developer Nicholas Zakas, formerly the front-end tech lead for the Yahoo homepage, recently posted a look back at the innovations of Internet Explorer. Zakas’ post serves as a reminder (or a history lesson for those of you that weren’t around to experience it firsthand) of the good things Internet Explorer did before Microsoft essentially abandoned it for 10 years. As Zakas writes:

Sometimes it’s hard to remember all of the good that Internet Explorer did before Internet Explorer 6 became the scourge of web developers everywhere. Believe it or not, Internet Explorer 4-6 is heavily responsible for web development as we know it today. A number of proprietary features became de facto standards and then official standards with some ending up in the HTML5 specification. It may be hard to believe that Internet Explorer is actually to thank for a lot of the features that we take for granted today, but a quick walk through history shows that it’s true.

For the skeptics, here’s a thought exercise: try to imagine the web without XMLHttpRequest or innerHTML. How about CSS, do you like CSS? Netscape’s plan was to handle styling with JavaScript. CSS was an independent effort lead by (now) Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie, but IE 3 was the first major browser to support it.

We’re not going to argue that lingering ancient versions of IE aren’t something of scourge on web today, but sometimes it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always that way. In fact IE’s main failing is simply that it stopped innovating.

For some more examples of what IE gave the web be sure to read through Zakas’s entire post, which has copious reference links at the bottom for anyone who’d like to dig deeper into the history of the early web.

The latest Internet Explorer 10 is available as part of the Windows 8 Release Preview.

This release marks the sixth IE10 Platform Preview and there’s no doubt that the big news is the integrated Flash Player, something Microsoft originally planned to leave out of the tablet-friendly Metro version of IE10. Now the company has changed its mind about Flash. Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer VP, writes on the The IEBlog:

We believe that having more sites “just work” in the Metro style browser improves the experience for consumers and businesses alike. As a practical matter, the primary device you walk around with should play the web content on sites you rely on. Otherwise, the device is just a companion to a PC. Because some popular web sites require Adobe Flash and do not offer HTML5 alternatives, Adobe and Microsoft worked together closely to deliver a Flash Player suitable for the Metro style experience.

Hachamovitch also notes that Microsoft worked directly with Adobe to optimize an embedded version of Flash for the Metro interface. That means not only is it reportedly less battery-hungry, but the Flash player in IE10 Metro supports touch gestures like double-tap and pinch-to-zoom so the Flash experience will be consistent with everything else in Windows 8′s tablet interface.

While IE10 Metro will indeed support Flash, developers shouldn’t expect Flash to work everywhere. Instead, Metro IE10′s Flash support is more of a last-ditch effort to make sure that big-name legacy sites with popular content will work on any future Windows 8 tablets. “While any site can play Flash content in IE10 on the Windows desktop,” writes Hachamovitch, “only sites that are on the Compatibility View list can play Flash content within Metro style IE.”

In other words, don’t start building web-based Flash games and expect them to run on Windows 8 tablets.

Flash isn’t the only new trick up IE10′s sleeve; in fact, in the long run the far bigger change may be Microsoft’s support for the “Do Not Track” header, a user privacy tool originally created by Mozilla that is in the process of becoming a web standard. Not only does IE10 send the Do Not Track header, but Microsoft has turned it on by default.

While Safari, Firefox and Opera also support Do Not Track, all of them leave it to users to turn on the feature. Google has pledged to support Do Not Track in Chrome, but thus far does not.

Turning Do Not Track on by default helps protect users’ privacy, but it also makes for a rather direct attack on one of Microsoft’s chief rivals — Google. Wired’s Threat Level blog has more on what the Do Not Track features may mean for the future of online advertising.

Web developers take note, the latest version of IE10 adds support for non-vendor prefixed versions of standards that have reached W3C’s Candidate Recommendation stage. That means IE10 will support CSS transitions, transforms, animations, gradients, and the font-feature-settings property without the -ms- prefix. (The prefixed versions will continue to be supported as well.)

There’s quite a few other new features in the sixth preview of IE10, including performance enhancements that Microsoft claims will make IE10 “fast and fluid while panning, zooming, and scaling content” through a touch interface. You can test out the company’s Chalkboard demo, a panning, zooming, content-scaling stress test for browsers. Without a Windows 8 tablet to test on, it’s impossible to tell just how fast IE10 will be in real-world browsing on an actual tablet, but you can get some idea of what the experience might be like in the Microsoft video below. For more details on other new features in IE10, be sure to check out the IEBlog announcement.

