Microsoft released Windows Server (“Blue”) to MSDN subscribers today, ahead of the BUILD (#bldwin) conference later this week in San Francisco. The build provides us a number of clues as to what we will see in the official Windows 8.1 (Blue) preview. The server build number is 9341, the windows 8.1 preview build will be: 6.3.9431.winmain_bluemp.130615-1214. IE11 scores 351/500 + 2 bonus point, and 25/25 for WebGL. Since this is a server build, the score may be a little higher than IE11 on Win 8.1, but this confirms WebGL for IE11. IE11 WebGL Conformance Test Results: 14,748 of 20,509 tests pass (71.9%). Many things seen in the Server 2012 R2 preview will also show up in the Windows 8.1 preview.

Most of this information comes via Robert McLaws, a MSDN subscriber and .NET developer:

IE11 About Dialog

Start Menu/Taskbar Options; Includes options to shut down from Start button and disable hot corners:

New Hyper-V, device redirection is called “Enhanced Session Mode

IE 11 option to add a website to your Apps list

New options for how IE 11 behaves when you open it: New session or previous session

New IE11 option to enable “Flip ahead with page prediction

IE11 allow you to turn off the SmartScreen filter right in the download UI

IE11 SPDY/3 confirmed

Other IE11 options

The new DOM Explorer in IE11 Dev Tools

IE11 Dev Tools Console

IE11 Debugger

Network Tab

UI Responsiveness Report

Script Profiler

Memory Monitor

Emulation with User Agent Strings

DOM Explorer shows the computed DOM, not the transferred DOM

DOM Change Highlighting: http://screencast.com/t/F18m0GyJb3Qb

Source: @RobertMclaws

Image Credits: Robert McLaws