Exploring IE

Internet Explorer 10 is the Most Energy Efficient Browser on Windows 8

2013-06-05T17:40:45Z

On World Environment Day, we are proud to announce that Internet Explorer continues to be the most energy-efficient browser on Windows 8, according to the Center for Sustainable Energy Systems at Fraunhofer USA. When compared to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer uses up to 18% less energy. This means that if every Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox user in the United States switched to Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 for a year, the energy saved could power over 10,000 households in the United States for that year.

Fraunhofer USA Inc. tested Internet Explorer 10, Google Chrome 26 and Mozilla Firefox 21 for their energy consumption on Windows 8. For their study, researchers tested the browsers on desktop and laptop computers in several common scenarios including:

· Browsing the most popular websites in the United States.

· Playing video content through Adobe Flash.

· Playing video content through HTML5 video.

In the above scenarios, Internet Explorer 10 exhibited the lowest energy consumption. In some scenarios such as playing Adobe Flash video on laptop PCs, it was 18% more energy efficient than Google Chrome, and it was 17% more efficient than Mozilla Firefox in playing HTML5 video.

The 18% savings in energy consumption is significant. Consider that if every Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox user in the United States used Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 for a year, they would save over 120 million kWh in electricity!

^-This is enough energy to power 10,722 households in the United States for an entire year.¹

- This would eliminate the release of over 85,000 metric tons of Carbon Dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions.²

- This is the equivalent of reducing greenhouse emissions by consuming nearly 10 million less gallons of gasoline.

- This is equivalent to the carbon dioxide removed by growing nearly 2.2 million tree seedlings for 10 years.

Power consumption is an important, but often overlooked, consideration in building a modern browser. It is one of our objectives to lead the industry in power requirements because the more efficiently a browser uses power, the longer a user can enjoy the Web on a PC, the lower the electricity costs and the smaller the environmental impact.

Keeping this in mind, we follow several principles to lower power consumption with Internet Explorer:

· We focus on making Internet Explorer fast because the quicker a browser can perform an action, the less the power it will consume.

· We tap into modern PC hardware to accelerate Internet Explorer rendering because using the native graphics hardware decreases power consumption.

Every year, the World Environment Day campaign urges us to do our part and see the power of our collective actions on the environment. As computing becomes more mobile, the Internet more prevalent and an HTML5-based Web more pervasive, it’s important to remember that the browsers we use can have an impact on the environment. We encourage everyone – the industry, browser vendors, and users – to join us in decreasing our energy footprint.

Roger Capriotti

Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Notes:

1. Average annual electricity consumption for a US residential utility customers was 11,280kWh

2. From US Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator

Internet Explorer Reaches New Heights on the Web with Everest: Rivers of Ice

2013-05-29T04:00:00Z

Today in partnership with David Breashears and his non-profit, GlacierWorks, we are thrilled to announce Everest: Rivers of Ice. With help from the IE10 team, Microsoft Research and the developers at Pixel Lab, this project brings an immersive, multi-touch exploration platform to the web showcasing David's life of mountaineering, filmmaking and photography in the Himalayan region. Everest: Rivers of Icelets visitors travel the peaks and valleys of the Everest region through sweeping multi-touch HTML5 panoramas and rich interactive features that bring to life the peaks, valleys and glaciers from a never-before-seen bird’s eye view.

A renowned explorer, filmmaker and photographer, David began chronicling the changes to the glaciers of Mount Everest and the greater Himalayan region in 2007 when he first matched an iconic image taken in 1921 by explorer George Mallory. David’s photo revealed the stark changes occurred to this glacier during the 86 years since Mallory took his photo.

Today we bring the complete experience online to explore the changes happening in the region with a site built entirely in HTML5. Through the use of video, gigapixel images, comparative photography and hot spot overlays, the site allows you to explore Everest and its glaciers and valleys via a web platform built for touch and the modern web - letting you get up close to the mountain in ways never before thought possible. With this experience available on the web, over two billion people can now become explorers themselves!

“In 1983 after climbing Everest, I met Sir Edmund Hilary for the first time, and started a life-long friendship. Over the years, as I talked to him about my climbs and the pursuits of the summit, he said to me 'David, someday you will learn to turn your eyes from the summit and look into the valleys.' It took many years for me to understand that message. Over the past seven years, my non-profit GlacierWorks, has undertaken fourteen expeditions to the Greater Himalaya in order to document changes to the region’s glaciers and share them with the world,” explains David Breashears, explorer and filmmaker. “I started GlacierWorks to bring attention to the change I was seeing in this region I care about. The glaciers of the Greater Himalaya contribute to the water supply of billions of people; what happens in this region has a global impact. I am very excited to launch this project and give millions of people the opportunity to understand these important changes and also to explore Everest and the Himalaya.”

Explore the Himalayas with just a touch

Everest: Rivers of Ice allows anyone to become an explorer and, using IE10 - the only browser built for touch- a simple tap or pan lets you fly across panoramic views of Everest and zoom into images composed of billions of pixels to discover the region in beautiful detail. And there is no telling what you might discover while exploring the vast valleys and peaks of the mountain systems within.

Utilizing IE’s touch model, Everest: Rivers of Ice, also goes further by creating innovative and intuitive touch interactions like “draw and zoom.” If you want to explore an area, a peak or basecamp on the mountain, you simply draw a circle around a piece of the photo and the site will automatically zoom to what you want to explore. We think it is a fun and fastway to quickly dive into a few of the billions of pixels at your fingertips.

