Coffee and Pins: What’s common between the two? Here’s a hint: Internet Explorer 9
Still don’t get it? Find the answer by visiting me at Starbucks Coffee, near Hamad Hospital on Saturday, 26th November at 10:00 AM.
I will show you how you can retain visitors on your website and increase the number of returning visitors by adding simple browser capabilities to your website. The session is free to attend for all web developers.
What’s more? Coffee and pastry is on me
If you’re a web developer and you want to register, send me a private message or write a comment below.
Windows 8 Developer Preview was made available last week and it came with Internet Explorer 10. Internet Explorer 10 can be started within the Metro UI and also in the desktop mode.
However, when started in the Metro UI, Adobe Flash plugin is unavailable and hence you cannot play YouTube videos. There is a workaround for this as Internet Explorer supports the next generation HTML5 capabilities.
YouTube now offers an HTML5 trial on their website. All you need to do is to activate the HTML5 trial using your YouTube account. To activate HTML5 trial, go to www.youtube.com/html5 .
Once you opt-in for HTML5 on YouTube, you can start watching YouTube videos on IE10 in Metro mode.
Internet Explorer 9 has been released today! Click here to download Internet Explorer 9. IE 9 has been discussed enough times on this blog and needs no further introduction!
Here are some reasons why you should install IE9.
1. IE9 is the fastest adopted beta in IE browser history. With over 40M downloads and a usage share on Windows 7 well over 2% globally, IE9 adoption has more than surpassed expectations.
2. IE9 is enterprise ready. IE9 has the highest LOB compatibility pass rate of any product in Microsoft’s internal IT “dogfood” history – 99% – coupled with one of the lowest IE helpdesk contact rates (number of helpdesk calls/number of installs) to date. And for our customers, IE9 is ready to go with their Windows 7 deployments.
3. IE9 has the fastest JavaScript engine in the industry. Script is one of many factors in performance. On a commonly used micro-benchmark, IE9’s improved JavaScript performance now holds the top spot in the industry, an improvement of almost 18 times from IE8.
4. IE9 is the only fully hardware-accelerated browser. All graphics, video and text in IE9 are hardware-accelerated. We re-architected IE9 to take full advantage of the Windows PC. IE9 was the first to introduce this concept and other browsers have been scrambling to catch-up. See the difference for yourself.
5. IE9 treats your favorite sites like apps. The site is the center of attention in IE9’s new frame. When you pin a site to the taskbar, your experience is even better. Over 250 of the world’s top sites have already taken advantage of Jump Lists, notifications, and thumbnail previews to make their sites more app-like. Web site publishers are seeing close to a 50% increase in engagement from their IE9 customers through pinned sites.
6. IE9 protects against 99% of socially-engineered malware. Malware is the #1 threat on the internet today. With Microsoft SmartScreen and the new SmartScreen application reputation feature in IE9, no other browser comes close in protecting consumers from these real-world threats. IE9 is 33 times better than Chrome and over 5 times better than Firefox.
7. IE9 is the only browser with integrated online tracking protection for consumers. Microsoft changed the browser and industry landscape with the introduction of IE9’s Tracking Protection, providing the only built-in browser solution protecting consumers today.
8. IE9 is leading with site-ready HTML5 support. IE9 is all in when it comes to delivering developers new standards-based capabilities with HTML5. Microsoft co-chairs the W3C HTML5 working group and during the IE9 release has contributed almost 6000 test cases to the W3C and international standards bodies. Currently, IE9 has the best conformance with W3C HTML5.
9. IE9 has had the strongest press in IE history: Here is a small sample of what reviewers are saying:
Web Slice is a web feed technology available in Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9. IE allows users to preview the subscribed Web Slices in a fly-out preview window.
You basically add a web slice to your Favorites bar, and you are notified when there is an update to your web slice and you are able to view the content directly on the toolbar without having to leave the page you are on.
Web slices are a fantastic way to increase the return rate of the visitors to your web site. Due to its simplicity, it can also potentially reach out to a larger number of eyeballs than a conventional RSS feed.
