In Windows 8, we reimagined the browser with IE11. We designed and built IE11 to be the best way to experience the Web on Windows. With IE11 for Windows 7 consumers can now enjoy a fast and fluid Web with the updated IE11 engine on their Windows 7 devices. The final version of IE11 on Windows 7 is available for download today.

IE11 on Windows 8 brings an entirely new browsing experience and set of capabilities to the Web, such as a new touch first browsing experience and full screen UI for your sites, security improvements that offer the best protection against the most common threats on the Web, improved performance, and support for the HTML5 and CSS3 standards developers need.

With this new release, Windows 7 customers receive all of the performance, security, and under-hood changes that enable a stellar Web experience. IE11 Release Preview also sends the "Do Not Track" signal to Web sites by default to help consumers protect their privacy.

Fast and Fluid

Browser performance is critical for running today's modern Web sites and applications. IE11 is all around fast, bringing improved hardware acceleration and Chakra JavaScript engine to Windows 7. We continue to focus on improving real world site performance and third party recognition of IE's leadership in this area has been consistent.

You can experience IE11's leading performance first hand with new demos on the IE Test Drive site with examples of hardware accelerated rendering in the Aston Martin 3D visualization for high frame rates, and interactivity, touch, and media with Audio Explosion.

The Mandelbrot test drive is another example of how IE11 runs real world sites fast, particularly sites with computationally intensive JavaScript and graphics. In this demo you can drill into detailed views of the Mandelbrot set and see how long it takes to calculate the view and how many iterations are calculated per second.

More Interoperable HTML5 Support

IE11 shines on Windows 8, and with this release , IE11 brings the same powerful HTML5 engine to Windows 7 customers:

Rich Visual Effects: CSS Text Shadow, CSS 3D Transforms, CSS3 Transitions and Animations, CSS3 Gradient, SVG Filter Effects

Sophisticated Page Layouts: CSS3 for publication quality page layouts and application UI (CSS3 grid, flexbox, multi-column, positioned floats, regions, and hyphenation), HTML5 Forms, input controls, and validation

Enhanced Web Programming Model: Better offline applications through local storage with IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache; Web Sockets, HTML5 History, Async scripts, HTML5 File APIs, HTML5 Drag-drop, HTML5 Sandboxing, Web workers, ES5 Strict mode support.

Developers building on these capabilities in Windows 8 can run the same markup with the same performance and capabilities on Windows 7. You can find a full list of new functionality available to developers in the IE11 developer guide here.

Commitment to Privacy with "Do Not Track" on By Default

IE11 continues our focus on helping consumers protect their privacy, which started in IE9 with features such as Tracking Protection. In Windows 8, "Do Not Track" (DNT) is "on" in the Express Settings at time of set-up, and IE11 in Windows 7 also sends a "Do Not Track" signal to Web sites by default. Microsoft's customers have been clear that they want more control over how their personal information is used online. While "Do Not Track" is a technology solution that's still in its formative stages, it holds the promise of giving people greater choice and control of their privacy as they browse the Web. IE11 Windows 7 customers are notified of the "Do Not Track" setting via IE11's first run welcome page, including instructions for how they can turn off "Do Not Track" should they wish.

We believe that meeting customer expectations by putting people first is the best way to grow online commerce and the Internet economy. Our commitment is to provide Windows customers an experience that is "private by default" in an era when so much user data is collected online. IE11 is the first browser to send a "Do Not Track" (DNT) signal by default.

A Better Web Today, and Ahead

The opportunities continue for HTML5 to make both Web sites and applications better. Those opportunities are exciting for everyone on the Web.

What's New:

30% faster for real world Web sites

With IE11 we continue delivering the best performance for real world Web sites on your Windows device. IE11 on Windows 7 improves performance across the board with faster page loading, faster interactivity, and faster JavaScript performance, while reducing CPU usage and improving battery life on mobile PCs.

Leading JavaScript performance

IE11 advances JavaScript performance, while ensuring compatibility, interoperability, and security. On Windows 7, IE11 is 9% faster than IE11, which is nearly 30% faster than the nearest competitive browser.

The updated Chakra JIT compiler in IE11 supports more optimizations including inline caches for polymorphic property access, in-lining of functions at polymorphic call sites, and compilation support for specific ECMAScript5 constructs like getters/setters, so even more code is JIT'ed and less time is spent in JavaScript computation. Garbage collection utilizes the background thread much more efficiently, substantially reducing the frequency and amount of time the UI thread is blocked doing garbage collection.

Fast, world-ready Web applications

IE11 includes support for the well-defined and commonly used features of the emerging ECMAScript 6 standard including let, const, Map, Set, and WeakMap, as well as proto for improved interoperability. IE11 also supports the ECMAScript Internationalization API (version 1.0), which enables culture aware sorting, number formatting, date and time formatting to be performed efficiently in JavaScript without having to round-trip to the server.

Faster development with 25 new and improved modern Web standards

For developers, IE11 brings increased support for modern Web standards powered by hardware acceleration to enable a new class of compelling applications and fast and fluid Web browsing. IE11 adds support for over 25 new or improved modern Web standards beyond IE11.

Best experience of your sites and apps together

IE11 puts your Web sites first, delivering the best Web on Windows across a full range of devices and screen sizes that is equally great for touch, mouse, and keyboard. You can have as many open tabs as you want, and side-by-side browsing with your favorite sites and Windows Store apps together. Here's a quick look at some of the thinking behind the user experience of the browser from a few of the engineers who helped build IE11 for Windows 8.1.