Day: September 17, 2010
Sitting up and Taking Notice
I had been playing around with a version of Internet Explorer 9 for a little while. It wasn’t too exciting as there was no GUI sitting on top of it. But, this week, a Beta of the product was made available for all. I was there to check it out. Internet Explorer has not been my browser of choice for some time now. I’m a real fan of Google Chrome which had become my default on both my Macintosh and Windows computers. I was curious to see what Microsoft had done with this new release.
I still had a bad taste in my mouth having to use Internet Explorer 6 this summer and the limitations that it had on what I was trying to do. On my own computer, I had Internet Explorer 8 installed for those few web sites that just refuse to work with anything else.
It was a rainy day so I gave it a download. Hmmm. The download is only 6GB or so – this is promising. Once that was received though, it started the REAL installer which took quite a while to download the rest of the browser. This isn’t going to go well. What about the minimalist approach that was promised. Then, oh dear, once downloaded, it’s reboot to install time. Has nothing changed?
I do the reboot and load the browser and take a first look at the interface. Interesting. Tabs on the top and if you run it without toolbars and bookmarks, you really do get the minimalist look. Unlike IE8, there is no separate search window. The approach of a combined address and search bar saves a bunch of space and the home, favourites, and tools icons are neatly tucked away in the corner. The result is more room on the screen for the actual webpage being viewed. Now, I’m really getting interested.
The browser again seems to be very nicely embedded into Windows 7. I can tear off a tab to spawn a new browser. Nice. I can even pin a shortcut to the taskbar just like any other application. Nice. Opening a new tab brings a smile to my face. I’ll bet that these turn into thumbnails as the product matures…
What I’m most interested in though is the promise of hardware acceleration. All of the major browsers have been beating their chests talking about using your computer to do the rendering using your computer’s hardware rather than the browser itself. That’s a major goal for every browser, along with a focus on support for Javascript, HTML5 and CSS3.
To show this off, Microsoft has put together a site to testdrive the new browser. http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/. I started by looking at the “How fast can your browser speed read?” link and it was here that I had my first Whoah! moment. It actually didn’t happen when I ran it in Internet Explorer. It just appeared to be a cute little demo. It was only when I ran it in another browser and then flipped back to IE that I sat up and noticed.
Microsoft IE9 Speed Reading Score – What’s your browser’s score?
Results from another browser…
What are the other browsers handling this? The release versions certainly paled in comparison. I went and downloaded Chromium’s Canary Build and the latest Beta of Firefox where hardware acceleration is a goal and they performed better but not nearly as well as IE9.
Recognizing that this is a Microsoft demonstration, I do play around with the rest of the demonstration applications. IE9 certainly does shine. How does it work in the real world? It’s hardly likely that I’d run into these types of things in real life. However, by making this the default browser for the afternoon made me feel like screen redraws were faster and scrolling smoother.
There’s my first kick at the new browser. I am really impressed with what I’m seeing. I’ve read that others are taking shots at Microsoft for taking design issues from Chrome and Firefox. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. It’s a very competitive domain and I’d prefer to think that developers are pushing each other to greater things. That’s good for us, the end consumer, as we get a better browsing experience as a result. For the moment, I’m sitting up and taking notice with IE9. This isn’t just tinkering and if this is an indication of what’s to come, we are going to be pleased.
links for 2010-09-16
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With the Publitweet Blackbird bookmarklet we released yesterday you can grab any tweet on Twitter.com and embed a static HTML version on your site in no time.
Today we release a version for your site, to turn the tweets you have embedded, embeddable in turn!
Even better, people who will embed the tweet from your site will see that it comes from there as a source! How cool is that? -
This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts. (Here's some context.)
You can use it, too… but only at your own risk. Paste a tweet URL below: -
The Chalkboard Speech Bubble – Make your photos do the talking – got to believe this would be a great project for a technology class
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With back-to-school season in full swing, now’s the time for freelancers to bone up on their skills or perhaps learn new ones. But you don’t have to shell out for pricey college courses to get the benefit of professional development. In fact, a lot of great information is available for free or very inexpensively if you’re willing to invest the time and do a little digging.
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We know how important it is to protect and educate young people on using the Internet and want to provide all of our users with a safe experience.
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Free interactive learning games and teacher resources for teaching information fluency. Drop these course materials into your online classes, library- medial kiosks, or school webpages.
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Making your own SMART Board lessons is not as difficult as you might think. The following article will give you some tips on how to make them a structured interactive learning experience for your students. A SMART Notebook file, complete with example techniques, is also available to download.
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Free classroom resources and lessons from Microsoft
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These online preschool learning games are a great way to introduce your little one to a computer, while also helping them to learn some early skills for math and language. They include all their favorite characters, and are guaranteed to keep them engaged for weeks to come.
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Your data is spread across the web.
Search through it at once, just like you search your hard-drive. -
In November 2009, developers had their first look at hardware accelerated graphics in a browser at the PDC. In March 2010, we released the first IE9 Platform Preview with “GPU-powered HTML5” turned on by default. In that release, hardware acceleration applied to everything on every Web page—text, images, backgrounds, borders, SVG content, HTML5 video and audio—using the Windows DirectX graphics APIs. With Platform Preview 3 in July, IE9 introduced a hardware-accelerated HTML5 canvas.
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This site is a freely available public site that is designed specifically for Music Teachers and pre-service Music Teachers interested in continual professional developent in their field of music education. While this site is free to use, all users must register for an account -for all non-logged users, clicking any of the links will take you back to this page.
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The lesson that day was on enemy movement, and the enemy was a dastardly collection of spiky-headed robots roving inside a computer game
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When we released our report on the colors of the social web, based on data analyzed by our Twitter theme tool, we were surprised that blue was such a dominant color in people's profile designs. Was Twitter's default color influencing their design decisions? Or is blue really THE most popular and dominant color online
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Trending peeps tells you who are the people that are trending on your timeline. This is calculated based on the number of times a person has been "mentioned" in the tweets from the people you follow. Go ahead, you'll be surprised!
