What is flip-ahead, in the Windows 8 Modern UI version of Internet Explorer 10?
The description simply says:
Flip Ahead Turn on flip ahead to go to the next page on a site. Your browsing history will be sent to Microsoft to improve how flip ahead works.
"Flip ahead" feature only works in Metro IE. It allows you to quickly and easily go to next page in a website which you are browsing by either swiping across the screen or clicking on forward button which is shown in the middle-right area of screen.
Enhanced touch browsing: In the Release Preview, IE10’s Metro style experience offers a new way of browsing multi-page and sequenced content. Flip ahead enables you to navigate your favorite sites like you read a magazine by replacing the need to click on links with a more natural forward swipe gesture on touch-centric devices (and forward button with mouse). Imagine flipping through a multi-page New York Times article, through product listings on Amazon or eBay, or quickly catching up on the latest news by flipping through CNN.com, all by simply swiping forward without hunting for the "Next" link on the page.
You can swipe to flip ahead to next page listings without hunting for the “next” link.
Transitioning to next page is fast and fluid with touch.
Once you turn on Flip Ahead, you can swipe through content spread across multiple pages to go to the next page within the same article, post or thread. When browsing sequenced content, such as blogs or news sites, and whenever you've reached the end of your multi-page content, flip ahead will suggest an appropriate next article, post or thread to continue your exploration. Using Flip Ahead requires end user opt-in, and sends your browsing history to Microsoft to improve the quality of the experience.
It's a new feature for navigating IE pages. A good description from this page - Windows 8 Release Preview detailed impressions, under the "Web browsing" section:
Though many of the changes here amount to stability improvements or fit-and-finish tweaks, the Metro version of IE has actually benefited from an honest-to-goodness new feature. It's called "Flip ahead," and it uses crowd-sourcing to figure out what page you're most likely to click on next. Then, instead of clicking on it, you can either swipe the screen or click the onscreen forward arrow to advance.
Flip Ahead is a new feature that allows you to use a gesture (a swipe across the screen) to flip between articles or web pages using either data sourced from other users browsing or based on support built into a website (via a <link rel="next" href="example.html" /> meta tag).
The new MSN which has just been launched supports this feature so you can try it out there.
