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Microsoft is continuing to show off new features coming in its Internet Explorer 10 web browser, with a couple of posts describing its touch-friendly Metro interface and its enhanced security.

The current trend in browser design, led by Google Chrome, is to scale back the browser’s interface so that it takes less and less of the screen, devoting more room to the web content itself. Windows 8′s Metro design similarly removes window chrome to put the focus on content.

Metro Internet Explorer 10 is the logical conclusion of this trend: Most of the time it has no visible interface at all, leaving only the webpage visible. Its app bar, displayed by swiping from the top or bottom of the screen or right clicking the mouse, contains tabs, the address bar, and so on.

The tab selector, replete with pretty thumbnails. Image from Microsoft

The Metro version of Internet Explorer feels slick and comfortable using both touch and mouse and keyboard interaction. Particular highlights are the tile-based favorites view and the tab thumbnails, both shown to good effect in Microsoft’s post.

Internet Explorer 9 introduced some particularly taskbar-oriented features: support for pinning sites to the taskbar, and the ability for those pinned sites to create custom options in the Jump list. In Windows 8, sites can be pinned to the Start screen to make them instantly accessible. Sites pinned this way can even update their tile to show status notifications — much in the way that “real” apps can do. However, the Jump lists are tucked away, only available from within Internet Explorer.

Pinned websites, with one showing off a notification. Image from Microsoft

One concern that this chromeless look raises is that of differentiation; Metro-style versions of both Chrome and Firefox are being developed, and it’s hard to see how they might look any different.

Security-wise, Internet Explorer 10 will include a new Enhanced Protected Mode. Protected Mode is the name Microsoft gives to its sandboxing technique. The current version, introduced in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, creates a separate, low-privilege process for running JavaScript and rendering HTML. This low-privilege process has no write access to most of the file system. This means that even if there is a security flaw in the browser, the attacker cannot write malware to the hard disk.

Sandbox protection of this kind isn’t perfect — there are various techniques for escaping from the sandbox and increasing privileges — but it serves as another measure attackers have to defeat if they want to exploit users.

Enhanced Protected Mode further reduces the rights that each low-privilege process has: Not only do they not have write permission to the file system, they also lose read permission. This makes the sandbox even harder to escape, but it comes at a cost: It breaks virtually all current plugins.

The Metro browser is already plugin-free, but the desktop browser is not. Enhanced Protected Mode won’t be the default on the desktop (though this will be an option) to ensure that plugins remain compatible. If Enhanced Protected Mode is enabled, then any attempt to use an incompatible plugin will result in a prompt to disable the mode for that tab, to allow the plugin to work.

This is what you'll see if you try to use Enhanced Protected Mode on a site that needs plugins. Image from Microsoft

With the systemwide anti-exploitation features that Internet Explorer 10 is also using, it’s shaping up to be the most secure Internet Explorer ever.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

Webmonkey

The new 3-D Inspector: Your pages, in three dimensions.

Mozilla has released Firefox 11, adding some new developer tools, support for the SPDY protocol and the ability to sync your add-ons between computers.

This release is not recommended for drummers, but everyone else can grab Firefox 11 from the official Firefox download page, or you can just wait for the automated update system to work its magic.

The big news in this release is the new add-on syncing tool. Firefox Sync has long handled syncing bookmarks, preferences, passwords, history and open tabs across computers, but until now syncing add-ons was an entirely manual process. Add-on syncing has been a feature request for Firefox Sync pretty much since syncing was announced in 2010, but until to day it wasn’t available.

If you’d like to include add-ons in the list of items synced, just open up Firefox’s preference panel, head to the sync tab and check the new add-ons option.

Firefox 11 also has some new features for web developers, including the Tilt 3-D code inspector. Derived from the Tilt plug-in, the 3-D code inspector is a WebGL-based visualization of the page’s DOM and HTML structure. When you select “inspect element” Firefox will bring up a breadcrumb-style menu bar at the bottom of the page. In Firefox 11 you’ll find that a new button “3D” has joined the HTML and Style buttons in the page inspector menu bar.

This release adds a new Style Editor to Firefox’s developer toolkit. The Style Editor offers a two-pane view for browsing all of a webpage’s styles, both inline and external stylesheets. The right-hand pane displays the styles as plain text (with syntax highlighting), while the left pane shows the list of all your style sources. Make changes to the stylesheet and your changes are reflected on the webpage in real time. When you’ve got things looking the way you’d like you can then save the modified stylesheet.

