Windows 8 & IE10

Ok, I've had a chance to try the new Windows 8 developer preview and IE10. 

First Windows, the new user interface is going to take some getting used to before I like it.  Personally, it feels too much like a smart phone and not enough like a desktop computer.  Still, I see it being a very good choice for touch enabled devices. (Most of your tablets, smart phones and many laptops to come) 

Second IE10, contrary to some reports, you CAN use third party add-ins.  However, at least for now, you can only use them in the "desktop" mode.  The good news here is that I was able to load several popular addins that worked with IE9 onto IE10 without any problems.

The speed of IE10 isn't great at this point (about 10% slower on several javascript tests), but that really isn't surprising. I seriously doubt that Microsoft has even start to optimize for speed yet.  (Bear in mind that this is pre-beta software)  Given the early state of this software it will be interresting to see what level of performance we get once Microsoft fine tunes everything.

Microsoft's continued progress toward standards compliance is nice to see, but more work remains to be done in this area.  There were improvements in every HTML5 test suite that I tried.

A question that remains: Will Microsoft release IE10 before Windows 8?  Personally, I doubt that that will happen, or if it does, it will be days or at most weeks before the release of Windows.