Microsoft launched the fifth IE10 platform preview last week as part of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The next major version of Microsoft's Web browser is a big step forward that will bring a wide range of modern features, advanced rendering capabilities, and greatly improved support for Web standards. After years of complacency and lagging behind other browsers, Internet Explorer is becoming highly competitive.

As Microsoft explained this week in a blog entry about the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, the operating system uses the same HTML rendering engine in both the Internet Explorer Web browser and as part of the Metro application runtime. Microsoft hopes to ensure that its HTML rendering engine is capable of supporting rich application-like user experiences.

In a second blog entry, Microsoft outlined some of the major new features that were introduced in the latest IE10 platform preview build. These include JavaScript typed arrays, cross-origin resource sharing, support for the latest WebSockets API, and Web Worker thread pooling. Microsoft says that it has also worked to improve performance in areas like animated CSS transformations.

Microsoft has also launched an IE10 "test drive" demo site to show off some of the advanced capabilities of the browser. One of the demos is a pong-style brick breaker game with smooth animations.

HTML5 bullets

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview was one of the biggest events this past week, but there were plenty of other noteworthy items to round out our HTML5 bullet list:

Mozilla's Hacks blog has a great new tutorial that demonstrates how Web applications can use IndexedDB, a standards-based NoSQL database for the browser, to store images and files. Mozilla also recently posted some sample JavaScript code that shows how to make a call and send SMS messages on Boot2Gecko devices.

WebKit gained support for the JavaScript vibration API, a feature that could be useful in mobile Web applications.

Programmer Jeff Atwood recently wrote a blog post advocating universal adoption of SSL encryption on websites where users are logged in. In his blog post, he looks at some of the performance and security implications.

We took a look at Firefox's new HTML inspector in our report about Firefox 10 last month. That feature is just the start of the browser's new built-in developer tool suite. Web developer Andi Smith has published a detailed overview of other features that are coming soon. You can also see a video tour on YouTube.

An open source software project called Guacamole is developing an HTML5 remote desktop client that can run entirely within a Web browser without requiring any browser plugins. It currently supports VNC and aims to offer near-native performance.

Ben Galbraith did a deep dive into how Netflix uses HTML5 to build its application user experiences.

Crumbs from the cookie jar

In case you missed it, here's the biggest developing story that we reported about the open Web this week:

Mozilla and Telefónica announced that they partnered to develop the Boot2Gecko project into a complete mobile operating system that will be deployed later this year on hardware. Be sure to check out our extensive coverage of the platform.