If the new developer features convince you to switch back from Chrome, you’ll be glad to know that Firefox can now migrate your bookmarks, history, and cookies directly from Google Chrome.

Other new features in Firefox 11 include preliminary support for SPDY, Google’s alternative to the ubiquitous HTTP protocol. SPDY, pronounced “speedy,” isn’t quite ready for prime time yet in Firefox and is disabled by default. But if you’d like to test it out (Twitter is using SPDY where possible, as is Google) head to about:config and set network.http.spdy.enabled to true.

With Firefox 11 officially released, Firefox 12 moves to the beta channel and Firefox 13 to the Aurora channel. As of this writing, those channels don’t appear to have been updated just yet, but if you’re using either expect an update to arrive in the next day or two.

Webmonkey

The high-res future is coming

The first of the new iPads will arrive in the hands of the public this Friday, March 16. Like the iPhone before it, and no doubt many more devices to come after it, the new iPad has four times the resolution of typical screens. That means your visitors will soon be looking at your site on a high-resolution screen with a whopping 3.1 million pixels.

The sharp, crystal-clear screens are awesome news for new iPad owners, but they create some new dilemmas for web developers who’d like to offer a better experience for high-resolution screens. Sure, increased pixel density means you can serve up sharper, better looking graphics, but there is a cost as well — bigger images mean more bandwidth and longer page loads.

This isn’t a new problem by any means and Webmonkey has looked at a variety of solutions in the past, including techniques like adaptive images and responsive images.

The problem is simple: you need to send smaller images to small screens and larger images to larger screens. Sending a huge iPad-optimized image to a device with a max resolution of 320×480 just doesn’t make sense. At the same time, when bandwidth isn’t an issue, most sites will want to serve high-resolution content to displays that can handle it.

The ideal solution would be to detect both the resolution of the screen and the available bandwidth. Then, based on the combination of those two factors, the server could offer up the appropriate image. Currently that’s not possible, though there are already proposals to extend HTML to handle that scenario.

The Responsive Image Working Group is a W3C community group hoping to solve some of these problems. The group is proposing a new HTML element, <picture>, which will take into account factors like network speed, device dimensions, screen pixel density and browser cache to figure out which image to serve up. Think of it as a much smarter version of the old lowsrc property. So far though it’s all hypothetical

In the mean time if you’d like to serve up high resolution images to your third-generation iPad visitors look no further than Apple.com for one (not necessarily ideal) way to do it. An Apple Insider reader noticed that Apple is already prepping its site to deliver double-resolution images to new iPads. Cloud Four’s Jason Grigsby, whose responsive image research we’ve covered before, has a great breakdown of what Apple is doing.

Essentially Apple is serving up lower resolution images by default, then using JavaScript to send larger images on to iPads. That works, but it will definitely mean increased download times for new iPads since they have to download two files for every graphic. Apple’s approach will also up the number of HTTP requests, which will also slow down the page.

The slower page loads seem to be an acceptable trade off for Apple since the company no doubt wants to showcase the new iPad’s high resolution display with high resolution images. For other sites the bandwidth trade off may not be worth the gain in image resolution.

Still, screens are only going to continue getting better with ever-increasing pixel density. Now is the time, if you haven’t already, to start embracing CSS 3 (avoid images altogether with gradients, shadows and rounded corners in CSS 3), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for resolution independent graphics and of course @media queries to serve high-res background images.

For more on detecting and developing for high resolution displays, check out these posts from around the web:

• Media Query & Asset Downloading Tests — Want to know how you can avoid the double image load tax Apple is paying? Tim Kadlec has the tests and results for a variety of methods.
• Optimising for High Pixel Density Displays. — Menacing Cloud’s take on optimizing for the iPhone 4 retina display.
• Mobile Web in High Resolution — Brad Birdsall’s take on bringing half pixel borders to high resolution devices
• Resolution Independence With SVG — David Bushell tackles SVG over at Smashing Magazine.
• Notes on Adaptive Images (yet again!) — Opera’s Bruce Lawson rounds up problems and solutions facing anyone trying to serve up different images based on screen size.

Webmonkey

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In a blog post titled “Google bypassing user privacy settings” Microsoft’s IE Corporate Vice President Dean Hachamovitch states that “When the IE team heard that Google had bypassed user privacy settings on Safari, we asked ourselves a simple question: is Google circumventing the privacy preferences of Internet Explorer users too? We’ve discovered the answer is yes: Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.”

