13 Microsoft Products have been nominated in CNET’s 2009 Webware 100 including several from Windows Live (Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live SkyDrive, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh) and Internet Explorer 8.

My colleague Antonia over on the Windows Live Team Blog has all the details including links on where to cast your vote. Voting voting ends on April 30, 2009 (12pm Pacific Time) so vote now!

Today we’re introducing the next chapter in the ongoing Windows Brand Campaign - an exciting new series of ads called Laptop Hunters. These new ads trace real people as they go on a hunt for a new laptop. For many people looking to buy a new computer today, it is likely that if they make purchase it will be a laptop. Laptop sales increased more than 20% last year.

The Laptop Hunters are not told they are taking part in an ad campaign by Microsoft. Instead, they think they are participating in market research. Each participant set their own budget for a laptop to meet their own unique needs. We then provide the participant with cash and sent them out to find and purchase a laptop – all in a single day. We followed them with a camera crew throughout the course of their hunt and recorded their experiences. Everything is completely unscripted. Once the participant finds and purchases their perfect laptop – we inform them out in the parking lot that it’s actually Microsoft and this was part of our Windows brand campaign. The participant can of course decline to be part of the ad series if they so wish.

In the ad making its debut today, we’re introduced to Lauren who is on the hunt for a new laptop under $1,000, a budget she set herself. She is out to find a laptop that has “speed”, a comfortable keyboard and a 17” screen. Here is Lauren’s hunt:

Laptop Hunters #1 - Lauren

Lauren’s hunt is a good example of real people finding Windows PCs a better fit for their whole lives with the right value.

We define the right value as simply benefits + cost. Windows PCs offer more “bang for the buck”. Competitors offer laptops that often cost quite a bit more, even though they have less powerful hardware, and can’t offer technologies such as Blu-ray, HDMI, eSATA, and 3G wireless broadband connectivity. When buying a laptop, after all, purchasing a laptop is an investment right?

The current state of the economy is forcing people to cut costs and save as much as they can, which means that people are looking for laptops with the most value at the lowest cost possible. According to NPD data as of February 2009, 74% of people looking at buying a new computer rated price as their most important purchasing factor.

Windows PCs have the benefits people want at the price point they like. They also offer choice and flexibility. If a person is a gamer, they can get a gaming PC for example.

In the coming weeks, you can expect to see more from Laptop Hunters as we follow real people on the hunt for a laptop.

Be sure to check out the Laptop Hunters website on Windows.com too!

The Windows Home Server Team announced today Power Pack 2. The English version of Power Pack 2 will be made available via Windows Update starting March 24th to Windows Home Servers with Power Pack 1 installed. You must have Power Pack 1 installed in order to install Power Pack 2. Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish versions of Power Pack 2 will be made toward the end of April.

Power Pack 2 offers Windows Home Server users the following awesomeness:

• Improvements to Remote Access
• Enhanced Functionality for PCs running Windows Media Center (via Windows Media Center Connector)
• Content Streaming Support for Windows Media Center Extenders

For me, I am particularly interested in the Windows Media Center Connector. With the Windows Media Center Connector installed, Windows Media Center will have access to content stored in shared folders on a Windows Home Server. Just this last weekend, I went through about 1,500 CDs and DVDs I’ve accumulated over the years of sporadic backups of photos and documents. I had CDs going back to 2000. I went through each CD and DVD and pulled off all the important data (mostly photos) and transferred the data onto my Windows Home Server. I now have no data remaining on any physical media anywhere. Everything is now on my Windows Home Server (which I affectionately call JARVIS). And now with Power Pack 2, I’ll be able to browse through those old photos I rediscovered from years ago directly within Windows Media Center downstairs in my living room.

For more information on Power Pack 2, read this post from the Windows Home Server Team.

Psst, here is a little tip for Windows 7 Beta users who have Windows Home Servers. You can add Windows Home Server shared folders to Windows 7 Libraries. Just right-click on a Library and choose “Properties”. There you can pick which folders you want in that Library. Choose “Include a folder…” and type \\ServerName\ShareName\FolderName etc. See below screenshot for a example:

You can see that in my Documents Library, I was able to add my “Brandon LeBlanc” user folder (located at \\JARVIS\Users\Brandon LeBlanc). I have actually created a standalone Library on my Windows 7 Beta PCs called JARVIS consisting of all the important shared folders on my Windows Home Server.

