The browser offers CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets) capabilities and accelerated graphics. "We're hard at work on IE10 on some forward-looking things," said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division at Microsoft, during a presentation Wednesday at the Mix11 conference in Las Vegas. Company officials demonstrated the IE10 platform preview, featuring video, CSS3 gradients, and 3D transforms. The preview, which was shown running on a machine running an ARM processor, also boasted faster SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), CSS3 Flexible Box Layout capabilities, and ECMAscript 5 Strict language improvements.

Microsoft is about three weeks into the development of IE10. The preview is available at the site, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft corporate vice president of Internet Explorer. He also stressed Microsoft's adherence to "native HTML5," which is , which was "You and your site can take advantage of that today and deliver significantly better browser experiences." Native HTML, Hachamovitch said, means "that you really use the language to take advantage of the underlying OS" and leverage hardware acceleration.

Updates to the IE10 platform preview are planned for every eight to 12 weeks. No specific time was offered for a general release of the browser. Hachamovitch acknowledged the browser upgrades at user sites can be a slow process. He cited an example of a hospital nuclear imaging system he was aware of that still used IE6. "Sometimes, the old versions just take a while to go away. "

Despite's Microsoft's emphasis on HTML5, seen as a rival to the company's proprietary Silverlight rich Internet application plug-in, also is due to be released at the conference. But in touting HTML5, Hachamovitch stressed it offers capabilities previously requiring a plug-in. "Native HTML5 support within Windows in IE9 makes a huge difference in what these sites can do."