DEAN HACHAMOVITCH: Good morning. It is an honor to welcome developers, partners, and guests here today; in particular the Web developers, the Web developers, and the designers who build the sites that matter to people.
There are three things we want to cover today. First, using the whole PC to browse and what that means for your experience on the Web. Then, we will check out Internet Explorer 9, the beta, and see a browser that uses the whole PC and puts sites at the center of your experience. And then we’ll finish by seeing how developers and partners are taking advantage of this now, today, live on the Web.
Now, this all starts from our point of view on Windows and the Web. Microsoft has over 1 billion Windows customers around the world. We want Web browsing, something that they do a lot on their Windows PCs, to be a great experience. Now, from our point of view, the browser is a stage. It’s a backdrop. It’s a backdrop for the Web. Sites on the Web are the star of the show. The Web is about sites. The browser should be, too.
People go to the Web for sites, not the browser, much as they go to their PC for apps, not Windows.
Today, websites are boxed in. The box is the browser. We asked ourselves, how can IE put sites at the center of the experience? How can IE make sites shine? Our approach here is to use the whole PC. Now, the platform previews that we’ve released, they show the benefits that happen when the browser taps into the native power of the PC. Now, there’s a video of the platform previews in action. Now, all of these samples that you see running here, they’re available on the Web, and anyone can try them out on any browser, because they’re written in HTML5, and they use the same markup.
Now, these samples show the performance advantage of full hardware acceleration of HTML5. And it’s just clear invisible. Now, developers downloaded these platform previews over 2.8 million times to see what they could do, and already there are many sites, like Amazon, IMDb, and Flickr, who have started to reimagine what running with the power of the whole PC means for them.
With IE9, we’re taking the same approach, unboxing the Web browser experience. Now, all the user interface, all the pixels, all the code that people need for a significantly better browser experience is already there for the user. They just happen to be outside of the browser box. You just need to look there, and see the whole PC, and use it for the browser.
Now, this approach is grounded in real-world data. Almost a year into the life of Windows 7 now, and we’re 15 years into the browser, and the browser experience. And so, people have had 15 years to get used to the browser, to understand how to use it, to get used to all the facilities. Let’s see how much people are using the user interface in each of these.
Now, the numbers I’m going to show you are based on tens of millions of users across hundreds of millions of sessions. It represents the usage patterns of students, and business people, of developers and enthusiasts, it represents Windows customers worldwide.
The Windows taskbar, and the tab row on the browser, 87 percent, 1 percent; 87 percent of people have launched a pinned app from the taskbar. One percent of people have ever used a keyboard shortcut for opening up a new tab. Pinning and the favorites bar; 33 percent, 4 percent; 33 percent of people have pinned one or more applications to their taskbar. Only 4 percent have ever added anything to their favorites bar.
AeroSnap, and having a lot of tabs open, 40 percent, 9 percent; 40 percent of people use AeroSnap to arrange the windows on their desktop and get more out of their screens. Just over 9 percent of people have ever had eight or more tabs open. Now, these are huge gaps in usage patterns.
IE9, in its experience starts from what more people use more regularly than the browser interface. It starts from what people use every day to launch tasks and manage their windows. We redesigned the browser putting sites at the center, and making what’s already familiar to users from outside the browser available to sites.
Let’s see it in action. So, here you see a desktop, and here’s a taskbar. And you’ll see sites pinned, just like applications. So, I have Outlook, and Hotmail, and the Wall Street Journal, and of course I have Facebook and Twitter. Now, these are sites. I should point out, this is Twitter, the site, it’s the real site.
Now, users can pin sites to the task bar just like they pin their Windows applications to the taskbar. Before, users had to go to the browser to get to the site. I have to go to the browser to read the newspaper. I have to go to the browser to go to Expedia and book a trip. I have to go to the browser to see what’s going on on Facebook. With IE9, users go to sites directly, the same way you launch everything else in Windows.
