You still haven’t upgraded to Internet Explorer 9 yet?  That’s old hat anyway, IE10 is being shown off and in fact it is being used to showcase more than just browser enhancements. 

Yesterday at a conference you have probably never heard of, Microsoft demonstrated the changes to the world of Internet Explorer with the upcoming IE10 iteration to developers.  Improved HTML5 support and performance enhancements even over the current best Google Chrome browser were just part of the story though; thankfully they had a little surprise for the hardware junkies as well.

IE10 shown running on Windows 8 with NVIDIA Tegra - Mobile 4
 


While you are indeed looking at a version of IE10, the real surprise is that you are looking at it on a new version of Windows: what most people are calling Windows 8 but what Microsoft calls "The Next Windows". 

IE10 shown running on Windows 8 with NVIDIA Tegra - Mobile 5


Check out the processor at work here, an "ARM Family 7 Model C09 Revisoin 100" running at a slick 1.0 GHz.  NVIDIA, describing the events on stage, confirms that this indeed an ARM-based version of the NVIDIA Tegra SoC product that we saw make a splash at CES in January.  With the announcement at CES that Microsoft was going to port the next iteration on the consumer Windows OS to ARM processors, we knew this was eventually going to happen, but the expediency of seeing something on it this week was interesting.

IE10 shown running on Windows 8 with NVIDIA Tegra - Mobile 6
Slide from NVIDIA’s CES 2011 Press Conference


While we can only speculate about the timing, we wonder how far along Microsoft is with Windows 8 and the ARM port of such an OS.  By demonstrating IE10 on it, obviously an integral part of the new operating system, MS might be giving us a subtle hint that things are closer than you might expect.  I know that getting Windows on ARM-based tablets and notebooks would mean a more consumer friendly transition to ARM designs and I also know that if NVIDIA has anything to do with it, this release will be soon.