Hachamovitch explains that IE’s default configuration blocks third-party cookies unless presented with a “P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences Project) Compact Policy Statement” indicating that the site will not use the cookie to track the user. Microsoft accuses Google of sending a string of text that tricks the browser into thinking the cookie won’t be used for tracking. “By sending this text, Google bypasses the cookie protection and enables its third-party cookies to be allowed rather than blocked,” Microsoft said.

The text allegedly sent by Google actually reads “This is not a P3P policy” and includes a link to a Google page which says cookies used to secure and authenticate Google users are needed to store user preferences, and that the P3P protocol “was not designed with situations like these in mind.”

Microsoft said it has contacted Google to ask the company to “commit to honoring P3P privacy settings for users of all browsers.” Microsoft also updated the Tracking Protection Lists in IE9 to prevent the tracking described by Hachamovitch in the blog post. Ars has contacted Google to see if the company has any response to the Microsoft allegations, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

UPDATE: It turns out Facebook and many other sites are using an almost identical scheme to override Internet Explorer’s privacy setting, according to privacy researcher Lorrie Faith Cranor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Companies have discovered that they can lie in their [P3P policies] and nobody bothers to do anything about it,” Cranor wrote in a recent blog post.

UPDATE 2: Google has gotten back to us with a lengthy reply, arguing that Microsoft’s reliance on P3P forces outdated practices onto modern websites, and points to a study conducted in 2010 (the Carnegie Mellon research from Cranor and her colleagues) that studied 33,000 sites and found about a third of them were circumventing P3P in Internet Explorer.

“Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (known as ‘P3P’) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form,” Google Senior VP of Communications and Policy Rachel Whetstone says in a statement e-mailed to Ars. “It is well known—including by Microsoft—that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality.”

Facebook’s “Like” button, the ability to sign into websites using your Google account “and hundreds more modern web services” would be broken by Microsoft’s P3P policy, Google says. “It is well known that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing this web functionality,” Whetstone said. “Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational.”

That 2010 research even calls out Microsoft’s own msn.com and live.com for providing invalid P3P policy statements. The research paper further states that “Microsoft’s support website recommends the use of invalid CPs as a work-around for a problem in IE.”

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

Webmonkey

To upgrade your servers to the latest release, head over to the Apache HTTP Server Project and download a copy of Apache 2.4.

Much of the focus in Apache 2.4 is on performance. The Apache Software Foundation blog touts reduced memory usage and better concurrency among the improvements in this release. Apache 2.4 also offers better support for asynchronous read/write operations and much more powerful Multi-Processing Module (MPM) support. Multiple MPMs can now be built as loadable modules at compile time and the MPM of choice can be configured at run time, making Apache 2.4 considerably more flexible than its predecessors.

There have also been numerous updates for Apache’s various modules, as well as a host of new modules that are available with this release — including mod_proxy_fcgi, a FastCGI protocol backend for mod_proxy.

For a complete rundown of everything that’s new in Apache 2.4, be sure to check out the documentation.

Webmonkey

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

In the recent kerfuffle over the prevalence of the -webkit CSS prefix and the lack of corresponding prefixes for other browsers, we told you that the problem was with developers, not WebKit browsers. Instead of writing code that will work in any browser many developers are coding exclusively for WebKit and that’s a problem.

But mobile expert Peter-Paul Koch, better known in the web developer community as just PPK, argues that the real problem is not WebKit, nor is it even web developers’ fascination with WebKit. The real problem is the developer-created monoculture of the iPhone.

According to Koch, “web developers don’t care about WebKit…. They care about the iPhone.”

The interesting thing about Koch’s argument is that he doesn’t claim there is actually a monoculture of the iPhone on the web. In fact, he cites some of Mozilla’s web crawler stats which seem to say just the opposite. Instead Koch believes the problem is in our heads, so to speak.

“What we have here is an iPhone monoculture; not in the stats, but in web developers’ minds,” writes Koch. “This is the fundamental problem we must address.”

The cure, says Koch, is to diversify tutorials and examples. “Start talking about testing in mobile non-WebKit browsers (i.e., Opera),” he writes. “Start talking about other platforms besides iPhone (and Android). Start talking about mobile diversity, instead of showing the iPhone over and over and over again.” What do you do if the only phone you have to test on is the iPhone? Well, there are emulators available for most phones, including Opera’s very powerful mobile emulator which can simulate all kinds of phones and connections. And don’t forget that Opera Mini is available for the iPhone if you’d like to at least test your site in something other than Mobile Safari.

Webmonkey