Windows Blue Windows 8.1 was leaked not too long ago. We reported on the release's illegitimate availability practically as soon as it happened. We knew that Internet Explorer took it to incremented its version to 11. The recent releases of Internet Explorer each made decent strides to catch the browser up to Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox. Once thrown to the sharks thoroughly investigated, this release is pining to be just as relevant despite how near its expected release has been to Internet Explorer 10.

I will not bury the lead: Internet Explorer contains some level of support for WebGL and might implement the SPDY protocol.

One of my first thoughts upon realizing that Internet Explorer 11 was an impending "thing": will it make it to Windows 7? Unfortunately, we still have no clue. Thankfully, unlike Windows RT which disallow rendering engines other than Internet Explorer's Trident, we are still capable of installing alternative browsers in Windows 7. If Internet Explorer 11 is unavailable, they can still install Firefox or Chrome.

For those who only use Internet Explorer and can upgrade to 11, you might be pleased to find WebGL support. Microsoft has been quite vocal against WebGL for quite some time, claiming it a security threat when facing the wild west of the internet. Then again, to some extent, the internet is a security nightmare in itself. The question is whether WebGL can be sufficiently secured for its usage:

This, to some extent, marks a moment where Microsoft promotes a Khronos standard. With some level of irony, Apple was one of the founding members of the WebGL group yet Microsoft might beat Safari to default WebGL support Of course it could not be that simple, however, as IE11 apparently accepts WebGL shaders (the math which computes the color and position of a pixel) in IESL rather than the standard GLSL. IESL, according to the name of its registry flag, seems to be heavily based on HLSL seen in DirectX.

I guess they just cannot let Khronos have a total victory?

SPDY also seems to be coming to IE11. SPDY, pronounced "speedy" and not an acronym, is a protocol designed to cut loading latency. Cool stuff.

Last and definitely least, IE11 is furthering its trend of pretending that it is a Mozilla Gecko-like rendering engine in its user agent string. Personally, I envision an IE logo buying a fiery-orange tail at a cosplay booth. They have been doing this for quite some time now.