Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 Ready for Testers

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Go here to download IE10 Platform Preview 2.

Microsoft released the second “Platform Preview” of Internet Explorer 10 to early testers and developers this week, adding support for several new HTML5 features as well as other additions.

High on the list of updates is faster HTML5 performance, including technology called Web Workers, which enables compute-intensive tasks like heavy duty graphics processing to be offloaded to run in the background.

“IE10 continues IE9’s precedent of enabling Web applications to do more in the browser without plug-ins … [and] also continues the pattern of offloading work to the parts of a PC that are best suited for them, like the GPU for graphics, and different processor cores for background compilation of JavaScript,” Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, said in a post to the IEBlog on Wednesday evening.

In the area of security, platform preview 2 adds support for HTML5 Sandbox and iframe isolation.

Another addition, called Positioned Floats, enables a user to drop a box in a field of text causing the text to flow around the box automatically.

The IE10 Platform Preview release cycle is very much like the cycle Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) followed last year when it began testing IE9. Microsoft released IE9 in early March of this year.

Just as with IE9 a year earlier, Microsoft chose its MIX Web developers conference in mid-April in Las Vegas as the place and time to release IE10 Platform Preview 1.

With IE9, the company rolled out a new Platform Preview about every eight weeks, until it began full-scale beta testing in September.

“With Platform Previews, developers and technology enthusiasts can try out new technologies and provide feedback without any confusion about which technologies are site-ready and which are experimental,” Hachamovitch said in his blog post.

“This approach enables the technical community to work through safety issues before putting any consumers at risk, and minimizes wasted effort re-writing consumer-facing sites,” he added.

IE10 Platform Preview 2 is available for download here.

Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.