Microsoft has made the preview version of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 available to download.
Group programme managers for Internet Explorer, Sandeep Singhal and Rob Mauceri, said in a blog post the latest version of the browser was even faster than the developer preview unveiled earlier this year.
"Performance matters to everyone who browses the web," they said. "The IE11 Release Preview for Windows 7 includes additional performance tuning so that real-world sites download and display fast and are highly responsive and interactive."
They said improvements made to the Chakra JavaScript engine within IE11 had made it faster than Firefox and Chrome.
"Internet Explorer 11 advances the performance leadership of our JavaScript engine, Chakra, while ensuring compatibility, interoperability, and security," the pair wrote.
"As we improve performance for real-world sites, IE11's JavaScript performance on benchmarks like WebKit SunSpider continues to lead compared with latest version of other browsers."
On Windows 7, the latest version of IE was nine per cent faster than IE10 and five per cent faster than the IE11 Developer Preview. They claimed the browser was also 30 per cent faster than Google's Chrome browser.
The update also includes a raft of updates to support new web standards, such as pointer events, which makes sure sites can support mouse, pen and touch inputs. IE11 is already available to users on Windows 8.1.
It also adds new user controls for the Standard Delivery Profile for Closed Captioning. With the new control, accessible from the Internet Options menu, users can customise how captions appear in the browser, even overriding the default styling provided by the video source.
The completed version of IE11 for Windows 7 is expected by the end of this year. The release preview can be downloaded here.
