Bing Previews a More Beautiful Search Experience in IE9

We are very excited about the IE9 beta launch today in San Francisco. The team has put a lot of work into building a browser that helps to unlock the beauty of the web. Bing was one of several publishers to preview some new possibilities from the combination of fully hardware accelerated HTML5 in IE9. We are very excited about the new capabilities in IE9 and how they can be used to provide a very rich search experience.

              

Jeff Henshaw, Director of Bing User Experience

Today we begin the next chapter of this journey, with IE9 and HTML5. We’ve built some concepts that we were honored to share at the IE9 event today, and we’ll be making that available in preview format for users of the IE9 beta soon.

HTML5 is the fifth major revision of the Web’s core programming standard, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). IE9’s implementation of HTML5 is a big step forward because it allows developers to do lots of things more quickly, and utilizes the full power of the PC as well as the web to bring customers richer, more immersive and more beautiful online experiences. Experiences that start to feel as immersive as the applications that run directly on your PC.

Bing has always stood for re-envisioning search. We’re driven by the belief that in today’s complex world, no matter how fast results are displayed, the experience is not always enough to help you complete your task and make an informed decision. IE9 has given the Bing team a new set of tools with which to re-envision search. The combination of hardware-accelerated HTML5, CSS3, a lightning-fast Javascript engine, and integration with Windows is allowing us to bring search to life in exciting new ways.

From the time we launched Bing, we have endeavored to use richer visual experiences to help customers get more out of search, enabling faster, more informed decisions. We continue to invest deeply in the visual aspects of Bing. Just this summer, we released an entirely new user experience framework that was designed to help our customers complete tasks and make decisions in a more visually organized way.

The first thing we hope customers will notice about this preview is the stunning visual beauty we are able to bring to our Bing and IE9 customers. Fully hardware accelerated HTML5 in IE9 helps us create a more visually appealing search experience. And you’ll notice that IE9 really puts the focus on the Bing site with the clean and simple UI, that just gets out of the way. Some of the things we showed today include:

· Animations that make search come alive, making Bing’s signature home page image an even more engaging experience.

· Smooth and beautiful transitions. Transitions are seamless from query to search results and then back again, and gone are the jarring page flips of the past.

· Previews of images, videos and text are bigger, bolder and easier to trigger

Beyond just being another pretty face, updates to the design and graphics that Bing has pioneered in search have a functional side as well. We’ve added cues and other elements that help users make decisions more quickly:

· In addition to being able to pin Bing directly to your Windows 7 task bar, we’ve pre-programmed an IE9 “Jump List” for the most important search tasks, from shopping and travel to maps, news and entertainment. Key features of Bing are just a single click away.

· A smooth scrolling feature provides better utilization of screen real estate, keeping horizontal, right- and left-hand navigation and the search entry box all in place while you scroll through results

· Finally, transitions in “Quick Tabs,” our horizontal navigation feature and “Visual Search,” our search and refinement feature which allows you to search using images instead of typing key words, are both presented in a more powerful and application-like experience.

The features we previewed today can be experienced on a preview site we’ll make available later this month at that time you’ll be able to experience what we previewed in San Francisco and maybe even a few more surprises. In the meantime, check out this video capture of some of the cool stuff we were able to do using IE9’s rich set of features and capabilities.

 We’re really excited to be part of IE9 beta launch, and equally excited about what we are able to do with Bing, HTML5 and IE9 to bring you even more visually compelling experiences that accentuate the beauty of the web. There’s a lot more to come, including taking advantage of HTML5 on Firefox, Chrome and Safari, so stay tuned.

Brian MacDonald, Vice President, Bing