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Rebuffing Advertisers
Do Not Track indicates to online advertisers and other stats gatherers that they wish to remain private. Every request sent to a Web server includes a header to show the user's explicit desire to remain private. Companies that honor this setting will accordingly have a greatly reduced ability to gather analytical data about those users.
Respecting the Do Not Track header is entirely optional at this point in time. A few high-profile sites have opted to honor it, most recently Twitter. Other major online players, including Google, have not. Microsoft says that enabling it is all part of the company's "private by default" commitment. It can be turned off if desired, but it will ship enabled.
The decision is a contentious one. Because Do Not Track is optional, it needs buy-in from advertisers and analytics firms. Those firms have been tentatively supporting Do Not Track, because it's currently positioned as an opt-in feature. The kinds of users who'd opt in are likely to be the same kinds of user who wouldn't click on advertisements anyway, so the inability to perform behavioral analysis of those users doesn't matter that much.
But as explored more fully by Ryan Singel over at Wired, there's a great concern that Microsoft's decision will derail the plans. With Internet Explorer 10's default, there's a prospect that before too long, 25 percent or more of Web users will have disabled tracking, and that changes the landscape considerably—enough that advertisers might not be willing to play ball.
New Specs
Do Not Track is just one of the many emerging standards that Internet Explorer 10 will support. When supporting features that are early in their development, new CSS and JavaScript features are given vendor-specific prefixes. For example, a CSS property transform is named -webkit-transform or-moz-transform or -ms-transform in the different implementations by WebKit (used in Chrome and Safari), Mozilla Firefox, or Internet Explorer, respectively. This allows the different vendors to safely implement different versions of the specification as it undergoes its development, so that they can learn more about the feature and how well it works.
Once the specifications reach a certain level of maturity, major changes to their syntax or functionality are ruled out, and the vendors start dropping the prefix, to allow the same, standard-targetting code to work cross-browser.
A number of preliminary specifications that Internet Explorer 10 implements have now reached that level of maturity, called "Candidate Recommendation," or are expected to do so shortly. As such, Microsoft has started supporting non-prefixed versions of a bunch of CSS and JavaScript features.
These include CSS transforms, animations, and gradients, which together allow Web pages to emulate the kind of effects that Microsoft's venerable WordArt feature made possible in the 1990s.
Internet Explorer 10 also includes a new feature to make touch navigation easier. An unfortunate reality of browsing the Web on touch devices is that many sites simply aren't designed for it. They include small links that are tightly packed together, forcing you to zoom in just to hit them. Particularly common culprits are the numbered links for paged articles, forum threads, and so on. Internet Explorer 10 has a neat new feature, Flip Ahead to take the pain out of such content.
Metro-style Internet Explorer uses a pair of gestures, swipe from left-to-right, and swipe from right-to-left to go back and forward, respectively. With Flip Ahead enabled (it's off by default), the right-to-left gesture changes meaning: it means "go to the next page of this multi-page article."
This is a neat little feature. I just hope Microsoft can figure out a way to include it that doesn't replace the normal "forward" browser behavior.
There's one more feature to Internet Explorer 10 that's palpable: it's fast. And it feels fast. Benchmarks may not show it, but Internet Explorer 10, even in a virtual machine, manages to feel smoother when scrolling and navigating than Chrome running on bare hardware.
Internet Explorer will ruffle a few feathers with the decisions Microsoft has made, but users may not care: it's shaping up to smart, effective browser that looks good, and works well. And it'll have a unique feature that no other tablet browser can offer: Flash that actually works.
via arsTechnica.