Using the web for the next generation of storytelling

David Breashears holds four National Emmys for his work in documentary filmmaking. Now with IE, he turns to the web to tell this critical story of what is happening to the glaciers in this region. Historically, story-telling has been a linear experience, with a defined beginning, end and content in-between dictated by what the director wants to show you. With Everest: Rivers of Ice we utilized the Microsoft Research platform Rich Interactive Narratives(RIN) to allow you not only to view amazing videos and hear directly from David, but also explore the gigapixel images, match photography and video vignettes at your own pace to discover the countless secrets David's powerful content reveals.

Building new experiences entirely in HTML5

Everest: Rivers of Icemakes extensive use of gigapixel panoramas to help you see the awe-inspiring scale of Everest and its glaciers like never before. These gigapixel panoramas are pieced together using HTML5-based RIN technology into a beautiful site. To create the incredible panoramas you see on the site, we used the multi-resolution, HTML5-based panorama viewer from Bing, which renders perspective corrected panoramas containing billions of pixels. Building on image-based rendering research from Microsoft Research, the viewer raises the bar on what a modern browser can do with technologies like CSS3 3D transforms and Canvas. Finally, RIN enables additional discovery and exploration by overlaying the panorama with hotspots that show more information in the form of HTML5 video, side-by-side image comparators and image galleries.

This experience wouldn’t be possible without the power of the standards-based web and a great touch browser like IE10. In order to create this site and help bring the web forward allowing more developers to build amazing cross browser websites, we worked closely with the ecosystem to create a standard for enabling touch on the web – Pointer Events. Available today in IE10 on Windows 8, Pointer Events was recently published by the W3C as a Candidate Recommendation specification, an important step towards interoperable support on the web.

Today’s launch is an exciting moment showcasing what is possible when cutting edge content from an explorer like David is combined with the power, reach and richness of the modern web and a modern browser like IE. So pick up your favorite Windows 8 device and scale Everest with just a touch.

Roger Capriotti

Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Building Internet Explorer 10: a Browser that is Perfect for Touch

2013-05-09T16:00:00Z

When you consider that browsing the web remains one of the most popular activities on a tablet, it’s surprising the experience isn’t better. People should expect more from the browsing experience on a tablet. Browsing speedhas been important to web users, but with the emergence of new form factors like tablets, browsing needs are more diverse than ever before. Page load time is now table stakes. For smaller, touch-enabled devices, the ability to browse the web quickly and effortlessly through an interface that is built for touch has become increasingly important to users. For these tablet users, the new browser performance benchmark is touch. Touch has become the new fast.

While most tablet browsers work with touch, they aren’t touch-first browsers. Simply adapting a desktop browser or smartphone browser to a touch device doesn’t create a great experience. When we started building IE10 we recognized that browsing on tablets had been relegated to second-class status, useable but in an underwhelming way when compared with apps. A recent study by Penn Schoen Berland showed that 8 out of 10 iPad users experienced an issue with the web – including broken functionality and difficulty navigating the page. These iPad users actually preferred using an app for the majority of common Web scenarios because they found the web browsing experience to be lacking.

As we built IE10, we were determined to bring a solution to users who were unhappy with their tablet browsing experience. We designed IE10 from the ground up to be the best browser for tablets, and most importantly, the best browser for touch. Touch is an area of technology that is ripe for innovation, and one that we invested heavily in for IE10 on Windows 8. We worked with partners to build sites like Contre Jour and The Hunger Games Explorerto showcase what a browser designed for touch can do. Take a look at the video below to hear directly from our engineering team about how they worked to set the new standard for touch browsing (and see the cool “magic fingers robot” that they use to test touch on tablets).

When we launched Windows 8 with IE10 on tablets, we believed we had built an entirely new Windows browser designed for touch. Some folks noticed how different Internet Explorer 10 on a Windows 8 tablet is.

In fact, a study by Mozaic Group showed that more than 8 out of 10 iPad users say they would be very likely to consider swapping their iPad for a Windows 8 tablet running Internet Explorer 10, if it meant having a better browsing experience.

Source: Mozaic Group’s study reports Internet Explorer 10 on a Windows 8 tablet improves the browsing and overall tablet experience enough to drive iPad users to consider switching (November 2012).

By looking at the IE user interface in a new light, we built features that make browsing with touch fast and fluid on Windows 8. We added features like flip ahead and multi-finger touch support, providing an amazing touch experience that rivals anything anyone has ever done with a browser on new devices. A performance study by Principled Technologies demonstrates how touch became the new fast for browsing as users could more quickly hit their favorite sites or do the most common web tasks with IE10 on a Windows 8 tablet.

Source: Principled Technologies reports that Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 is faster than Chrome on Android and Safari on iPad on common Web tasks (November 2012).

And while we believe that IE10 on Windows 8 is the best tablet browsing experience available today, we’re ever dedicated to ensuring that users can enjoy the Web on any browser they choose. Knowing how important web experiences and touch capabilities are to consumers, we continue to help developers create sites built for touch but that also work great with mouse, keyboard and pen. We are actively contributing to the standard work in this area, submitting Pointer Events to the W3Cto allow developers to write to one set of input mechanisms across mouse, pen and touch to ensure they work across all browsers and operating systems. From this, we’re really pleased to see how quickly Pointers has progressed towards a web standard, showing the value of IE’s support to help developers build innovative, touch-optimized sites.

IE10’s fast and fluid, touch browsing experience is different than anything that has been done with a browser on a tablet before, and different than any other browser on Windows. People who have used IE10 on Windows 8 agree and are voicing their enthusiasm for the entirely new Windows 8 browser. Try IE10 on your favorite Windows device today and see the difference, and if you are a developer check out some of the tools we’ve made available on GitHub, or Pointer Events samples available at WebPlatformto give your site the best touch interaction available on the web.

