Microsoft's Windows 8 Consumer Preview turns two weeks old today and Microsoft has started to dig into the security and feature improvements of the company's Internet Explorer 10 browser. With Google and Mozilla both promising their own Windows 8 Metro style browsers, Microsoft has placed a lot of focus on its touch, performance, and security improvements for the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10.

Simple usability improvements include swiping backwards and forwards (with a touch screen) in the browser to mimic the back / forward buttons typically found in a traditional browser. Mouse users can find the web transport controls to the side of the Metro IE10 interface. Microsoft is also taking advantage of its new Metro tile look and feel, with navigation tiles for frequently visited and pinned sites available within the browser. Outside of IE10 Metro, Windows 8 users can also pin sites to the Metro Start Screen. Pinned sites will include a site's color and favicon and can even provide background notifications for new messages and other activity from a website.

Microsoft's security improvements for Internet Explorer 10 include an "Enhanced Protected Mode" sandbox, for what the company describes as better isolation of website content in each tab. InPrivate browsing has also been extended to run per-tab rather than per-session and Microsoft is using a new ForceASLR option in IE10 to randomize the location of all modules loaded into memory by the browser. The protection has been added to the Windows 8 kernel and will be back ported to Windows 7 as an update for Internet Explorer 10 on that particular platform.