Developer(s) Microsoft | Engine Trident v7.0, Chakra | |
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Initial release 17 October 2013; 3 years ago (2013-10-17) Stable release 11.0.38 (11.0.14393.576) (December 13, 2016; 2 months ago (2016-12-13)) [±] Operating system Included with Windows 8.1 and later
Windows Server 2012 R2 and later | ||
Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) is the last version of the Internet Explorer web browser by Microsoft. It was officially released on 17 October 2013 for Windows 8.1 and on 7 November 2013 for Windows 7. The browser was also shipped with Windows 10 on its release on 29 July 2015, but Microsoft Edge is the default browser in this version of Windows. It is the default browser shipped with Windows Server 2016. After 12 January 2016 only the most recent version of Internet Explorer to be offered for installation on any given Windows operating system will continue to be supported with security updates, lasting until the end of the support lifecycle for that Windows operating system. On Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, only Internet Explorer 11 will receive security updates for the remainder of those Windows versions' support lifecycles.
Contents
Changes
IE11 features redesigned developer tools, support for WebGL, enhanced scaling for high DPI screens, prerender and prefetch. IE11 supports SPDY on Windows 8.1 and newer only. In addition, IE11 supports Full Screen and Orientation APIs, CSS border image support, JavaScript enhancements, DOM mutation observers, Web Cryptography API, video text track support, encrypted media support and an improved HTML editor. IE11 uses Transport Layer Security v1.2 as the default protocol for secure connections and deprecates RC4 cipher suite.
Internet Explorer 11 for Windows RT does not support Java and other add-ons.
Removed features
document.all, meaning that code that checks for its presence will not detect it, but code that actually uses it will continue to work. Additionally, the attachEvent proprietary API has been removed.Added features
Performance
In one review, IE11 scored better than Google Chrome 30 and Firefox 26 in two of four benchmarks (including WebKit's SunSpider test), tied for fastest in a third benchmark, and was last in Google's V8 performance benchmark. As a result of the speed improvements, the reviewer said "if you switched to Chrome for speed alone, you're now using the wrong browser."
IE11 was also observed to use less memory with multiple tabs open than contemporary versions of Chrome and Firefox.
History
Though an internal build of IE11 was leaked on 25 March 2013, its first preview version was not formally released until June 2013, during the Build 2013 conference, along with the preview release of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. On 25 July 2013, Microsoft released the developer preview of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.