Let’s take a look at some of these pinned sites. Now, pinned sites are more than just shortcuts. Sites can program jump lists. So, here you see the Wall Street Journal programmed a jump list that makes it very easy for me to get directly to All Things D, or Barron’s. Here’s Jango, it’s an Internet radio site, and you see they’ve programmed some of my playlists, and other parts of their site that are very important to me.
Now, of course, here is Facebook, and you’ll see what Facebook has done. Now, remember the usage data, jump lists are used a lot. And now websites can make them available for their users. Now, this is a complete win-win. You see, users have one click access from the desktop. Now, it’s super useful for users. And from a sites point of view, they can program what they want there, and it’s easier for users to come back. It’s useful for both sides.
Now, I should point out that sites, in addition to jump lists, can also program notifications. So, I’ll come here, this is the Live Strong site, and you see they’ve programmed this reminder, it’s a comment that I have to track my breakfast. You know, I’m trying to stay healthy and stuff, and Live Strong is a great place to do that. Now, again, it’s easier for users and sites to engage in many ways, reminders, jump lists, and that is a huge advantage.
Today people start their browsing experience from the browser. You’ll see that over time their desktops will start to look like this, with many sites pinned. Now, in pinned sites, let’s take a look at the experience. So, I’ll bring up Live Strong, now let’s look at the browser. IE9 has a clean new design. It puts the user focus on the site not the browser. The frame reinforces the site’s visuals. Here you see the site’s icon and a prominent place. You’ll see that the back and forward buttons reflect the color of the site.
Now, this is significant. The site is brought forward, because the browser is less of a distraction, and sits in the background. This is site-centric.
Let’s take a look at the Rough Guide site. So, you’ll see rough guides and their bright orange icon is prominent here, and their back and forward buttons are distinctive. And you can tell what site you’re in, because the browser is saying, look at the site, not look at the browser.
Tabs are an essential part of the browsing experience and before IE9 it was very easy to have a bunch of sites open in different tabs and they were all stuck behind one icon down here on your desktop, empty task bar, a big, long stack of them. With IE9 your tabs are grouped. So, here are the three tabs I’ve opened on this site. Then I can come over here and here are the two tabs I’ve opened over here. The thumbnails are grouped. Now, these are some of the ways that sites can plug into what consumers already know and use the familiar Windows 7 desktop experience. Let me bring up what I’ll call regular IE. So, here’s the default browser, when you just go and launch IE what you’ll see.
Now, people often want to put tabs up side-by-side. For example, over here I want to compare two products. Some browsers support tearing off tabs. IE9 is the first browser to integration tabs with Aero Snap. Let me show you. So, I can take this top-level Windows of IE, and as I can with any Window in Windows 7 I’ll snap it there. Now, I can take the tab, you’ll see I get the entire tab, and I can bring it over and snap it, as well.
Now, this makes arranging tabs very easy, makes it very easy to see more of the Web on your screen. Of course, because it’s Aero Snap it works consistently. If I bring this back it’s sized appropriately and of course I can snap this back in. And the browser is exactly where it should be.
Right now, frankly, is not a great time for me to make this purchase. So, I want to come back to this later, though. And so I’m going to take the tab and I’m just going to drag it down her and pin it. So I’ll have it there ready for later. And that’s all I have to do. Now, Amazon is pinned. You’ll see I’ve got a nice, big Amazon icon, and the back and forward buttons reflect the yellow that’s in the Amazon site icon. Of course, I can pin, so it’s the start menu, as well.
Now, the rest of the user interface reflects our focus on sites and users, as well. Let’s take a look at the new tab page. We got feedback about the new tab page, that it has to be fast. It’s very important for it to be fast. So, let’s see how that goes. So, I’ll just keep clicking here. I’m going to cramp soon, so I’m going to stop. You see that was pretty fast and just so you know that all those clicks really did happen, yes, I have a lot of new tab experiences here. So, let me close some of them down and now my finger really is cramping.
