Video: How to surf faster with Internet Explorer

June 30, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments |

d_screenshot_acceleratorA few enterprising Microsoft employees have produced a low-cost video that shows how accelerators, a feature of the Internet Explorer 8 browser, reduce the number of steps to perform common tasks.

What Microsoft’s doing is attempting to beat Google by changing the game. Instead of trying to lure Googler users away with higher relevance, more pages in a search index, or faster search response, Microsoft is focusing on saving the Internet user’s time by keeping them away from Google’s life-eating search box.

Accelerators are shortcuts to common tasks, such as getting a map, that you can select by clicking your right-hand mouse button. Internet Explorer ships with a few of them, but you can add many more, such as the new Bing Maps accelerator. There are also accelerators for Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Multimap. They’re complicated to explain, but easy to watch and learn.

The days of Microsoft trying to lock out competitors via sites that only worked for Internet Explorer are long gone.

(The clip below is done in Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, rather than Flash. I had problems getting it to play in my Chrome browser, and it developed a mind of its own while playing in Internet Explorer 8, too. You can accelerate yourself by skipping the first minute to watch the first test, which begins at 0:55.)

There are probably Greasemonkey add-ons to do all of this in Firefox. Why doesn’t mozilla.org have a collection of amateur videos like this, to promote all those features they’ve spent years building into their own product?

Next Story: Spain’s Fotowatio plans $500M solar foothold in the U.S.
Previous Story: Themes: Another way that FriendFeed is getting more like Gmail

Bookmark and Share

Tags: ,

Photo of Paul Boutin

About the Author, Paul Boutin

Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Tim F.
    "The days of Microsoft trying to lock out competitors via sites that only worked for Internet Explorer are long gone."

    Try to get a "Suggested Site" that isn't Microsoft affiliated. Try to explain why the default browser search engine page features Google half way down the page buried between Truveo.com and Bidtopia (who? what?). http://www.ieaddons.com/en/searchproviders

    Oh yeah: "Microsoft is focusing on saving the Internet user’s time by keeping them away from Google’s life-eating search box." Are they really trying to save me time or is the lack of lock-in court-sanctioned and yet they still try just about anything to keep me away from Google that they can get away with?
  • RP
    MS is doing what it can to fight Google. Fair enough. Be it using affiliate sites, burrying goole search under whatever. Doesn't matter it's all fair game. However, this time they actually did a good job with ie8 and although rendering is slower than web-kit browsers, they're right, it's more important to have those accelerators than fast rendering.
  • Tim F.
    I don't have anything wrong with it (besides the fact that they look like asshats who don't get it by burying the few useful accelerators). I use them myself. I just wanted to point out that it's not all altruism and making the web better. What's hilarious is that there is a surprising dirth of accelerators for their own products and services. Even when they get it they don't get it.
  • Xeon21
    Because you think that Google, Apple do it for the sake of offering a better world to leave in? How naive you are!!!
    Google and the others are not worse nor better - they are all doing business !
  • Anonymous
    Wait a second... who wrote this? Paul, or did he just paste something that a Microsoft PM wrote? I particularly love this:

    The days of Microsoft trying to lock out competitors via sites that only worked for Internet Explorer are long gone.

    (The clip below is done in Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, rather than Flash. I had problems getting it to play in my Chrome browser, and it developed a mind of its own while playing in Internet Explorer 8, too. You can accelerate yourself by skipping the first minute to watch the first test, which begins at 0:55.)

    No, they're not locking out sites by using browser-proprietary content, not at all... just proprietary video? I mean, the irony? Anyone?

    So, seriously, was this an article or a marketing piece? Either way, it reads like a joke.
  • Ken Bundy
    *WARNING* Do NOT use Internet Explorer 8 - this web browser has unacceptable security vulnerabilities.
  • I wrote my thesis on the subject of improving task performance & saving time while browsing using a browser utility. One major flaw with these utilities are that they open a layer window on your current working window requiring you to take action on it, due to this behavior you cannot reference back to your original window or do any comparison. My approach was to do simultaneous browsing (side by side) instead of sequential (window on window), I wrote a Firefox add-on for that - www.omture.com, it's goal is to save time while browsing, you can multitask and use it for comparison.

    It is interesting to note that MS does not compare Accelerator to Add-ons. Just like Firefox add-on user has to add/install Accelerators. They are comparing out of the box functionality. What if Firefox comes with basic preloaded add-ons? The video says they will talk about add-ons in the next video, looking forward to see what MS has to say on that.

    Prince Arora
    www.omture.com