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Internet Explorer Brings New Web Experience to the Living Room with Xbox and DailyBurn

2013-05-01T13:11:00Z

On the Internet Explorer team we love the web, and we’re always looking for ways to make it better. Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with DailyBurn.com, which lets you make the most of the browser on your phone, tablet and IE for Xbox 360. DailyBurn allows users to sync their workouts, interact with personal trainers or track their nutrition goals across devices, all on the web. We’ve come to calling cross-device experiences, like our partnership with Daily Burn, the companion web. IE on Xbox 360 is one of the most popular browsers out today, and that great browsing experience just got better: to ensure all Xbox users have access to this new experience, we’ve worked with our friends on the Xbox team and DailyBurn to create some compelling offers:

· Starting today, May 1, all Xbox LIVE users will have one-month’s access to the IE for Xbox 360 app surf, explore and experience the web with sites like DailyBurn.

· Also starting today, DailyBurn is offering all users two months free access to all online workouts and nutritional advice and programs via IE on your Xbox 360 or PC.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen an explosion of scenarios where people are multi-tasking on one device while consuming content from another. In the US alone, 85% of smartphone and tablet owners are consistently using these devices as companion experiences to watching TV.Our partnership with DailyBurn is just the beginning of real-world examples popping up that demonstrate the potential of companion web scenarios. What’s valuable about the companion web is that you can use multiple devices simultaneously, or sequentially, with the end product always resulting in an increase in consumer interactivity.

For example, I’m a new dad and I love working out but don’t always have the time to go to the gym. Firing up DailyBurn via IE on my Xbox, and syncing my fitness goals to my Windows Phone or Windows 8 device, provides an easy way for me to track calories burned and interact with the trainers—all while completely engaged with my devices. We believe the companion web has many user scenario options, and this concept will fuel the next generation of interactive web experiences as tablets, smartphones and PCs are now a part of 93% American households.

Working with the DailyBurn team has brought Xbox fitness enthusiasts a new, exciting way to experience their workouts through IE and DailyBurn’s Get Fit for Summer Program.

“The Internet Explorer team understood our mission to bring a convenient and new experience online that allows our DailyBurn subscribers to achieve their fitness goals in an easy and convenient manner using the gadgets they love,” said Andy Smith, DailyBurn.com CEO, “The IE team’s initiative to move the web forward and partner with us to bring this experience to Xbox provides our fitness fans with just another option to stay active and live a healthy lifestyle.”

To give you a sense for what happens behind the scenes with Daily Burn on Xbox 360, here are a few technical backend details:

· When a user is about to start a new workout through the web, we open a new communication channel with the server. To connect a companion device to IE on the Xbox we use a QR code, which is effectively the same as typing in the URL that is also available and seen from the screen. Opening that address through a phone or tablet will connect the device in a handshake through the server to the Xbox.

· Once this happens, messages are sent frequently between the Xbox and the companion device to ensure that everything is synchronized based on the current status of the video.

The cool thing about building companion web experiences is that the developer is not tied to a specific platform or standard. For example, you can develop these sites using WebSockets for a faster communication if real-time updates is a requirement, or you could use a more traditional pulling system if reaching a broader audience is of importance, and the scenario can handle a delay of a few hundred milliseconds.

To check out the DailyBurn experience and see how IE can make this experience seamless and convenient across your favorite devices, check out the video below:

Now get off the couch, turn on your Xbox and get started on your DailyBurn workout!

Chewy Chong

Senior Product Manager—Developer Relations, Internet Explorer

Celebrating the Best of the Web with the Help of our Great Partners!

2013-04-24T18:58:59Z

On the IE team, we are humbled to have worked with a variety of partners to create beautiful, immersive experiences on the web like Atari, Contre Jour, Project Prometheus, Pulse, and viral videos like Child of the 90s. This year some of these efforts have been recognized for innovative work through awards at SXSW Interactive, and most recently, the Webby Awards!

The Webby Award nominations span a few categories, including: Best Online Commercial for Column Five’s work on the Child of the 90s video, Best Use of Animation or Motion in a website with Contre Jour, Best games website for Contre Jour and Atari, and best use of video or moving image for Project Prometheus. There’s only one day left to vote for these awesome experiences on the Web, so be sure to check out the nominations below and vote for your favorite!

For more context on some of our partnerships, here’s a quick rundown on a few of the Webby-nominated site experiences we’re proud to be part of:

· Atari: As you might remember last summer, we unveiled the Atari Arcade with the help of Grant Skinner and the team at Plain Concepts, bringing eight classic Atari games to life with IE10 and multi-touch. We’re excited that the Webby Awards loved it as much as fans did and nominated it for a Webby’s People’s Voice Award in the Best Games Website category.
Click HERE to cast your vote for Atari Arcade as Best Game Website.

· Child of the 90s: We had a lot of fun creating this video with Column Five. It went viral quickly collecting more than 28 million views since its launch three months ago! If you like it too as much as we do, click HERE to cast your vote for Best Online Commercial.

· Contre Jour: Back in October, we announced our work on the groundbreaking game, Contre Jour, where we brought a very ambitious use of HTML5 to the browser, and showcasing the most updated web standards. Contre Jour was a collaboration between the IE team, Clarity Consulting and Mokus Games, which has been nominated for two Webby Awards and was also recently honored at the SXSW Interactive Awards, where it was named Best of Show! Click HERE to cast your vote for Contre Jour as Best Game Website and HERE in the Best Use of Animation or Motion Graphics category.