Windows 8. Photo: Microsoft

The consumer preview of Windows 8 with no Flash support in IE 10 Metro.

Microsoft seems to have changed its mind about Adobe Flash and will include a bundled version of Flash with its upcoming Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 web browser. Previously Microsoft announced that the Metro version of IE 10 would run without plugins like Adobe Flash or even Microsoft’s own Silverlight.

The rumor of an about-face on Flash comes from leaked Windows 8 screenshots that have turned up on rumor sites WinUnleaked and WithinWindows. Microsoft declined to answer Webmonkey’s questions for this post, noting only that “Microsoft does not comment on rumors and speculation.”

Rumors and speculation though the conclusions may be, the screenshots tell the story and the story is simple: The latest developer builds include support for Flash in Metro IE 10.

To get around the “no plugins” policy for IE 10 Metro, Microsoft appears to have included the Flash runtime in the actual browser, meaning that it’s not technically a plugin. But even with the new plugin that’s not a plugin, don’t expect Flash to work everywhere. Instead, Metro IE 10′s Flash support looks more like a last-ditch effort to make sure that big-name legacy sites with popular content will work in the Metro version of IE 10.

Flash in Metro isn’t going to work everywhere, though. In fact, Microsoft will maintain a white-list of sites that can access the Flash player in Metro. Microsoft’s previously published Internet Explorer Compatibility View lists dozens of sites including Hulu, CNN, Amazon, Adobe Labs and other popular sites with older, Flash video. (Wired is on that list as well.)

It’s unclear how much of the leaked info represents a change in Microsoft’s policy toward HTML5 video and web standards. Historically, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to maintain backward compatibility and it may be that dropping Flash entirely was simply too much for the company to stomach all at once. Also bear in mind that these leaked screenshots are of early builds and things may well change considerably before the final version of Windows 8 is released.

Windows RT makes Firefox sad. Photo Neil McIntosh/Flickr.

In a post on the Mozilla blog, Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s General Counsel, says that Windows RT’s restrictions signal “an unwelcome return to the digital dark ages.”

While Mozilla is already hard at work on a version of Firefox for Windows 8 on traditional PCs, Microsoft’s restrictions mean that there will be no similar version of Firefox for the new Windows RT.

The crux of Mozilla’s gripe is that in Windows RT Microsoft gives its own Internet Explorer access to special APIs other web browsers can’t use. The result, according to Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler, is that “there’s no way another browser can possibly compete with IE in terms of features or performance.”

Mozilla believes this represents the same abuse of monopoly power Microsoft used to sideline Netscape in the early days of the web. The special API access for Internet Explorer in Windows RT “restricts user choice, reduces competition and chills innovation,” writes Anderson.

Dotzler points out that at least part of what makes this different than Apple’s iOS — which imposes similar restrictions on software and prevents Firefox from running on iOS — is that Microsoft still has binding agreements with the EU about browser choice on Windows, and Windows RT is still Windows.

The new restrictions, writes Dotzler, “are in direct violation of the promises [Microsoft] made to developers, users, and OEMs about browser choice.” So, while Microsoft may be aping Apple with these new application limitations, Apple has the advantage of not needing to worry about past anti-trust agreements.

Furthermore, argues Dotzler, while Windows RT may be aimed at tablets at the moment (an area where Microsoft is currently nowhere near having monopoly power), Microsoft’s long-term goal is for Windows RT and ARM devices to include servers and laptops as well. That would mean that if Microsoft succeeds and ARM chips are running Windows RT on laptops, tablets, phones and toasters near you, there would be only one browser available on any of them — Internet Explorer.

It’s unclear what Mozilla and other potential competitors plan to do about the restrictions in Windows RT. Anderson concludes his post writing simply, “we encourage Microsoft to remain firm on its user choice principles and reject the temptation to pursue a closed path.” Since Windows RT hasn’t yet been released there’s still time for Microsoft to change its mind and lift the current restrictions. For now at least Mozilla seems willing to wait on Microsoft’s next move. If Microsoft doesn’t change course the fact that Mozilla’s complaint was penned by its top lawyer may give some hint of where this fight is headed.

