Despite the gains made by Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, Internet Explorer is still the most popular web browser and Microsoft hopes to keep it that way.
To that end, Microsoft on Wednesday released a "preview version" of the next incarnation of the browser for Windows 7, IE 11. Microsoft says IE 11 runs 30% faster than other browsers, according to benchmark tests.
This browser has many of the features of the IE for Windows 8.1. For instance, it supports multi-touch gestures. While there's scant few Windows 7 touch PCs out there, this will be helpful for enterprises buying new Windows 8 touch PCs and "downgrading" the operating system to Windows 7, which their enterprise licenses allows them to do.
The browser has some new features for developers, too, like support for something called F12 developer tools, which helps Web developers analyze their HTML code. Plus, it supports a Web standard called WebGL for 3D graphics.