Here are some examples of web slices:
I’m no developer pro, but I’ve added a web slice of my own on this blog. This web slice basically shows the last 5 posts from my RSS feed. It’s pretty simple. Here’s how it’s done:
1. Write your web slice file
On my self-hosted wordpress blog, I created a file named webslice.php, which contains the following text:
<html><head> <title>MicrosoftNOW</title> </head><body> <div class="hslice" id="1"> <h2 class="entry-title">MicrosoftNOW</h2> <div class="entry-content"><ol> <img src="http://www.microsoftnow.com/MSNOW-white.png" height=50% width=50%> <font face="tahoma" size=2> <br><b>Latest posts on MicrosoftNOW</b> <?php require_once(‘wp-load.php’); $results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT post_title, guid FROM $wpdb->posts where post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER BY ID DESC LIMIT 5"); foreach($results as $row) { echo "<li><a href=’".$row->guid . "’>" . $row->post_title ."</a></li> \n"; } ?></font> </ol></div></div> </body></html>
This is the content that is displayed when someone opens my web slice. The important bits are in red and need to be present for the web slice to work. Notice the id=”1” in the hslice <div> tag.
Save this file on a location in your web server.
2. Place a button on your website to add a web slice automatically to the favorites bar.
For this, you will use the AddToFavoritesBar method. Here’s how the code will look like to add the button below:
<button onclick="window.external.AddToFavoritesBar(‘http://www.microsoftnow.com/webslice.php#1‘, ‘MicrosoftNOW.com’, ‘slice‘);"> Add to Internet Explorer </button>
Note the text in red. The #1 is the ID that you set in your web slice code. The word ‘slice’ is an optional parameter that you need to pass to the AddToFavoritesBar method so that the browser understands that this is a web slice, and not just an ordinary favorite URL.
I’ve added the button on the sidebar of my blog. Make sure you add my web slice to get updates from my blog delivered on your browser!
One of the most exciting new features in Internet Explorer 9 is the ability to “pin” your favorite websites to your Windows 7 taskbar. I just added a jumplist to my blog today!
Try it out – If you’re running IE9, drag and drop the browser tab showing this page on to your taskbar and see what happens.
Not only can your visitors pin your website, you can also add Tasks (or links) when your visitors right click on their pinned website.
Pinning is really cool because:
Your visitors can pin their favorite website to their taskbar
The pinned website icon is always displayed on the taskbar and the probability of the visitor returning back to your website is very high. This helps you retain your visitors.
Plus, they don’t have to remember the URL
You can add common areas of your website as a menu when they right click on the icon of your pinned website, giving them instant, one click access to all areas of your website.
Here are some interesting examples of IE9 jumplists in Action – Amazon, Facebook, Bing and ebay. There are plenty more websites out there already making use of this handy feature.
So, just how easy is it to add a jumplist to your website? It’s as simple as adding a few <meta> tags.
As an example, to display the jumplist that I added to my blog, here’s the code:
Hardware Acceleration unlocks the full power of your PC Today’s websites and browsers only use about 10% of the processing power your PC has to offer. Internet Explorer 9 unlocks the other 90%. With Internet Explorer 9, we’re tapping into your graphics processor through Windows to harness the full potential of your PC. It makes HD video smoother, colors truer, graphics clearer, and websites more responsive. Combined with our new JavaScript engine, the web now performs like an application installed directly on your computer.
Lesser Clicks
We’ve also added a several ways to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get where you’re going. You can pin your favorite sites to your task bar for single-click access. Pinning, Jumplists and Aero Snap.
Your sites shine Designed to get you to the web faster and get out of the way once you’re there, Internet Explorer 9 lets web content come forward and shine.
One single drop down menu
“Tear off" tabs let you view websites side by side
Address bar and search box combined to One box
Notifications appear in the bottom of the browser window instead of popping up
When you open a new tab, IE9 suggests commonly visited websites to open
HTML5 support
Through active participation in standards development in CSS3 and SVG working groups, co-chairing the HTML5 Working Group, and leading the HTML5 Testing Task force, we are actively helping set the standards for the modern web. Through our investments in standards and interoperability, we hope to help bring predictability to web programming. Because when you can spend less time rewriting your sites to work across browsers, you can spend more time creating amazing experiences.
Internet Explorer 9 introduces support for modern web standards, including CSS3, HTML5, SVG, ICC Color Profiles, DOM L2 and L3, and ECMAScript5.
This recommendation from the German authorities came after a confirmed vulnerability was detected in Firefox.
What do I gather? If every government starts telling users to stop using every browser each time a vulnerability is discovered, I wont be surprised if one day they tell citizens to stop using the internet altogether!
I will show you how you can retain visitors on your website and increase the number of returning visitors by adding simple browser capabilities to your website. The session is free to attend for all web developers.
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