Okay. I’ll stop. Just about there and bring it back. Now, it’s just as fast as being important. It’s just as fast that it reflects your Web usage. We looked at the patterns IE8 users had in using new tab. At about 50 percent of the time, immediately after opening the new tab page, they would just go and type into the address bar. And we looked at that very closely, and it’s because the address bar manages itself. You go places and it remembers where you went. What we realize is, when people go to a new tab they’re going to go back to where they’ve been before. So, we need to do a great job presenting where they’ve already been, because users don’t need another list of sites to manage. They already have favorites that they don’t manage. Now, the icons here represent sites, and we’re using the icons here to represent sites, because that’s how sites represent themselves, and IE respects that.
Now, let’s look up here in the address bar. And you’ll notice it’s a combined address bar. You can type Web addresses and you can do searches. There’s one notable difference from other combined address bars. By default IE respects your privacy and doesn’t send your keystrokes to search services. Let me show you. So, I’ll type OBA and you’ll see there are all the things coming off of my machine, addresses that I’ve typed before and things out of history. And down here in suggestions you’ll see that by default I’m not getting suggestions from any of the search services, but it’s under my control and I can very easily, with one click, turn that on, and I’ll get suggestions.
IE also makes it very easy to use several search services at once. I can flip over and get suggestions from Wikipedia, and turn them back off and they’ll go back over and turn them back on. There we go. So, the address bar is obviously respectful of privacy. Now, there are a lot of other ways that IE keeps you in control.
Now, bad things happen to people on the Web in a lot of ways. One of the most common ways is when people download executable files. Now, when you do that in other browsers you get this prompt that ways, you’ve downloaded something from the interwebs, it might be dangerous, what do you want to do? And just kind of leaves you there. And IE9’s download manager has a different approach. IE9’s download manager is like an early warning system against malware. It’s based on application reputation. That’s a nice way to say stranger danger for downloads. And so, let’s go through and see it in action and here we are and here’s a page. Now, it turns out that there’s this program that I really want to download and one of these links is the download and the other is malware pretending to be that download. So, I’m going to come over here and just try one of them. And it says do you want to run or save Freevideo.exe. Well, I’m going to go ahead and run that. And it turns out that it checks out, it’s appropriately signed, it’s been downloaded a lot, it’s well understood and it just runs. No more prompts, no more annoyance. Now, let me try this other link, and I’ll go ahead and try to run it. And it will say it’s not a commonly downloaded program, this could harm your computer actions.
Now, what happens here is, IE is very clear and uses human language to explain the risks and what might be going on, and leaves me in control in a more informed way. I’m going to go ahead and delete that, because I know what it is.
Add-ons are another great aspect about browsers. Now, add-ons can deliver very good functionality, and be very important to users. They’re not always consistent with great performance. Add-ons cause 75 percent of all crashes in Internet Explorer. And so, what we have here on the machine is a fresh IE9 installation. It’s atop IE8 that had several add-ons installed. And I’ll fire it up, and you’ll notice that the performance is not the same as it was before. I’ll try to open a couple of tabs, a couple of new tab pages, and you’ll see there’s a really big lag.
If I look down here at the bottom, IE has given me a notification that I can speed up browsing. So, let’s try that out, and you’ll see that IE makes it very clear what’s going on, and what the user can do about performance, so the user can stay in control. And so, there’s one add-on that’s really having a bad impact. I’ll disable that. The other seems okay, so I’ll leave it alone. And now, when I do new tab, it’s just as fast as it was before.
Now, one more thing that I think is worth talking about is reliability. Now, everyone has experienced the frustration of browser hang. You’ve got a lot of work going, a lot of tabs, and then the browser is non-responsive. Isolation of tabs provides reliability. It keeps tabs separate from each other. IE9 improves on IE8’s tab isolation with great performance.
So, let me bring up this very rich site, something that a partner has done, and I will start this car spinning, this is a nice HTML5 animation. And you’ll see that as the car is spinning, I can pick up this tab, and start dragging it around. Just imagine, this could be an HTML5 video animation, and even as I drag it, it’s isolated its own process, and the video is still playing. In fact, I can snap that there, and snap that over there, and it will keep playing. Now, tabs are cleanly isolated with great performance. You can feed video and rich HTML5 sites running even during windows drags.
