Microsoft recently released consumer preview (beta) version of Windows 8 for public. This build includes Internet Explorer Platform Preview 5 with lots of HTML5 goodness and improved performance.

As Microsoft announced earlier, Windows 8 has one common browser engine to power two different versions of Internet Explorer 10: desktop version and Metro style version. The Metro version of IE 10 will be free from plug-ins and takes advantage of modern web standards like HTML5 and CSS3. The same engine will be available to metro apps as well.

Microsoft suggests webmasters to follow open standards and avoid using out-of-date libraries, “We also recommend that developers use feature, not browser, detection. Often, the compatibility problem reports we receive have more to do with sites detecting IE and sending it different content than they send other browsers than any particular issue in IE.”.

This is the biggest change in Microsoft’s strategy for IE. The company has already decided to update IE automatically which will ensure that the users receive latest security fixes faster.

Microsoft has also released a guide for web developers (available here) describing latest features and documentation for IE10 and Metro style apps.