Internet Explorer 9 RC – Now with More Surprises!Rey Bango | February 10, 2011
I love surprises and I especially love seeing the web developer community’s reaction when they’re caught by surprise after the IE team releases new updates to Internet Explorer 9. With the release of the IE9 Release Candidate today, I’m expecting a number of developers will be very happy as this update includes a much requested feature, Geolocation support. GeolocationWith location-based applications becoming more and more prevalent, especially on mobile devices, it’s obvious that the next-generation of web sites would head full steam towards supporting location-aware services and thankfully, the W3C have created a great specification for making that happen. Internet Explorer 9’s support of the Geolocation API now allows web developers to build applications that can access the current geographical location of a PC and provide localized services and information such as weather, news, and maps that greatly personalize the user experience for site visitors. In addition, the feature is implemented ensuring that users have the ultimate choice in sharing their information. Internet Explorer provides a clear message explaining that a website wants to track your location and providing multiple options for opting in or out of the tracking.
Developers have had a number of 3rd party solutions for creating geo-based applications but nothing that was directly built into the browser or that was based on a standardized, industry-accepted API. The W3C’s Geolocation specification helps to ensure that developers now have a way of building geo-aware applications that will work consistently across all browsers that support the standard.
Be sure to check out the Geolocation demo provided on the IE9 Test Drive site to see the experience in action. Do Not Track – Respecting User PrivacyA lot of concern has been brought up about companies tracking your online behavior. Rightfully so, consumers are asking for ways to protect their privacy and be given a choice as to whether a company should be allowed to collect certain pieces of information about their online experience. Internet Explorer 9 RC introduces a new feature called Tracking Protection which is meant to offer users functionality similar to the “Do Not Call” telephone registry. This feature relies on Tracking Protection Lists which users can install from the organizations they trust and gives users great control of how information is collected (or not). It’s a great start to a very pressing consumer concern and I’m happy to see that organizations such as Abine, AdBlock Plus, PrivacyChoice, and TRUSTe are working to build tracking protection lists that consumers can opt into. Feature CompleteSince IE9 Platform Preview 1 was announced in March 2010, we've seen the IE team embrace standards and deliver a ton of amazing functionality. I've personally seen developers who have been shocked to see the number of HTML5 and CSS3, standards-based features added to Internet Explorer 9 and begin to look at the browser (and Microsoft) very differently. This obviously makes me extremely happy and my job as a web platform advocate for Microsoft substantially easier. With this Release Candidate, Internet Explorer 9 is now feature complete supporting a number of important technologies that will help developers build exciting web applications. From support for Canvas, HTML5 video and audio, the new semantic elements, SVG, Geolcation, 2D Transforms and more to the blazingly fast Chakra JavaScript engine, this release marks a dramatic rise in Microsoft’s support of standards-based web development. Also, to make it easier to see all of the additions between IE9 Beta and RC, check out this great cheatsheet built by the IE engineering team.
This is by far the best version of Internet Explorer ever built at Microsoft and I’m very fortunate to be able to show it off to developers and consumers. Be sure to check out the following resources so you can download Internet Explorer 9 RC and get all of the latest information on this new release.
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