So, what have you just seen? IE9 uses the whole PC. IE9 is fast. It’s fully hardware accelerated HTML5. Sites can take advantage of the full power of your PC. There is a clean, new UI. It puts the user’s focus on the sites, not the browser, and integrates sites into the familiar desktop experience. It’s trusted. IE9 delivers significant new protections against malicious and poorly written websites that threaten your online safety and privacy. And for developers, IE9 delivers excellent support for HTML5 and other standards. So, the same markup works across more browsers, and the Web is more interoperable. And it’s available for download today in 33 languages at www.beautyoftheweb.com. (Applause.)
Now, websites are the star of the Web, and it’s exciting to see what developers have built to take advantage of this. Of all the experiences on the Web, search has had tremendous innovation. And to show a preview of what the search experience can become when the browser enables it to use the whole PC, please welcome Jeff Henshaw of the Bing team. (Applause.)
JEFF HENSHAW: Thanks, Dean. It looks fantastic.
Thank you, everybody. At Bing we are passionate about reenvisioning search. And we’re driven by a belief and observation that in today’s complex world sometimes ten blue links, no matter how fast they’re rendered, are not enough to help you solve the complex tasks, and make some of the harder decisions that you’re trying to make.
So, we’ve looked at IE9 and discovered an entirely new suite of tools to help us turn search into a richer experience than it’s ever been before. It begins with some of the fantastic Windows integration that Dean showed earlier. We built into Bing one button access to any of the Bing experiences that you might want to link directly to, like weather, finance, or travel.
But for today’s search, I would actually like to start out with the Bing home page. It’s become famous and loved by tens of millions of people everyday as the place to come and see a beautiful curated photo, and explore your world in new and interesting ways. With IE9, we’ve been able to leverage HTML5, and the built in support for the video tag to take that home page experience to an entirely new place. (Applause.)
In the future people will be able to come to Bing.com and see not only still images, but video, and thanks to the support for the canvas tag, we’ve also explored ways of doing exciting new things with still images. In this case, we partnered with Microsoft Research to take an enormous JPEG and use hover spots to give users the ability to dynamically zoom in and out on different aspects of the picture, and give you a new way to explore it. All of this was done with less than a day of coding. That’s the type of experience that IE9 enables.
So, let’s begin a search. Let’s start out with this fine city that we’re in, San Francisco. In the old days, the act of searching was as serious of jarring transitions. But, thanks to IE’s support for CSS3, and a wicked fast JavaScript engine, we’re able to integrate the experiences, and actually blend the home page, the search results page, and your navigation of pages into a seamless experience that feels more like a native application.
One of the investments that we’ve made in Bing is delivering the concept of tabs across the top of the page that allow you to explore some of the rich categories of results, and you’ll see that navigation amongst these tabs has the same smooth HTML5 hardware-accelerated benefits that the home page did.
In the past, this was all done through AJAX, and AJAX tended to confuse browser pretty badly because the concept of the back button didn’t preserve state adequately to actually provide a good navigation experience. The IE9 team has fixed that. So, now navigating with the back button will actually traverse us back through those tabs with exactly the same elegant transition. (Applause.) It’s a huge, a huge, huge benefit for Web developers.
We want to take these experiences beyond just graphical sizzle, and actually really begin to change the way that people interact with their search provider. In the past, when I scrolled the page, you immediately lost those important tabs to help you explore more of the results. In IE9, when you scroll we’ll on the fly fold up that header, and retain those tabs at the top. And you can see that we even dynamically blend the home page image, so you’ve always got an anchor to help you navigate through the rest of your experience.
In doing that, though, screen real estate, of course, becomes precious. Every Web developer is sensitive to the number of vertical pixels that they’re trying to keep above the fold, or above the bottom of the browser. IE9 and HTML5 have enabled us to do something really cool here. You’ll notice that we’ve got one line Web results captions visible at the bottom of the screen. But as I scroll vertically, we use HTML5 to dynamically unfold those Web results, and truly maximize our use of screen real estate in an incredibly elegant way. (Applause.)