· Project Prometheus: Last spring, we partnered with Fox Studios and Ignition Interactive to create the Project Prometheus Training Center, giving fans the chance to compete to be a crew member on the virtual Prometheus ship, built entirely in HTML5. The Webby Awards have nominated this website for Best Use of Video or moving image. Click HERE to cast your vote for Project Prometheus in the Best Use of Video or Moving Image category.

As you can imagine, all of our partners are excited to be nominated for such prestigious Internet awards. In particular, our friends at Mokus Games are flattered to be nominated:

“I’m excited and honored to have my work with Contre Jour recognized by the Webby’s, where I’m among great company of other beautiful sites and experiences on the web,” said Maksym (Max) Hryniv, Contre Jour creator. “The partnership with Internet Explorer really helped Contre Jour bring the story to life online, making for a beautiful and immersive experience on the web.”

Again, we want to congratulate our partners on their achievement as Honorees and Nominees of the 2013 Webby Awards and thank them for their great work in bringing beautiful and immersive experiences on the web with IE. Thank you to all those who have already shown their support to honor the nominees and truly make the Web a first-class experience! The winners of the People’s Voice vote and the prize winners will be announced next week on April 30^th. Stay tuned!

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Consumer Survey: 85% of Americans are concerned about their online privacy; far fewer take action

2013-04-22T10:26:00Z

At Microsoft, we take our responsibilities for protecting your privacy very seriously. It’s a priority across all our businesses, and an area where we continue to work closely with othersthroughout academia, government and industry. And while we don’t pretend to have all of the answers, we do want to help raise awareness for how you can have greater choice and control as you browse the web.

To that end, today we are launching a new consumer awareness campaign focused on online privacy, with resources at www.Microsoft.com/YourPrivacy. We want to help people learn more about the tools and technologies Microsoft provides that give them have greater control over personal information as they browse the web and use their favorite Microsoft devices. As part of this, we’re also launching an advertising campaign to kick start awareness and conversation. Here’s an example of the TV spot:

You can also take a new online quiz called Your Privacy Typeto help you discover your privacy tendencies and preferences, along with tips on how to turn your newfound awareness into action.

As important as privacy is to most of us when we’re asked, it can still be a complicated matter.

Very few of us believe that sharing some personal data online is a bad thing. It’s part of our everyday routines to fill out profiles, login to sites, and oftentimes provide personal information like our credit card or phone numbers in order to take advantage of all the web has to offer. In fact, the more personal and relevant the web gets, the better it can get.

Yet, at some point, we all draw a line where we are uncomfortable sharing more. And when we think we’re being tracked, particularly by those we may not have a direct relationship with, our tolerance drops. And while tracking isn’t bad per se, we typically reach our information-sharing breaking point with very personal data, like items related to our kids or our health. That said, everyone is unique when it comes to what we feel comfortable sharing with whom.

Providing customers with the tools and technology that allow you to have more choice and control is something Microsoft has been doing for quite some time, and today’s products like Internet Explorer, Windows, Xbox, and Outlook.com make it easier to manage and control your privacy.

As we look forward, the privacy conversations will certainly continue and evolve. It has been great to see those organizations that have come out in supportof our approach to privacy. Microsoft is committed to stay engaged with consumers as well as government, industry and consumer-advocacy partners to help better define the line between public and private while offering more controls through technology.

Ryan Gavin

General Manager, Windows

Internet Explorer Partners with The Hunger Games to Spark a Catching Fire Revolution on the Web

2013-04-15T03:32:00Z

With the second film in the blockbuster The Hunger Games franchise, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, set for release November 22, Internet Explorer has teamed up with Lionsgate to bring you The Hunger Games Explorer – the go-to destination and hub online for fans to get all the latest on The Hunger Gamesin an interactive and rich experience like nothing else on the web.

Whether you’re a superfan or not, it’s hard not to get excited about The Hunger Games: Catching Fire after seeing the trailer premiere at the MTV Movie Awards. Part of what makes The Hunger Gamesexperience so great is the devoted fan base of the books and movies, who have broken all sorts of social media records with their conversations about the beloved series.

Starting tonight with the global launch of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire trailer, fans can now visit The Hunger Games Explorer to be immersed in this world, track every development of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, including tweets, exclusive images and videos, and then share their thoughts and excitement with others around the world creating a global conversation. The Hunger Games Explorer lets fans explore the online world of The Hunger Gamesin a way they’ve never be able to before.

“We have the best fans in the world, and starting tonight they have a home on the web where they can be a part of The Hunger Games experience and contribute to the excitement for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” said Danielle De Palma, senior vice president digital marketing, Lionsgate. “The Hunger Games Explorer is not only a place for fans to spark the conversation around Catching Fire, it is also a destination for us to continue to provide fans with new content, experiences and unprecedented behind the scenes access.”

When a fan enters The Hunger Games Explorer, they can manipulate the site to customize The Hunger Games: Catching Fire info exactly how they want it – they can tailor and filter content in and out of their stream, pull in fan blogs and tweets in addition to messages from the Capitol, and interact with other fans across the globe. The site is also the destination for all official content straight from Lionsgate, including trailers, excusive videos, photos of the cast and more. The Hunger Games Explorer takes full advantage of multi-touch technology, letting visitors swipe and scroll with the flick of a finger. Fans can also “spark” – similar to letting fans “like” objects while driving discussion around each bit of news or fan-created content.

