Features




Internet Explorer has been designed to view a broad range of web pages and provide certain features within the operating system, including Microsoft Update. During the heyday of the browser wars, Internet Explorer superseded Netscape only when it caught up technologically to support the progressive features of the time.better source needed

Standards supportedit

Internet Explorer, using the Trident layout engine:

  • Supports HTML 4.01, parts of HTML5, CSS Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3, XML 1.0, and DOM Level 1, with minor implementation gaps.
  • Fully supports XSLT 1.0 as well as an obsolete Microsoft dialect of XSLT often referred to as WD-xsl, which was loosely based on the December 1998 W3C Working Draft of XSL. Support for XSLT 2.0 lies in the future: semi-official Microsoft bloggers have indicated that development is underway, but no dates have been announced.
  • Almost full conformance to CSS 2.1 has been added in the Internet Explorer 8 release. The trident rendering engine in Internet Explorer 9 in 2011, scored highest in the official W3C conformance test suite for CSS 2.1 of all major browsers.
  • Supports XHTML in Internet Explorer 9 (Trident version 5.0). Prior versions can render XHTML documents authored with HTML compatibility principles and served with a text/html MIME-type.
  • Supports a subset of SVG in Internet Explorer 9 (Trident version 5.0), excluding SMIL, SVG fonts and filters.

Internet Explorer uses DOCTYPE sniffing to choose between standards mode and a "quirks mode" in which it deliberately mimics nonstandard behaviors of old versions of MSIE for HTML and CSS rendering on screen (Internet Explorer always uses standards mode for printing). It also provides its own dialect of ECMAScript called JScript.

Internet Explorer was criticised by Tim Berners-Lee for its limited support for SVG, which is promoted by W3C.

Non-standard extensionsedit

Internet Explorer has introduced an array of proprietary extensions to many of the standards, including HTML, CSS, and the DOM. This has resulted in a number of web pages that appear broken in standards-compliant web browsers and has introduced the need for a "quirks mode" to allow for rendering improper elements meant for Internet Explorer in these other browsers.

Internet Explorer has introduced several extensions to the DOM that have been adopted by other browsers.

These include the innerHTML property, which provides access to the HTML string within an element, which was part of IE 5 and was standardized as part of HTML 5 roughly 15 years later after all other browsers implemented it for compatibility, the XMLHttpRequest object, which allows the sending of HTTP request and receiving of HTTP response, and may be used to perform AJAX, and the designMode attribute of the contentDocument object, which enables rich text editing of HTML documents.citation needed Some of these functionalities were not possible until the introduction of the W3C DOM methods. Its Ruby character extension to HTML is also accepted as a module in W3C XHTML 1.1, though it is not found in all versions of W3C HTML.

Microsoft submitted several other features of IE for consideration by the W3C for standardization. These include the 'behavior' CSS property, which connects the HTML elements with JScript behaviors (known as HTML Components, HTC); HTML+TIME profile, which adds timing and media synchronization support to HTML documents (similar to the W3C XHTML+SMIL), and the VML vector graphics file format. However, all were rejected, at least in their original forms; VML was subsequently combined with PGML (proposed by Adobe and Sun), resulting in the W3C-approved SVG format, one of the few vector image formats being used on the web, which IE did not support until version 9.

Other non-standard behaviors include: support for vertical text, but in a syntax different from W3C CSS3 candidate recommendation, support for a variety of image effects and page transitions, which are not found in W3C CSS, support for obfuscated script code, in particular JScript.Encode, as well as support for embedding EOT fonts in web pages.

Faviconedit

Support for favicons was first added in Internet Explorer 5. Internet Explorer supports favicons in PNG, static GIF and native Windows icon formats. In Windows Vista and later, Internet Explorer can display native Windows icons that have embedded PNG files.

Usability and accessibilityedit

Internet Explorer makes use of the accessibility framework provided in Windows. Internet Explorer is also a user interface for FTP, with operations similar to that of Windows Explorer. Pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing were added respectively in Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Tabbed browsing can also be added to older versions by installing MSN Search Toolbar or Yahoo Toolbar.

Cacheedit

Internet Explorer caches visited content in the Temporary Internet Files folder to allow quicker access (or offline access) to previously visited pages. The content is indexed in a database file, known as Index.dat. Multiple Index.dat files exist which index different content—visited content, web feeds, visited URLs, cookies, etc.

Prior to IE7, clearing the cache used to clear the index but the files themselves were not reliably removed, posing a potential security and privacy risk. In IE7 and later, when the cache is cleared, the cache files are more reliably removed, and the index.dat file is overwritten with null bytes.

Caching has been improved in IE9.

Group Policyedit

Internet Explorer is fully configurable using Group Policy. Administrators of Windows Server domains (for domain-joined computers) or the local computer can apply and enforce a variety of settings on computers that affect the user interface (such as disabling menu items and individual configuration options), as well as underlying security features such as downloading of files, zone configuration, per-site settings, ActiveX control behavior and others. Policy settings can be configured for each user and for each machine. Internet Explorer also supports Integrated Windows Authentication.

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