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Internet Explorer 11 brings even more default and custom touch support for your sites and Windows Store apps.

IE11 on Windows 8.1 features enhanced support for consumers on touch-based devices, including default handling for touch-based drag and drop, hover, and active link highlighting.

For developers, IE11 introduces the msZoomTo method for animated scrolling effects and brings even more fine-tuned control of the panning and zooming experience on your site or Windows Store app.

IE11 also includes several updates to Pointer Events, to align the Windows Internet Explorer implementation with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Pointer Events specification, which has now reached Candidate Recommendation stage.

Datalist improvements

IE11 provides a touch-optimized user experience for the HTML5 datalist element introduced in Internet Explorer 10. When you use it with a datalist, the input control now provides a touch-friendly UI with ample room for each option as a hit target, consistent with the touch-optimized select control experience introduced in Internet Explorer 10.

Drag and drop

IE11 introduces native support for touch-based HTML5 drag and drop. Just as Internet Explorer provides basic touch support by default, most existing sites using HTML5 drag and drop should “just work” with a press, hold, and drag user interaction pattern.

Important  This feature is not supported in IE11 on Windows 7.

 

For more info, see "Drag and drop touch support".

Hover

IE11 on Windows 8.1 has built-in touch support for common UX scenarios requiring hover, like hover menus, via a press and hold user interaction pattern.

Important  This feature is not supported in IE11 on Windows 7.

 

For more details, see "Hover touch support".

When you tap on a link in IE11, you’ll see improved highlighting, which provides a faster, more accurate visual indication of what your touch targeted on the page. This experience on Windows 8.1 is now similar to that of Windows Phone 8. In IE11, link highlighting:

  • Applies to both linked text and images
  • Only applies to touch (in Internet Explorer 10, link highlights also applied to mouse)
  • Doesn't impact the CSS on your page

If you'd rather not use link highlighting, you can specify the following meta tag on your page:

<meta name="msapplication-tap-highlight" content="no" />

This disables touch tap link highlighting on both IE11 on Windows 8.1 and Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8.

Important  This feature is not supported in IE11 on Windows 7.

 

Pointer Events

To comply with the Candidate Recommendation of the W3C Pointer Events specification, the IE11 implementation has changed slightly from that of Internet Explorer 10.

For the complete details, see "Pointer Events updates".

Scrolling and zooming

IE11 builds on the support of the fine-tuned control of scrolling and zooming with touch introduced in Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 with support for other input types (such as touchpad, mouse, and keyboard) and with a new method for animated scrolling and zooming effects.

Important  This feature is not supported in IE11 on Windows 7.

 

For more info, see "Scrolling and zooming with touch and other inputs".