We partnered with Lionsgate and RED Interactive Agency to create The Hunger Games Explorer, which provides a unique way for fans to explore and be a part of The Hunger Games discussion happening in all corners of the web and around the world. The challenge was to engage fans, give them what they hungered for, and give them a reason to share content and return time and time again. Our goal was to create the best fan site possible, showcasing responsive web design, multi-touch and HTML5, so it really shined on Windows 8 with IE10, as well as other modern platforms across the web. The resulting community allows users to interact and engage in conversations in a much easier, more interesting way across platforms and devices.

We’re really proud of what we’ve created and make sure to stay tuned and check back often as there is lots more to come. Be sure to check out our behind the scenes page hereon how we made this magic happen - and may the odds be ever in your favor!

Roger Capriotti

Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

IE10 and The Webby Awards partner to highlight the future of the web

2013-04-02T14:15:16Z

Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with The Webby Awards to unveil the new Winners Gallery + Archive using the best of IE10 capabilities and the latest web standards. Every year, The Webbys honors outstanding achievement online including beautiful site experiences and sets the standard for the best of the web. Now with partnership from IE, they can showcase the last 16 years of Winners in their new online gallery built perfect for touch. Through bringing this site to life, IE and The Webbys have made a one-stop experience to show how the web has evolved over the years and the breadth of possibilities that now exist to make beautiful, responsive, and immersive experiences.

Starting today, visitors can experience and interact with all past Webby Award and People’s Voice Winners, Nominees and Honorees for each category in an easy and fluid design that brings the content to the forefront of the user experience. The site allows you to share past Winners with friends via social channels, or easily find your favorite Winner using type-to-search functionality.

“The Internet Explorer team clearly understood our mission to bring an entirely new experience online that matches the beauty and innovation we see every year in our Winners,” said David-Michel Davies, Executive Director, The Webby Awards. “The IE team and our partners at Area 17 came together to create a vision of a gallery that is rich, interactive, and provides a showcase for the work we have celebrated for the past 16 years.”

In addition to our partnership with the Webby Awards, today we’re also announcing new features to modern.IE, a site that provides tools and resources to help developers build amazing sites, such as Webby Award-winning sites. These updates include additional ways to test your site’s compatibility cross-browser and more options to scan and detect site issues. These tools help create beautiful experiences like those highlighted in the Winner’s gallery. More in-depth information on the updates to modern.IE can be found on the IEBlog.

The Winner’s Gallery Shines with IE

Before today, the gallery portrayed the Winners with very little content. In the new gallery, Nominees and Winners come to life in a sleek, functional, and beautiful site built perfectly for touch devices.

With IE10 on a Windows 8 touch device the gallery truly shines, using easy gestures to navigate the previous Winners, fluid page scrolling, responsive design and type-to-search functionality. We also used the latest web standards to build this site, referencing modern.IE to test the site’s compatibility cross-browser.

If you are interested in learning more about the work that went into bringing The Webby Awards Winners Gallery + Archive to the web, take a look at the technical tear-down that includes the making-of video.

More on modern.IE and how to build the next Webby Award winning site

For designers and developers, today we announce the availability of the Windows QuickStart for iOS including Parallels Desktop 8 and Windows 8. We have also updated modern.IE with new enhancements and virtualized copies of IE10 on Windows 7 and IE8 on Windows XP for testing purposes.

We are excited to bring The Winners Gallery + Archive to life with the Webby team, and pay homage to the amazing work that has been created through a beautiful gallery that is worthy of the award winning work on the web. We're big fans of the amazing work web designers do every day to make the web more beautiful and we are humbled to be a part of that process.

Chewy Chong

Manager—Developer Relations, Internet Explorer

Progress. Celebrating One Year of The Browser You Loved to Hate Campaign

2013-03-20T14:29:18Z

It has been incredibly exciting to see such strong engagement and support from web browser enthusiasts and others over the past year with The Browser You Loved to Hate campaign. With over 25 million total video views worldwide to date, we know we struck a chord with you. Whether you were simply entertained or began to question your assumptions about Internet Explorer, we are happy to entertain and help people learn that something’s changed with IE.

Just one year ago, we launched The Browser You Loved to Hate – a Tumblr dedicated to telling the story of Internet Explorer’s comeback. Whether it was introducing you to Eugene or Officer Cupcake, reminiscing about the 90’s or letting you know that comebacks do indeed come in many shapes and sizes, there was one common theme – reintroducing you to the new Internet Explorer. So, if you are someone who hasn’t been happy with IE in the past or someone who simply hasn’t used IE in a while, we hope the Browser You Loved to Hate has been fun and gotten you to take a second look at IE.

And so on this one year anniversary, we wanted to say thanks to our supporters. And for all of you who are still on the fence about IE, we invite you to take a look at the new Internet Explorer.

Rebecca Wolff

Internet Explorer Marketing Manager

The Web’s First Multi-Touch Game, Contre Jour: “Best of Show” @ SXSW

2013-03-13T16:55:17Z

We are proud to announce that Contre Jour, a collaboration between the Internet Explorer team and Mokus Games, has been named Best of Show at the SXSW Interactive awards. On a night celebrating the very best in digital technology, Contre Jour was selected as the judges’ overall favorite project. Contre Jour, which also took home the award for the Amusement category, showcases the incredible possibilities of IE10, multi-touch and HTML5.

Contre Jour started as an iOS game earning multiple accolades, including the 2011 “iPad Game of the Year” and a 2012 Webby award nomination for “Best Tablet Game.” Bringing Contre Jour to the web has resulted in arguably the most ambitious use of HTML5 to date. Coupled with the entirely new IE10 browsing experience, the game play of Contre Jour on the web is simply stunning. It is as fast and fluid as many native apps, and with IE10 and Windows 8, it is perfect for touch. Once you start playing in IE10 on Windows 8, you immediately forget you’re on a website.

