Microsoft has released the first platform preview for Internet Explorer 10, less than a month after the launch its much-hyped Internet Explorer 9 browser.

The technology giant unveiled IE10 earlier today at its Mix11 developer conference in Las Vegas. The preview, which is now available for download, isn’t a reinvention of the browser (Microsoft’s goal with IE9), but rather a continuation of the work it did in hardware acceleration, HTML5 and CSS3.

Windows 8 Aero Light UI Revealed

We are seeing more leaks of upcoming Windows 8 screenshots in the past month than in the whole year before. It is not clear what caused the increase in leaks, could be additional beta testers, that new features have been integrated recently or that Microsoft’s Guerrilla marketing campaign has started.
The latest leak shows three screenshots of a new Aero Light interface. It is not clear yet if the interface will make it in this form into the final product, but it could be that the interface will be succeeding the Aero Basic interface of Windows 7.

Windows 8 Going out to OEM’s?

While Windows 7 has been an overwhelming success with over 300 million copies sold in 2010, it hasn’t stopped Microsoft from working on Windows 8. Now comes notice that Windows 8 may be further along than thought. Why so? Because Microsoft  has begun to distribute early copies of Windows 8 to special OEM partners.

Windows 8 To Add History Vault?

Windows has had backup utilities for years in many different forms and functions. Based on screenshots supposedly from new internal builds of Windows 8, Winrumors is reporting a new feature for backing up your PC called History Vault.
Little can be gleaned from the screenshot, but it is reported that this is a feature which will rival OSX’s Time Machine. Many believe this to be a copied feature from OSX, but when you consider that History vault is supposedly built on Shadow Copy which was a feature in Vista, which was released before Time Machine, I would say this is more of an iteration on technology already present in Windows than a copy. What we may see is a new interface which might be more user-friendly, similar to Time Machine for OSX.

Windows 8 Aero Requirements, Updated Desktop Window Manager

to the Internet. The latest three screenshots have been posted by Winreview, a Russian news site. According to their information the Windows 8 rendering engine has been changed so that the Desktop Window Manager may use software rendering instead of hardware rendering which means that Windows Aero will run on many low end computer systems thanks to this change.

Microsoft seems to have removed the blur effect from all windows and all builds. The window borders are still semi-transparent but they are not blurred anymore.

Windows 8 Aero Auto-Colorization

The next new feature of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system has been revealed: Windows Aero Auto-Colorization. What does it mean? It basically means that Aero will change the colorization of Windows automatically based on the underlying color. If you have green background, for instance a green desktop wallpaper, then the window color will also be set to colors in that spectrum.
The same is true for other colors. The change is accessible in the Personalization > Windows Color menu. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how the new menu looks like.

Possible Windows App Store Screenshots Leaked

We’ve heard rumors that Microsoft is working on an App Store model codenamed “Jupiter” for their upcoming release of Windows 8. Very little is known about the app store, but small bits have started to leak about Microsoft’s plan for the new app model.
Cnbeta posted screenshots this morning of the supposed App Store running in Windows 7. The screenshots have not yet been confirmed, so take this with a grain of salt.