By Peter Bright, Ars Technica

The browser wars are back on in earnest. For the second time in three months, Internet Explorer made large gains, picking up almost 1 point of market share. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all lost out, as Internet Explorer 9 won over new users.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Internet Explorer gained 0.99 points for a 53.88 percent market share, taking it to a six-month high. Firefox is down 0.37 points to 20.55 percent. This is the lowest share the browser has been at since October 2008. Chrome is down a third of a point to 18.57 percent, Safari is down 0.17 points to 5.07 percent, and Opera also fell, dropping 0.09 points to 1.62 percent.

This is a strong performance from Microsoft, though it may come as a surprise to many. In mid-March, Web analytics firm StatCounter announced that Chrome had overtaken Internet Explorer for the first time ever: On Sunday, Mar. 18, for one day only, Chrome was the number-one browser. This seems at odds with Internet Explorer’s growth and Chrome’s decline.

StatCounter, however, is recording something slightly different from Net Marketshare, the numbers we use for our monthly look at the browser war. StatCounter measures raw unadulterated pageviews. It doesn’t attempt to make any corrections for pre-rendering (Chrome will render pages ahead of time if it thinks that the user will look at them, boosting its number of pageviews), it doesn’t attempt to count unique visitors, and it doesn’t attempt to use geographical weighting to account for uneven visitor demographics. (Some sites are more popular in the United States than China, for example, so their browser usage will tend to be more representative of American users than Chinese ones.)

StatCounter’s numbers are still interesting as a measure of web usage, but Net Marketshare’s numbers, which do try to account for things like the geographical variation, are a better measure of browser market share — that is, the number of people using each browser.

A look at the version breakdowns for each browser reveals how Microsoft has made these gains.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Internet Explorer 9 has picked up 2.6 points of share in the last month. This is its strongest month since its release. Internet Explorer 8 fell by almost the same amount, dropping by 2.19 points. Internet Explorer 7 dropped a fraction, down 0.09 points, and Internet Explorer 6 picked up 0.66 points.

The numbers suggest that Internet Explorer 8 users are switching to Internet Explorer 9 in relatively large numbers, particularly on Windows 7: 34.5 percent of Windows 7 users are using Internet Explorer 9.

Microsoft has been vigorously promoting Internet Explorer 9, most recently with a campaign that encourages nerds to give Internet Explorer a second chance; the latest part in a broader campaign to educate users and explain to them that Internet Explorer 9 really isn’t the same as the much-hated Internet Explorer 6.

On top of that, the company is continuing to use automatic updates to move Internet Explorer 7 and 8 users onto the latest version.

Together, these factors seem to be driving upgrades to the current browser version, and users are actually sticking with it rather than switching to other options.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Chrome’s update story is the same as ever. Its automatic update process is reliable, consistent, and effective, keeping the large majority of Chrome users on the latest and greatest version of the browser.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Firefox continues to have a large number of users on version 3.6 and below. The final update for 3.6, version 3.6.28, was released on Mar. 13. Unless there’s a security emergency, there will not be a 3.6.29: Support for 3.6 ends on Apr. 24. Firefox users wanting a browser with long-term support but without six-weekly major updates will have to switch to Firefox Extended Support Release 10.0.4. Everyone else should switch to the current main branch, which on Apr. 24 will be Firefox 12.

Mozilla plans to make Firefox 3.6 offer an update to version 12 once the end of its supported lifecycle has been reached. This means that Firefox 3.6 users should start to decline. However, as with the die-hard group of Firefox 3.5-and-below users that still exists, it’s unlikely that they will all opt to do so.

Automatic, silent updates are still being developed for Firefox. The latest 32-bit nightly builds (version 14) include automatic updates that do not show any UAC prompts on Windows. They’re not yet silent updates, though this too is planned. Until these things are finished, the browser will struggle to have transitions as smooth as Chrome’s.

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

Data from Net Market Share, image by Ars Technica

In mobile, iOS users continue to outnumber Android users, with the surprising implication that Android users don’t actually use the web very much on their smartphones.

Image by Ars Technica

Image by Ars Technica

At Ars, however, Chrome and Android are dominant.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

By Peter Bright, Ars Technica

Microsoft is continuing to show off new features coming in its Internet Explorer 10 web browser, with a couple of posts describing its touch-friendly Metro interface and its enhanced security.

The current trend in browser design, led by Google Chrome, is to scale back the browser’s interface so that it takes less and less of the screen, devoting more room to the web content itself. Windows 8′s Metro design similarly removes window chrome to put the focus on content.

Metro Internet Explorer 10 is the logical conclusion of this trend: Most of the time it has no visible interface at all, leaving only the webpage visible. Its app bar, displayed by swiping from the top or bottom of the screen or right clicking the mouse, contains tabs, the address bar, and so on.