If you haven’t already, you need to check out this very amusing video put together by the Internet Explorer Team on the History of the Web. Check it out!

Today on Day 2 of MIX09, Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch during his keynote this morning in Las Vegas announced the availability of the final release of Internet Explorer 8 to download and install on their PCs.

Click here to download Internet Explorer 8!

Internet Explorer 8 is available for the following Windows releases: Windows XP SP2 and SP3, Windows Server 2003 SP2, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista (RTM), SP1 and SP2.

With Internet Explorer 8, common tasks on the Web are faster and easier. I’d like to take a moment and highlight how I am using Internet Explorer 8 today to quickly accomplish tasks that important to me. It all starts with my favorite Internet Explorer 8 feature – the Favorites Bar. The Favorites Bar in Internet Explorer 8 gives people quick access to information such as their top favorites and Web Slices.

On my Favorites Bar, I have Web Slices from partners such as Digg and The New York Times and of course Live Search (see my post on Live Search Web Slices). These Web Slices give me one click access to the latest news, weather, and traffic as I browse the Web. I never have to leave a webpage I’m on to view information from these Web Slices. When a Web Slice is updated, the slice on the Favorites Bar becomes bold. You can install Web Slices from The New York Times from this blog post from their First Look Blog and the Digg Web Slice can be installed by visiting Digg.com.

The Favorites Bar isn’t just a place for people to put their favorite Web Slices. In Internet Explorer 8, you can subscribe to an RSS feed and add it to your Favorites Bar.

With both RSS feeds and Web Slices on my Favorites Bar, I feel I am able to access important bits of information much quicker and easier.

The Favorites Bar is great at giving me information I want and keeping me up-to-date with things. But sometimes I need to quickly find something that’s not in my Favorites Bar. That’s where Internet Explorer 8’s Instant Search Box and Accelerators come in.

Internet Explorer 8’s Instant Search Box can provide Search Suggestions as you type in your search. When I search for “Windows” in Wikipedia, an Internet Explorer Search Provider, it provides me with suggestions (you’ll also note Instant Search also searches my History too).

Internet Explorer 8’s Instant Search also provides Visual Search. For example I am looking for some Zune accessories for my Zune 80. I want a dock for my Zune 80 for my office here in Redmond. Because just like with Wikipedia, I have Amazon.com as a Search Provider in Internet Explorer 8, I can search Amazon.com for Zune accessories and actually see the products.

Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 can also be a huge help in finding information you need – directly off a webpage.

Yesterday evening I was invited to a little meet up in downtime Seattle at a place called Spitfire Grill. I’m not too familiar with downtown Seattle yet so I had no idea where this place was. With Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8 such as Live Search Maps, to find out where this place was real easy. All I needed to do was go to the Spitfire Grill website, select their address, click the blue Accelerator button that appears and choose “Map with Live Search” and a pop-out map appeared showing me where it was.

There are many Accelerators available today – including a Find on eBay Accelerator or a Find on Facebook Accelerator.

Accelerators aren’t necessarily just for finding information on a webpage. They can be used for sharing information on a webpage, or simply a webpage, too. My two favorite Accelerators I use to share information are the Share on Facebook Accelerator and fellow Microsoftie Adam Kinney’s Send to FriendFeed Accelerator. Both these Accelerators let me share webpages I find interesting that I would like other folks to check out.

So in closing, Internet Explorer 8 truly lets me do common tasks on the Web easier and faster. And because of it, I feel much more efficient. You should definitely go download Internet Explorer 8 today and give it a shot.

Feel free to share with me you favorite Web Slices, Search Providers or Accelerators in comments. Dig in at the Internet Explorer 8 Add-ons Gallery after you get Internet Explorer 8 installed.

And if you’re interested in how Internet Explorer 8 stacks up from a performance standpoint, I suggest reading this blog post and watching the following video:

MIX09 kicks off today in Las Vegas and brings together web developers and designers to discuss how they can deliver a better experience through software and the Web. And we are making several announcements this week at MIX09 that will help web developers and designers easily create the best experiences with their websites and applications.

