14 DAY TRIAL // Windows Phone 8.1 sure comes with quite a lot of improvements, but some are less visible to users and are made under the hood for better performance, stability, and security.
One of the changes that Microsoft made in Windows Phone 8.1 concerns the HTML5 support, so Internet Explorer can now provide a superior browsing experience even on smartphones.
Audio and video elements are now fully supported on Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft says adding that inline playback of video and adaptive streaming also work flawlessly on its smartphones.
“These new features provide Web site developers the tools they need to provide compelling media experiences, and make IE an ideal browser for mobile media applications,” the company says.
No plug-in required for playing videos on WP 8.1
HTML5 support is a must have if you really want to make the most of your device when browsing the web, and playing YouTube videos, for example, would really be a nightmare without it. Flash has never worked smoothly on mobile devices, so HTML5 is pretty much the best and the only way to go.
Microsoft claims that on Windows Phone 8.1, everyone can play HTML5 videos without the need for any other plug-in and that’s indeed true. Watching online clips on a Lumia 1520 is indeed a real pleasure and everything runs smoothly without any playback issues whatsoever if the Internet connection is good enough to handle the loading process.
“Multiple audio elements can play simultaneously on a single page, making it possible to use HTML5 audio with games or interactive Web apps. And video playback works on a 512MB device. This is a mobile browser, after all!” Redmond explained.
At the same time, Internet Explorer brings on Windows Phone 8.1 technologies that were previously available only on the desktop, including Media Source Extensions and Closed Captioning using the W3C TTML Simple Delivery profile.
“With it, sites will be able to deliver adaptive streaming videos using the same MPEG-DASH framework to Windows Phone 8.1 devices,” the software giant said.
Inline and full-screen video playback also works amazingly well on Windows Phone 8.1, and Microsoft says that it worked specifically to make it easier to play a clip straight in the page you loaded.
“Inline video is a great fit for Web pages where video is accompanied by other content that users may want to view while the video is playing. Or sites might want to use a video element to play an animation within the context of other content. These scenarios are easily possible on Windows Phone 8.1 using inline video playback coupled with the HTML5 Video attributes such as controls, mute, autoplay and loop,” the company added.
And still, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Internet Explorer is the right browser for every Windows Phone 8.1 user.
There still are a few glitches to be addressed and we also came across some font rendering problems on certain websites, but Microsoft most likely knows about them and will probably fix them in the coming OS updates.
