Microsoft celebrates the Beauty of the Web with Internet Explorer 9 And kicks off The Wuglies competition.
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Microsoft New Zealand today announced the Beta version of Internet Explorer 9 is available worldwide. The launch is accompanied by new web experiences from some of the world’s top sites. Ready for immediate public download, Internet Explorer 9 is set to deliver a fast, clean and trusted browsing experience and takes full advantage of Windows 7 to put the focus on the sites and applications people care about. The innovations in Internet Explorer 9, which make full use of the power of modern PCs, will bring richer and more immersive web experiences to customers that make their favourite sites and applications feel more like native Windows apps.
Internet Explorer 9 will help transform the capabilities of the web. With Windows and Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft has reimagined the role of the browser to deliver an experience that makes your web feel as native as your favourite PC applications, enabling a more beautiful, immersive, and compelling web experience. It will enable a version of the web that, by default, feels faster, cleaner, and more trusted.
Microsoft New Zealand Windows Business Group Lead, Ben Green, believes that the technology advances in Internet Explorer 9 will bring the web to life. “People spend most of their time on a PC in a web browser. So what we’re doing with IE9 is engineering it in such a way that it can take full advantage of all the latent processing power found under the hood of today’s PCs. By doing this, websites will be able to look and feel just like a native Windows application”.
“Internet Explorer 9 is also the first browser to be fully hardware accelerated” he says. “We’re harnessing the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and reallocating much of the graphic processing to the GPU instead of the CPU. In short, Internet Explorer 9 unlocks the 90% of the PC’s power that previously web browsers didn’t take advantage of and allows people to fully enjoy the richness and beauty of the web”.
By removing the obstacle of performance, Microsoft is also able to place the focus squarely back on the content people want to reach. The completely redeveloped Internet Explorer 9 interface expands on this notion to provide the cleanest, most uncluttered web browsing experience yet.
“We call this being site-centric, rather than browser-centric” says Green. “The beauty of the web lies in the content itself, so when we set out to design Internet Explorer 9, we made sure our entire approach concentrated on connecting people to the web — in effect, we want the browser to fade into the background so people can get on and thoroughly engage in all the web has to offer.”
Some major websites are already taking advantage of the new capabilities of Internet Explorer 9, these partners were showcased at today’s launch event in San Francisco;
· The top four social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Netlog
· Twitter, the largest real-time information-sharing service
· The No. 1 sites for retail (Amazon.com), auction (eBay) and entertainment information (IMDB)
· Leading sites in news (CNN, USA Today), search (Bing), travel (Orbitz), movies (Flixster), multimedia (Hulu), music (Gorillaz) and photos (Photobucket)
This group collectively reach over 800 million visitors daily, their innovations can be experienced at www.beautyoftheweb.com.
There’s plenty to get excited about behind the scenes too. With Internet Explorer 9 Microsoft has provided the means by which web developers can let loose their creative juices thanks to extensive support for both existing and emerging industry standards including HTML5, SVG, CSS3, and COM. These provide a new set of capabilities and mean that developers can write one set of markup and know that it will work and look the same in all modern browsers.
Darren Wood, senior user interface designer at Auckland-based digital agency Marker and an active member of the Web Standards Group, says Internet Explorer 9 allows his company to build websites that can be viewed as they were really intended.
“The IE9 team has clearly been listening to developers and users alike. Web standards, security and performance have been the main focus and I'm totally stoked to see such a great advance in this ubiquitous browser. IE9's support for web standards, like HTML5 and CSS3, is for me the most outstanding feature” he says.
In the spirit of raising expectations for a better web, Microsoft New Zealand is celebrating the launch of Internet Explorer 9 locally with a tongue-in-cheek competition that sets out to find New Zealand’s ugliest website. Launching today, The Wuglies asks people to nominate and vote on the country’s ugliest websites. The “winning” website will be offered a free website makeover courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand, and everyone who nominates or votes at www.thewuglies.co.nz will have a chance to win an HP DV6 notebook powered by Windows 7 so they can fully enjoy Internet Explorer 9 and the web in all its glory.
“Over the past few years the Internet has undergone some significant changes”, says Ben Green. “Thanks to the proliferation of things like online video, rich web applications and social networking sites, the web has gone from being a useful tool, to a thoroughly personalised experience through which people are able to socialise, work and play. Thanks to the power of Windows 7 and the clean, fast and trusted environment Internet Explorer 9 creates, we believe everyone can unlock the beauty of the web and all it has to offer.”
Find out more at www.beautyoftheweb.com.