Microsoft has detailed the changes which came to Internet Explorer in the August Update. Most of the changes are minor improvements to performance, security, and some developer tools. Some of these changes were previewed in the developer channel before hitting mainstream deployment.
Internet Explorer becomes more web compliant with this update with improvements to its WebGL rendering engine. Now this version of IE improves their Khronos WebGL Conformance Test 1.0.3 score from 89.9% to 96.8%. This is great news for all web developers using modern web technologies.
In addition to WebGL, Microsoft makes changes to the F12 tools, and supports new WebDriver standards. The changes to the F12 tools will be detailed in a future IE blog post. The WebDriver support enables developers to automate testing their sites across lots of different user scenarios.
Security is improved in different ways with this release. By blocking old Active-X controls Microsoft is hoping to encourage websites to update and improve their own controls. The other way Microsoft is making IE more secure is to close 26 vulnerabilities and update Adobe Flash Player. These patched vulnerabilities are detailed here and the Flash Player update is detailed here. Microsoft says these improvements should come through automatically with the August Update.
How does this make you feel about using IE? Do you like the improvements Microsoft is making? Let us know in the comments below!
Further reading: August Update, IE, Internet Explorer, Microsoft
