Today, Rob Mauceri, the group program manager for Internet Explorer, authored a post on Building Windows 8 blog describing the web browsing experience in Windows 8 Consumer Preview with Internet Explorer 10. In this post Rob explains how Microsoft has enhanced the user experience to suit the new metro style used in Windows 8.

The Metro style web browser

IE10’s user experience is exclusively built around all the Metro style design patterns which makes it to be fast and fluid for even the most intense everyday browsing. The interface and controls are designed to be there if and when required. Along-with this additional design improvements include: touch keyboard support for forms, integrated spell checking with AutoCorrect, finding text on the page, etc. The user experience follows Metro style patterns and conventions for personality, animations, and command activation and support for Windows 8 charms, snap, and more.

Navigation tiles are designed to help you find and navigate to sites immediately using the site’s icon and color while minimizing your typing. IE shows you frequently visited sites as well as sites that you’ve pinned to the Start screen. As you type in the address bar, the navigation tiles filter to show you sites from your history, favorites and even popular URLs. With Windows 8 roaming and connected accounts, your browsing history and favorites roam with you so that you can easily access recent webpages across all of your PCs.

Tabs: Browsing multiple web pages is core to any good web experience. The Metro style tab switcher appears when you swipe in from the bottom or top of the screen with touch, right-click with the mouse, or press Windows key+Z on the keyboard:

Connecting websites and apps in the Metro style

Snap makes it easy to use Windows 8 for more than one thing at a time. You can browse in IE10 and have side-by-side access to your mail, music, or any other application.

Charms provide a consistent way to perform common actions like searching and sharing in Windows 8. IE10 supports the Search, Share, Devices, and Settings charms.

With site pinning, you can personalize your Windows Start screen with the sites you use all the time. You can pin any website to the Start screen from IE10, so you have one place to access all the things you care about or need.

Protecting you from malicious web

IE10 offers the same industry leading security, privacy, and reliability features, building on IE9’s SmartScreen, XSS filtering, Application Reputation, InPrivate browsing, Tracking Protection, and hang detection and recovery. In addition, IE10 takes advantage of Windows 8 to provide “Enhanced Protected mode” for better isolation of website content in each tab.

Summary of changes from the Developer Preview

IE10 in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview brings a more full-featured Metro style experience to your browsing. Here are just some of the improvements to IE10 for fast and fluid browsing:

• Full, independent composition enables responsive, fast and fluid behavior on real websites (including pages with fixed elements, nested scrolling regions, animations, and video)
• Back and forward swipe navigation with preview
• Double-tap to zoom in on content
• Fast back and forward navigation controls for mouse
• Mouse (CTRL+scroll wheel) and keyboard methods for quickly zooming in and out to mirror touch interactions
• Automatic domain suggestions for faster navigation and less typing
• Share charm support for URLs, snippets, images and selection with Mail and other apps
• Search charm with visual search suggestions
• Devices charm for printing, projecting, and playing video to external devices like TVs
• Plug-in free support: notifications for sites requiring activeX
• Background notifications for pinned sites and other tile improvements
• Jumplists for pinned sites
• InPrivate tabs that are easier to open
• Clean up tabs command, which quickly closes all but current tab

We can expect more improvements by the time the operating system hits the final release in the last quarter.