Our own Frederic Lardinois noted that the new version of Internet Explorer wasn’t a major revamp, but it does play home to some very compelling changes under the hood.
Take WebGL for instance — nearly all of Microsoft’s major browser rivals have already jumped on that bandwagon, and now Antoine Leblond confirmed at Microsoft’s annual BUILD conference in San Francisco that Internet Explorer 11 (which should officially debut alongside Windows 8.1 later this year) will indeed support WebGL too.
Finally.
Granted, this tidbit won’t come as much of a shock to those paying very close attention — an early version of Internet Explorer 11 spotted in a leaked Windows Blue build this past March late last month basically confirmed as much, Microsoft posted a kooky Vine (seriously, with browser puppets and everything) that strongly hinted that WebGL support was in the works. All that said, this is a major win for proponents of the cross-platform graphics acceleration API, especially considering how dicey the prospect of universal adoption looked for a while. As one of the last major WebGL holdouts, Microsoft raised its share of concerns with WebGL — consider this pointed critique of WebGL’s security shortcomings from a few years back.
Leblond also took a few moments to talk up the implementation of MPEG Dash –a streaming video standard that has been slowly picking up steam among industry players — in IE11. It’s slowly been picking up steam among industry players, though Microsoft’s interest in it hasn’t exactly been a secret. After becoming a standard in 2011, Adobe adopted MPEG Dash in 2012 and Microsoft committed to it just a few months later.