The tab selector, replete with pretty thumbnails. Image from Microsoft

The Metro version of Internet Explorer feels slick and comfortable using both touch and mouse and keyboard interaction. Particular highlights are the tile-based favorites view and the tab thumbnails, both shown to good effect in Microsoft’s post.

Internet Explorer 9 introduced some particularly taskbar-oriented features: support for pinning sites to the taskbar, and the ability for those pinned sites to create custom options in the Jump list. In Windows 8, sites can be pinned to the Start screen to make them instantly accessible. Sites pinned this way can even update their tile to show status notifications — much in the way that “real” apps can do. However, the Jump lists are tucked away, only available from within Internet Explorer.

Pinned websites, with one showing off a notification. Image from Microsoft

One concern that this chromeless look raises is that of differentiation; Metro-style versions of both Chrome and Firefox are being developed, and it’s hard to see how they might look any different.

Security-wise, Internet Explorer 10 will include a new Enhanced Protected Mode. Protected Mode is the name Microsoft gives to its sandboxing technique. The current version, introduced in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, creates a separate, low-privilege process for running JavaScript and rendering HTML. This low-privilege process has no write access to most of the file system. This means that even if there is a security flaw in the browser, the attacker cannot write malware to the hard disk.

Sandbox protection of this kind isn’t perfect — there are various techniques for escaping from the sandbox and increasing privileges — but it serves as another measure attackers have to defeat if they want to exploit users.

Enhanced Protected Mode further reduces the rights that each low-privilege process has: Not only do they not have write permission to the file system, they also lose read permission. This makes the sandbox even harder to escape, but it comes at a cost: It breaks virtually all current plugins.

The Metro browser is already plugin-free, but the desktop browser is not. Enhanced Protected Mode won’t be the default on the desktop (though this will be an option) to ensure that plugins remain compatible. If Enhanced Protected Mode is enabled, then any attempt to use an incompatible plugin will result in a prompt to disable the mode for that tab, to allow the plugin to work.

This is what you'll see if you try to use Enhanced Protected Mode on a site that needs plugins. Image from Microsoft

With the systemwide anti-exploitation features that Internet Explorer 10 is also using, it’s shaping up to be the most secure Internet Explorer ever.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

WebKit may seem like the only game in town, but it's not. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

It sounds like something from a galaxy far, far away, but in truth it was not that long ago that the web was littered with sites that proudly proclaimed “works best in Internet Explorer.” Thankfully those days are over. IE6 no longer dominates the web.

But, while IE6 may be a thing of the past, the root problem — websites that work in one and only one web browser — sadly, remains.

This time the culprit is WebKit, the rendering engine that powers the browsers on the iPhone, iPad and Android phones. But what’s different about this round of monoculture is that, unlike IE 6, the WebKit developers haven’t done anything wrong. It’s web developers that have created the WebKit-only web.

Instead of writing code that will work in any browser, which might mean adding an extra three lines of code to their CSS rules, some of even the largest sites on the web are coding exclusively for WebKit.

The problem is bad enough that on Monday at the CSS Working Group meeting, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera announced that each 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.

The danger is that if other browsers implement -webkit prefixes then the entire CSS standards effort will be broken. Instead of coding against a single CSS specification developers will need to code against changing vendor prefixes. As CSS Working Group co-chair, Daniel Glazman, says, “I don’t think this is the right way. And this is the first time in this WG that we are proposing to do things that are not the right way.”

Vendor prefixes like -webkit and -moz were designed to help web developers by allowing browser makers to implement CSS features before the official standard was published. Prefixes were intended to help speed up the process of adding new features to the web and, used properly, they have worked. Unfortunately they’ve also been widely abused.

WebKit is currently the dominant mobile browser in the mind of most web developers (that Opera is actually the single most widely used mobile browser). But even the perceived dominance of WebKit is not the real problem. The problem is — just as it was last time — that web developers are developing exclusively for WebKit.

To be clear, Firefox, IE and Opera also support these features. In most cases, the -webkit properties being used have -moz, -ms and -o prefix equivalents for use in the respective browsers. Popular CSS 3 features like border-radius, transforms, gradients and animations work in all modern browsers. Developers simply need to add those three additional lines of code to make their websites compatible with Firefox, IE and Opera. But they aren’t doing that.

