The latest version of Internet Explorer is set to officially debut later this week as the default web browser in Windows 8.1, and unsurprisingly, Microsoft keeps talking about the newest features in its latest browser.
This time around, users are in for a real treat — the company has come up with something really exciting. Internet Explorer 11 can now pre-render web pages that are displayed in Bing’s search results.
The concept is quite simple actually. According to Microsoft, most users click on the first result that is displayed for a search. And Internet Explorer 11 automatically pre-renders these webpages in the background to make sure they are loaded faster.
Microsoft’s Bing team talked about this in a blog post:
“The next time you perform a search in Bing using IE11, you’ll notice that when you click on the top result, the associated page is almost instantly rendered. To achieve this, we leverage IE11’s pre-render tag to automatically download and render the top result page in the background – it does this in a streamlined fashion taking care to not waste your bandwidth and battery life.”
The company also has some statistical data to share on this.
Redmond claims that typically, a search process takes anywhere between 30 to 60 seconds. And this time is now cut to as little as 15 seconds, and pages loads are now actually 50 percent faster:
“At minimum, a typical search process involves several stages, from typing a search query, waiting for results, then selecting a result link, and finally waiting for the selected page to load. This sequence of steps can take between 30 and 60 seconds. In practice we find that people engage in an iterative search process as they lead up to completing their task.”
This is another innovative new feature that seems to be implemented rather well.
The company also has put up some more details about the IE 11 pre-render tag for website owners, and how it is put to good use with this new technology. So if you own or run a website, click the link above to get an idea of how everything works. You’ll be glad you did.
All Comments
Now that MS is also doing this, it should put IE back on even ground on the monthly browser usage stat sites. I can already see the comments.
I think IE usage is higher than some of these sites report. Just by personal experience, how many of us know someone who is just an average computer user who just decided on their own that Chrome was the browser for them? I don’t know of many. Some were prompted by someone else telling them to use something other than IE or a website or a school application telling them to use another browser. I have a lot of clients or people I deal with in various schools who don’t even know what Chrome is at first.
I tried Chrome and firefox and found it is not as good as my friends said. Finally, I am back to and happy to use IE10.