In addition to those ten blue links looking fantastic, better than they ever have before, some of the rich content that Bing provides, like weather results, also looks vibrant and new. No longer is it just static arrays or columns of numbers. We’re actually giving you a dynamic peek with a rich experience into what the weather actually looks like in San Francisco today. And the weather looks good. Our temperatures are high 60s. It’s partly sunny. But, that video of the beach that we saw on that first screen really makes me want to get away for a tropical vacation.
So, let’s hit Bing with a nightmare search engine query. One word, no context, the search engine has absolutely no idea what I actually want to do. Am I booking a vacation? Am I researching? No search engine knows. But, Bing is going to do a fantastic result under IE9 of giving me a good set of interesting algorithmic results, but also giving me one entirely new experience, and that is the ability to visualize data in ways that I’ve never been able to do before. On the fly, using pure Web technologies, no downloads, no plug-in, no plug-in instantiation like we just downloaded a set of some of the most popular beaches in the world.
With one click I can begin to filter that large set of over 400 down to some of the more interesting ones. I can apply some filters over here on the left. Maybe I want to go snorkeling. I like to do a little bit of swimming. That’s starting to filter the set down a little bit. It’s September and I’d actually like to leave directly from here to the beach. So, let’s go ahead and find beaches that are nice to visit in September. And now we’ve got a list that looks about manageable.
On other search properties, and in older browsers, as soon as I clicked one of these results, I completely lost my view of the rest of the data set. Under IE9 when I click a result, we’re actually going to preserve that view of the data set, by folding up the other results into a ribbon, that I’ve always got one click access to and we’ll display the details inline as screen real estate affords.
And thanks to the power of HTML5 and using the entire PC to drive my experience, I can click and image and will display the details in line as screen real estate affords. And thanks to the power of HTML 5 and using the entire PC to drive my experience I can click and image and with built-in support in IE9 I’ve got a truly beautiful hardware accelerated photo slide show that required very, very little development investment.
When Dean first saw this he dared me to right click on this experience, and prove that there is no plug-in being used here. It is the Web pop-up. These are all Web technologies.
So, on the Bing team we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to leverage a new platform like IE9. The power of hardware accelerated HTML. CSS3, a lightning-fast JavaScript engine and great integration with the Windows desktop. We’ve made such great progress with this that we’re actually going to be rolling this out in a preview form within a month, so that you can begin to explore it and experience yourself, as well. We look forward to having you enjoy the experiences. Thanks, again, to the IE team for a great platform.
DEAN HACHAMOVITCH: A little bit of a wardrobe malfunction here.
JEFF HENSHAW: Okay. So, now let’s take a look at what developers have built that’s available today, live in the Web, day one of the beta that takes advantage of IE9. The people who build the Web have better ideas than browsers have been able to run. With IE9 this situation starts to change. Web sites can offer richer experiences, because of full hardware acceleration.
Richer Web experiences can blend into the consumer’s desktop experience comfortably and consistently. So, today we have an A to Z, literally, of Web sites, partners, live with Web experiences that take advantage of IE9, even more than the A to Z of the Web. Today with IE9 you can enjoy five of the world’s largest social and information networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Netlog.
Top news and entertainment from around the world, including the BBC, CNN, Hulu, Vimeo, Daily Motion, and of course, some amazing forward-looking work from the world’s leading Web designers.
Today partners around the Internet join us in releasing new experiences for the Web. Over 70 top sites and brands that reach over two-thirds of active Internet users. Together that’s over 800 million visitors whose Web experience just got better on Windows with IE9.
Today we ask customers to please download IE9. Please pin sites to your taskbar and enjoy the benefits of full hardware acceleration. Now, there’s much more in the beta than we’ve covered this morning. And you can find a lot more information about consumer features and the HTML5 support at our blog, and at beautyoftheweb.com. To wrap up we’d like to share one more video that shows some of what we’ve seen today in action.
(Video segment.)
The stars today are these partners who have built great Web experiences. If you’re watching on the Web, please try them at beautyoftheweb.com. And if you’re here we invite you to come to the partner showcase. You can try them out. You can meet some of the people who are building a more beautiful Web.
On behalf of everyone who has worked together to deliver this beta, thank you. (Applause.)