Perfect for Touch: Contre Jour with IE10 really helps paint a picture of what is possible when it comes to the future of touch on the web. IE10 not only provides a browser UI that is perfect for touch -- dedicating 100% of the pixels to the site with a full-screen chromeless UI -- but provides developers a new set of multi-touch capabilities that change what is possible on the web. In fact, Contre Jour is the first game brought to the web that actually requires multi-touch on particular levels. These kind of multi-touch experiences have typically been limited to apps, but with IE10 and its extensive touch support, the team has been able to deliver an elaborate and engaging game that requires users to get hands on to complete levels.

New worlds and a truly ambitious use of HTML5: The visuals are stunning, and the math behind making all these features come alive is intense. With hundreds of active elements on the screen at any point in time, the level of interactivity is pretty unprecedented. Unlike other games, the elements in Contre Jour are not simply made up of images or sprites—most of the elements in the game are drawn dynamically using just math and physics on an HTML5 canvas. To display all these elements, it uses four or more canvases in tandem—where most websites only use one at a time. Only hardware accelerated browsers like IE10 can stitch these canvases together to create the fast and fluid experience you would expect when playing a game like Contre Jour.

And just when we thought this couldn’t get better, it did. We launched 2 new worlds of the game right around Valentine’s Day. The New Friend World is a sweet treat for players, featuring beautiful new sunset themed levels that provide a beautiful background to Petit’s love story. These levels are exclusive to the Web and introduce a brand new character to join Petit, named Amie. Amie, French for “friend,” is a fluffy, vibrant and energetic partner-in-crime to Petit, and flies through the levels helping Petit on his journey to find his true love, The Rose.

Like Contre Jour, sites like the newly released Vyclone, Pulse and Atari are part of our continuing efforts to showcase what is possible on the web today, and how touch and IE 10 are changing the way users interact with the web. We had a great time building this game, and encourage you to check it out.

You can play the game at www.contrejour.ie.

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Bringing Touch Video Editing to the Web with Vyclone and Internet Explorer

2013-03-13T13:01:00Z

Today we are excited to announce a new web experience with social video editing start-up, Vyclone. Vyclone has a very popular mobile app that allows users to co-create, sync, and edit multiple views of a single shared moment – like a concert, sporting event, or birthday. With the new Vyclone web editor released today, users can now edit and share crowd sourced video to the web using just a browser and HTML5. Best part about it? It’s built for touch, allowing users to explore social video editing as naturally as they would on mobile phone, but with a modern browser like Internet Explorer 10. Check it out here.

Does this sound familiar? You go to a concert and there is a sea of phones in the air, are as common as lighters once were. It’s human nature to want to capture the moment and share it with the world. But Vyclone takes that one step further. With Vyclone, users can access everyone else’s video to make their own director’s cut from the best views at the concert – instead of one point of view, videos can showcase the same event from multiple points of view.

What makes this new web experience unique is the collaborative approach Vyclone has taken to crowd sourcing video. The process is simple—once video is recorded from an individual’s phone, it can be shared to the cloud, where it’s available to everyone else who was at that event. (Users can also make video footage private as well.) Here’s where it gets really fun—once the video is uploaded, users can remix their content, using all of the footage uploaded by other users at the concert. With endless possibilities for storytelling and complete artistic control, users mash up scenes to create their ultimate, uniquely personal social video to share as they see fit.

This type of experience wasn’t always possible online, and Vyclone is a great example of how far the web has come. Now, through modern browsers like IE10, the web has incredible business opportunity due to the breadth of users, coupled with an app-like experience that customers have come to expect. This was compelling to Vyclone, as the mobile platform is inherently limited by mobile hardware and the number of pixels developers can squeeze into an experience, whereas the web provides the greatest reach of any platform and limitless hardware capabilities. A great example of how the web experience improves on the app experience is in the sheer number of videos a user can remix at one time. The phone provided space for four videos, but with the web experience users can remix as many as nine different videos - with potential for more in the future.

While Vylcone’s web editor will work in any modern browser, the immersive experience of video editing truly comes to life with IE10. IE10’s unparalleled touch capabilities really shine when users can swipe and tap their way through edits on nine source videos at a time. With Vyclone, video editing is actually faster than with a mouse, as users can edit as fast as their fingers can tap the screen. And off-line support allows Vyclone’s web editor to take a big leap forward, combining the richness of apps to the ubiquity and power of the web. Just a few years ago, creating this experience with no plug-ins or installed software but just a browser and HTML5 would have been science fiction.

We’re so excited to share the future of social video editing with Vyclone! Getting to work collaboratively with the Vyclone team has been an incredible experience. Be sure to try out the experience today and share something great with Vyclone and IE10, and if you’re at SxSW, head over to the Vyclone double decker bus on 1^stand Trinity to see the experience in action and to hear some great up and coming artists perform.

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Internet Explorer 10 now available for more than 700M Windows customers

2013-02-26T13:59:00Z

Today we are excited to announce the availability of IE10 for Windows 7, bringing the most modern and high performing version of IE to over 700M Windows customers. IE10 delivers a 20% increase in real-world site performance over IE9 making IE10 the fastest modern browser on the market according to third parties.

IE10’s advancements run deep, from a 60% increase in supported modern web standards to industry leading security, privacy and reliability that makes IE the browser of choice for millions of Windows customers worldwide. For a deep-dive on all of the great enhancements that come to Windows 7 with IE10 head over to the IE Blog for the full update.

