By the time you are reading this the all new IE Developer Channel will have been released into the wild. This is a new way for the Internet Explorer team to share with the developer community the progress being made in the browser. It is part of our commitment to increased openness, and joins the Status IE site as another method of getting developer feedback, and helping you plan for future IE versions.
Never before has the IE team been so open with their future plans. It is also a break from the tradition of previous developer previews in that it both has the full browser chrome and can be installed side by side with your main IE11 browser. This should make testing much easier, without losing the ability to test in the current version or force you to run a separate VM (it is in fact run as an App-V Client.) As with IE11 it runs on Windows 8.1 update and Windows 7 SP1.
For the first developer channel release, we are including some of the new features that were marked “in development” on the Status IE site. This includes WebGL Instancing Extensions, Gamepad API (unprefixed you’ll be pleased to know), and WebDriver. We have also included a big update to the F12 Developer Tools. A number of other features are in active development that will be included in a future IE Dev Channel release.
As an aside, many of the existing articles and demos for Gamepad API only use the moz or webkit prefixes, or an earlier version of the spec. If you find any outdated content please file an issue in the Stale GitHub repo. I’ve been attempting to reach out to authors to get these fixed.
We hope that you find the developer channel useful and that it will make IE less of a black box to develop for. If you have any feedback or find any bugs, please don’t hesitate to file them on Connect. Interoperability is a big focus of IE. If you have any questions or further comments we are always watching the IEDevChat Twitter feed, and are we’re happy to help.
When I joined the IE userAgents programme, Increased openness was something I wanted to push for, so I’m personally pleased of how things are now moving with the new dev channel and status site; two of the things I hoped could become a reality. This is something that felt a long way off even just a year ago. I feel like things are changing, and I hope we’ve shown that we are heading in the right direction with actions as well as words.
For both the Dev Channel and Status IE releases I had the pleasure of working on the development (and design for IEDC) of the web sites, along with my colleague Antón Molleda. If you find any issues, don’t hesitate to contact us. For StatusIE bugs can be filed in the GitHub repository. For the IEDC site we made liberal use of SVG and it should be fully responsive (which was quite a pain for embedded YouTube iframes.) We didn’t make use of 3rd party libraries or frameworks, except Google Analytics and YouTube so the page should be lightweight. We also tried to make sure the page itself is accessible with the use of WAI-ARIA.
Please take some time to play with the preview and let us know what you think! If you’re not on Windows, don’t forget that Modern IE provides VM images for Windows 7 and 8.1.