Microsoft announces next IE version will feature Web Audio, Media Capture, ES6 Promises, and HTTP/2

Microsoft today announced it is developing at least four new features for the next release of Internet Explorer: Web Audio API, Media Capture and Streams, ES6 Promises, and HTTP/2. The company says this is not an exhaustive list of what to expect in the next version, but merely what it is currently confident that it will be able to deliver.

For those who don’t know, HTTP/2 is a faster protocol for transporting Web content. It is based on Google’s SPDY open networking protocol and is currently being standardized by the IETF.

Web Audio is a JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in Web applications while Media Capture provides access to the user’s local audio and video input/output devices. Promises is meant to help developers write cleaner asynchronous code.

Microsoft further says these features form a part of its “commitment to delivering interoperable implementations for the latest features on the modern Web.” The company also mentions that “several other features” are very important, it is working on a plan to support them, and that developers can expect “more updates in the future.”

At the same time, Microsoft also took the opportunity today to share its vision for the IE platform going forward: “The web should just work for everyone – users, developers and businesses.” As such, the company emphasized it will continue to push more IE users onto the latest version of the browser, invest in security features that provide broad mitigations to potential vulnerabilities, and continue to work on both improved backwards capability as well as interoperability with the latest HTML5 features.

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At its Build 2014 conference last month, Microsoft launched status.modern.ie, a site that shows developers what Web technologies are supported in IE and which standards Microsoft is considering for future versions. Today, the site is coming out of beta, which the company is highlighting with these improvements:

• Open Sourced – after many developers expressed an interest in contributing to the project, Microsoft has made the entire site (including the data that backs it) available on GitHub under the Apache V2 license (see the Readme).
• Improved Search & Filter: The new “Interop” menu lets you easily enter in your browser support interests to find available features.
• Deep Linking – via HTML5 History and Angular routing, the site now enables you to deep link to a feature you want to share with others.
• Better Mobile Support & Performance – Nearly 20% of visitors have come from mobile devices so far, and Microsoft has further optimized the site to make sure developers can get at the latest browser status details on the go.

Today’s news is the beginning of another big Internet Explorer push from Microsoft. We’re quite interested to see what the company has planned for IE12, or whatever it ends up calling the latest version of its browser.