You can download IE10starting today.

Perfect for Touch

In conjunction with the release of IE10 we are also introducing a new IE commercial which features singer, song-writer, and composer Blake Lewis. We came together with our friend Keith Rivers and Blake to showcase what is possible on a new Windows 8 touch device with Internet Explorer 10. Check it out…

The site you see Blake interacting with in the spot is also live today at ExploreTouch.ie. The Explore Touch website provides the individual music components of Blake's track – vocals, strings, bass and other elements – in an interactive touch player that you can use to mix, explore and experiment with via multi-touch on IE10.

Built entirely in HTML5, Explore Touch takes advantage of the innovative touch support of IE10 to create a site that can be swiped, tapped, scratched and rotated to fully explore the richness and depth of Blake’s track, Your Touch.

We are huge fans of Blake's new track so we made it available for streaming for a one-week exclusive at ExploreTouch.ie, and as a free download from Xbox Music.

Whether you have a great new touch device with Windows 8 or are a Windows 7 customer who is about to have your web experience upgraded with IE10 – we invite you to hit play and turn up the volume.

Thank you for helping us continue to create a more beautiful and more touchable web!

Ryan Gavin, General Manager, Internet Explorer

Hold Your Own Heist: Robert Kirkman's Thief of Thieves Now Interactive Online through IE10

2013-02-18T16:34:56Z

A message from the Internet Explorer Developer Relations team…

Today we’re excited to announce the online debut of Thief of Thieves: Experience, an interactive online game based on the comic book series from Robert Kirkman and Skybound, his imprint at Image Comics. The site is a showcase of the new features in Internet Explorer 10, including full multi-touch capabilities and HTML5 support. We thought bringing the comic book style to the web would suit the immersive, chromeless browsing experience on Internet Explorer with Windows 8.

The Thief of Thieves comic tells the story of Conrad Paulson, alias Redmond - a happy coincidence as that just happens to be the hometown of Microsoft’s headquarters. Redmond is a master thief who steals from other thieves to make up for his past robberies and gain redemption. Each arc of the comic is written by a different writer echoing Robert’s experience in the writers' room on The Walking Dead television series. Thief of Thieves was an instant hit when it was introduced in February, 2012, so much so that AMC immediately began developing Thief of Thieves as a potential series with Robert serving as creator/executive producer and writer. Needless to say, we were beyond excited to work with Robert to bring the style of the books online.

With the Thief of Thieves: Experience, fans can create their own secret thief identity, practice their skills in larceny, and ultimately participate in one last job -- the big heist.

“I’m really pleased with how well the web experience captures the setting we were trying to build for Thief of Thieves. It’s a great way for fans of the of the Thief of Thieves comic books to immerse themselves in Redmond’s world and really interact with the story,” said Robert Kirkman.

Under the hood, the Thief of Thieves: Experience, built in partnership with Skybound and creative agency Bradley and Montgomery, is firmly built on web standards. This includes the new Pointer Events specification recently accepted and published by the W3C. This specification enables a unified way for developers to accept input from users (such as touch or mouse) while allowing the user to leverage other means of input in the future, without the site owners having to rebuild their experience. IE10 supports this specification and it makes for a fun touch-first means of experiencing the Thief of Thieves story via the web.

The Thief of Thieves web site also makes heavy use of scalable vector graphics (SVG), which provides rich graphics regardless of a user’s zoom level or screen size. Animating these rich graphics enhances the story telling but in the past has caused issues with performance, which could impact a user’s overall experience. To optimize for this heavy load, the Thief of Thieves site uses new performance and animation standards like requestAnimationFrame to ensure that paint requests are being synchronized with the refresh rate of the hardware, ensuring the performance remains fast.

In addition, we’ve used:

· CCS3 animations for some of the larger scene transitions on the site;

· MSGesture API for handling more advanced pointer interactions like the safe cracking exercise;

· pageVisibility API to detect when an open page isn’t being actively used so we can control audio appropriately; and

· setImmediate API to improve performance and power consumption on tablet devices. setImmediate like setInterval and setTimeout is a timing API and requests the CPU to process the instruction as soon as it’s possible to.

You can read more about the technology behind the scenes including code snippet and an example of the game mechanics used like the A* pathing algorithm in JavaScript here.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with great partners leading up to and through the release of IE10 to showcase the power of HTML5 and multi-touch – Pulse, Atari and Contre Jour, to name a few – and Thief of Thieves is no different. Be sure to download IE10 to check it out, and let us know what you think. Happy heisting!

Contre Jour Returns with Beautiful New Levels to Excite Fans around the Globe

2013-02-12T14:00:27Z

In October, we introduced the world to the adorable creature Petit by bringing the groundbreaking game Contre Jour to the web with Internet Explorer 10 and HTML5. Today, we are excited to announce that Petit is back with 20 new levels to play on the web. Just like the game we launched this fall, these new levels show off the power of browsing in IE10 with fully accelerated HTML5, and advanced multi-touch support for a first class browsing experience on a tablet.

We were thrilled with the positive response and global momentum from fans playing Contre Jour from over 100 countries. Bringing this successful app to the web has allowed more people from all over the world to enjoy Contre Jour. For example, since October, there have been nearly one million visitors to the site from Brazil, a market where Contre Jour previously had very little presence through other platforms, making Contre Jour a truly global experience.

Given the resounding success of the game worldwide, game creator Maksym Hryniv (Max) and the team at Pixel Lab decided to work with the IE team again to create two new “worlds.”