That the problem lies with web developers, not the browsers, led Glazman, to put out a call for action, asking web developers to “stop designing web sites for WebKit only, in particular when adding support for other browsers is only a matter of adding a few extra prefixed CSS properties.”

Neither Glazman, nor anyone else is suggesting that Apple and Google should stop innovating or stop implementing new features as fast as they can. As Tantek Çelik, a Mozilla representative in the CSS WG, says in the minutes of Monday’s meeting, “I think it’s great that Apple wants to innovate as fast as they can…. I don’t want Apple to slow down in innovation and implementing new things. That helps the Web grow and innovate.”

At the same time both Apple and Google have set some bad examples by building a number of WebKit-only demos that might be part of what lead some developers to conclude that only WebKit supports such features. That has also spilled over into the world of tutorials where even sometimes even standards advocates showcase -webkit in their sample code while ignoring -moz-, -ms- and -o-*.

What makes the current -webkit-only epidemic all the more depressing is how easy it is to solve — just use prefixes they way they were intended. Thanks to modern toolkits you don’t even need to write any extra code. Preprocessors like SASS and LESS make it easy to output five lines of prefixed code with a single mixin. Not a fan or SASS or LESS? No problem, just use cssprefixer, which parses your CSS and adds any prefixes you need before you publish it to the web (there’s also a client-side auto-prefixing solution if you prefer).

That’s fine for your website, but what about all the rest of those top 30,000 sites you don’t control? Well, you could email the developers, let them know that their site isn’t working in the most popular mobile web browser; let them know that you can’t use their service. If you’re a programmer or web developer you can help out with Mozilla developer Christian Hellman’s effort to Pre-fix the web. Pre-fix the web is looking for developers willing to seek out projects on Github that only work in Webkit and then fork the project, adding the missing prefixes to the CSS, extending JS code to do proper feature detection and then sending a pull request. In other words, literally fixing the web.

We at Webmonkey hope it’s obvious that building WebKit-only sites is a waste of time. If you’re only interested in iOS users then take a tip from Instagram and build a native app. As Peter Linss, Hewlett-Packard’s CSS WG representative says the CSS WG minutes, “there’s no advantage to the Web to have someone write a platform-specific website.” There’s also no real advantage for the developer, especially when an automated prefixer can do all the work for you. If you want your site to embrace the web, take the time to learn the craft and embrace all of the web. Be good at what you do and do it right.

Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer has barred browser plugins in the Metro environment. But Microsoft has revealed a method that plugin-dependent websites can use to leap over Metro’s walls and reach the green fields of the conventional Windows desktop, where Flash is still allowed to roam free.

The relevance of proprietary browser plugins is declining as standards-based web technologies mature. Native web technologies don’t yet supply complete functional equivalence with the capabilities of plugins, but the open web has the advantage of greater ubiquity.

The ubiquity of native web standards over proprietary plugins is set to get a major boost from Microsoft with the launch of Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10. As we have previously reported, the next major version of Microsoft’s web browser will not display plugins in the Metro environment, which will be the default shell in Windows 8.

A plugin-dependent website prompting the user for permission to run on the desktop. Image courtesy of Microsoft

Microsoft has published a series of posts in its official IE development blog that discuss the implications of this change and what it means for users and web developers. In a new post published this week, IE program manager lead John Hrvatin highlighted the advantages of plugin-free browsing and emphasized the need for web developers to start supporting users who browse in environments that don’t have plugins enabled.

“The transition to a plug-in free web is happening today. Any site that uses plugins needs to understand what their customers experience when browsing plugin free. Lots of web browsing today happens on devices that simply don’t support plugins,” he wrote. “Metro style IE runs plug-in free to improve battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers.”

A growing number of websites that rely on browser plugins already offer a standards-based fallback for users who are browsing on popular plugin-free devices such as as the iPhone or iPad. Microsoft has previously discussed some of the steps it is taking to ensure that those websites serve their plugin-free content to Metro users.

There will still likely be many Flash-heavy websites, however, that can’t accommodate users who are browsing without plugins. In the blog post, Hrvatin explained that such websites can ask the user for permission to jump to the conventional Windows desktop and launch the windowed version of Internet Explorer, which will have full support for plugins.

Web developers can get the browser to display the prompt by including the special requiresActiveX=true property in an X-UA-Compatible meta tag or HTTP header. Hrvatin cautions that this feature is included for transitional purposes and is intended to serve as a last resort. The preferred behavior is still for web developers to display a plugin-free version of their site to users who are browsing in the Metro environment.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.