Happy Hardware Accelerated Holidays

Here are two new HTML5 experiences you can run in your browser, designed in the spirit of the holiday season and with hardware accelerated HTML5 in mind.

Check out Santa’s Workshop, where the speed of your browser on your PC determines how many elves help pack Santa’s bag for the big night, and how fast they work. We built this experience using HTML5 technologies like integrated SVG graphics and HTML5 audio.

Santa's Workshop demo

See how big of a storm your browser and your PC can kick up with HTML5 Blizzard. Your snowflake score shows you how many falling snowflakes can be animated in real time (60FPS). The more snowflakes you see, the faster your browser and PC. This experience combines HTML5 canvas, SVG, audio, CSS3 and WOFF fonts together to create a winter wonderland.

HTML5 Blizzard demo

Just over a year ago we presented the earliest look at IE9 and how browsing experiences are better through the power of underlying hardware and operating system. Starting in March at MIX 2010, and throughout the year, we demonstrated our approach to bringing full hardware acceleration to the web in IE9. We showed continuing progress with the release of seven platform previews, the IE9 beta, and through samples on the IE test drive site.

We showed how web applications built on the next generation of hardware accelerated HTML5 approach the level of interactivity and performance found in native apps, and we had some fun along the way (as did many partners) – we hope you did as well.

Thank you!

Your participation and feedback is an important part of how we build IE9. Today we want to say thank you to everyone who has downloaded IE9 beta and previews, run the test drives, reported issues on Connect, or submitted feedback through the Send Feedback (alt+X, K) in IE9 beta. We also want to thank the people and groups who make the standards process work, the broad community of web developers, and enthusiastic consumers who work to move the web forward.

From the entire IE team, we wish you a happy hardware accelerated Holiday season, and we look forward to another exciting year on the web in 2011.

Rob Mauceri
Group Program Manager, IE