“Bringing my game to the web really helped me reach new fans all around the world,” said Max. “The first version was so successful that I wanted to create something truly unique for the web version. I decided to create a totally new chapter with visuals, gameplay and a new character. I think fans from my home country of Ukraine all the way to China and the U.S. will be pleasantly surprised by the look and feel of the new levels.”

The New Friend World is a sweet treat for players, featuring beautiful new sunset themed levels that provide a beautiful background to Petit’s love story just in time for Valentine’s Day. These levels are exclusive to the Web and introduce a brand new character to join Petit, named Amie. Amie, French for “friend”, is a fluffy, vibrant and energetic partner-in-crime to Petit, and flies through the levels helping Petit on his journey to find his true love, The Rose.

The new Moonlight World looks more similar to the other Contre Jour worlds, and showcases the power of IE10 as a touch browser. Contre Jour was truly designed to be a touch-first game—in fact, it was the first game brought to the web that actually required multi-touch on certain levels.

Check out the twenty new levels of gameplay for yourself at www.contrejour.ie and send a Valentine Card to share the Valentine’s love with your friends and loved ones this upcoming holiday.

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Introducing modern.IE – Testing sites for Internet Explorer made easier

2013-01-31T10:55:49Z

Today we are introducing modern.IE, a free set of tools and resources designed to make it easier for developers to ensure their sites work beautifully across Internet Explorer as well as other modern browsers.

As part of the modern.IE release, we’re excited to announce a special partnership with BrowserStack, a leading browser testing service that lets developers test their site on any browser on any Windows OS. For any web developer that visits BrowserStack via modern.IE, we’re offering three months of this service for free over the next year.

IE9 and the recently released IE10 represent an entirely new chapter in IE’s long history. We have made a lot of changes over the last several years: adopting automatic updates to move customers to the latest version of IE; the introduction of Platform Previews for early developer feedback; and the full embrace of modern web standards, coupled with cutting edge performance and advanced touch capabilities, just to name a few.

At the same time, we recognize that customers on older versions of IE continue to be a real challenge for developers testing their sites, particularly for those developers on non-Windows devices. We want to help. We want the web to move forward. And we genuinely want web developers to spend more time innovating and less time testing. That is where modern.IE comes in.

A new code detection wizard to detect common coding issues

modern.IE is part of our commitment to offer the tools and resources that make developing for the web –and IE – just a little bit easier. As part of this, modern.IE features a wizard that scans for common coding practices that might prevent users from having their best experience on a site. Developers start by entering a webpage URL that they want to test:

In a few seconds, modern.IE reports the webpage results in the below three categories, and includes recommendations on how to update the site:

1. Address common problems that result from supporting older versions of IE.
This wizard detects the most common compatibility issues – like an outdated jQuery web framework – and helps developers find a solution quickly. We also indicate when there are known compatibility issues that might prevent a site from rendering in the latest version or pre-release of IE. Together with Platform Previews, this can make it easier for developers to plan for and address differences from version to version. For security and privacy reasons, we don’t disclose these technical details on the site. Instead, developers can easily contact us, receive this info, and get IE engineering team support at no cost.

2. Help the site work well across browsers, across devices.
The wizard also includes a set of emerging best practices on the web that apply to the growing range of form-factors – mobile, desktop, tablets, even large-screen TVs. Implementing feature detection, coding with CSS prefix best practices, building plug-in free, and using responsive web design can each save testing time across new browsers and devices, and provide a more consistent user experience in each of them.

3. Consider building with some new features in Windows 8.
This includes suggestions for touch-enabled browsing and Start Screen site tile(s) for your site.

The wizard doesn’t offer a complete checklist for coding the modern web, but it is intended to focus on the things that can make a real difference in the overall user experience. We plan to continually improve, and add to, modern.IE and we want the developer community to help us in this effort. We encourage developers to share their feedback on how we might improve it.

Free Virtual Testing Service with BrowserStack

Another big pain point for developers is access to the many browsers and platforms required to thoroughly test for the web today. modern.IE includes special access to BrowserStack, a leading virtual browser testing site that lets developers test their site on any browser available on Windows – regardless of what OS their test machine is running. For developers who visit the site via modern.IE, we’re offering three months of free service over the next year.

Services like BrowserStack mean that developers won’t need to worry about maintaining their own test machines as that the browsers on the service are maintained in the cloud.

We have also created add-ins for developers using Chrome or Firefox, which will give developers single click access to the BrowserStack virtual testing service right from their browser of choice.

Additionally, we are making available free virtual images for developers to download and run local versions of Internet Explorer with Windows for testing – even on Mac, Linux, or PC. Developers can download these on modern.IE.

Best practices and sample code for cross-browser coding

After spending time with, and listening to, hundreds of developers and partners from across the globe, we have compiled the top 20 tech tips that address most of the compatibility issues developers have coding for the web – and IE – today.

It can be a challenge to code for modern browsers while supporting older versions in a simple or cost-minimal way. With so many dev tools, code frameworks, and searchable raw code, it’s not always clear what the best resources are to build with. While this list of tech tips doesn’t include every insight shared by developers, it represents some of the most common patterns and practices to make coding for the web easier. The list has also been moderated by two coding experts we trust to help developers: Dave Methvin, President of the jQuery foundation, and Rey Bango, our own Technical Evangelist and former member of the jQuery Project. We want to make this list better over time, so give us feedback.

Helping build a more modern web

modern.IE is just another part of our continued commitment to help developers spend less time testing and more time building amazing sites. The next time you’re testing your site, try out the tools on modern.IE and start your next project with BrowserStack.

Ryan Gavin

General Manager Internet Explorer