Today at MIX09 we introduced the next version of Silverlight – Silverlight 3. Silverlight 3 offers web developers more than 60 controls to take advantage of – making it easy for them to create cutting-edge Web applications. Silverlight 3 expands on high-quality and high-definition video experiences with true high-definition video in full-screen mode including stutter-free live and on-demand video. Silverlight 3 supports more video formats, including H.264, and hardware-based media acceleration. And Silverlight 3 also adds support for Windows Touch on Windows 7 (click here to view my blog post on enabling Windows Touch on supported PCs with the Windows 7 Beta)!

Download: Silverlight 3 Beta for Developers

The final release of Silverlight 3 is expected to ship later this year. For more information on Silverlight 3, check out the Silverlight Team’s brand new blog: The Silverlight Blog.

NBC Universal has announced that they have chosen Silverlight to deliver the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games on its official Web site NBCOlympics.com. They used Silverlight for the Beijing Games with great success.

For a perfect example of the power of Silverlight web applications – check out the brand new web client for the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. You can browse the galaxy directly within your web browser! A comparison of features between the web client and desktop PC client of the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope software is available here.

Here on The Windows Blog, we utilize Silverlight for delivering video content to our readers. Our video content is hosted on Microsoft Videos and with their Silverlight Video Player we embed the video into our blog posts. We’re working with the folks at Microsoft Videos in doing something real neat with our video content (and it’s all in Silverlight) so stay tuned!

For the full press release of today’s announcements from Day 1 at MIX09 – click here. On top of the Silverlight 3 announcement, we also announced several new components of the Microsoft Web Platform which includes the Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta. And we also announced new capabilities for Windows Azure as well.

Tim Sneath is “live blogging” MIX09 so if you’re wanting to stay on top of all the latest MIX09 happenings, read his posts.

Also announced today is the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit. Web developers can use the toolkit to make it possible for people who use Windows Live Messenger to communicate and express themselves directly within their website. Essentially, a web developer can give you a pretty slick web IM experience using Windows Live Messenger on a website you are visiting.

Why would a web developer want to embed Windows Live Messenger IM functionality within their website? Visitors of a website with Windows Live Messenger functionality built in can IM with their contacts or even other visitors on the website. This creates a new level of engagement for visitors on that website.

For more information on the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, click here. UPDATE: Angus Logan blogs about the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit here and worth checking out.

We are looking at deploying the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit here on The Windows Blog for our readers.

This is just another quick reminder that for those of you who are on Twitter and want to stay on top of all the latest happenings with Windows through our blog posts here on The Windows Blog – you can follow The Windows Blog on Twitter. Each time we post a blog post here, it automatically gets “tweeted” to Twitter. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed as well. And of course I’m on Twitter too – feel free to follow me as well. When I’m not busy posting blog posts here, I’m tweeting about Windows and Windows Live or reading what others are saying.

For other Microsoft products and services on Twitter, Adam Kinney has a pretty nice list going here for you to also follow.

In late February, the Windows Engineering Team offered a little sneak peek at upcoming changes with the Windows 7 RC based off on the amazing amount of feedback we’ve received (and continue to receive) from the Windows 7 Beta. Today they are offering another peek at some more changes coming with the Windows 7 RC. These 2 blog posts represent only some of the changes coming for the Windows 7 RC and as Steven notes in his intro – this is not an exhaustive list.

Back in October during PDC2008, I highlighted the Windows + Windows Live relationship. Specifically, I called out how Windows + Windows Live will complete the Windows PC experience with Windows Live Essentials. Now that people can experience the relationship first-hand with Windows Live Essentials today – I thought I’d re-approach and discuss the topic in a little more detail.

Today, users are increasingly expecting that their PC (and their OS) allow them to do things on their desktop that have an online component such as e-mail. This is where Windows Live Essentials comes in. For example, when you’re at home on your laptop you can use Windows Live Mail, but when you’re on the go you can access that same mail from any computer with an Internet connection by going to Windows Live Hotmail. Windows Live Essentials combines what you do on the PC with what you do on the Web. That’s the benefit of software + services.

Many of the Windows Live programs within Windows Live Essentials serve as a “bridge” to the Windows Live services:

• With Windows Live Messenger, you can not only chat with your friends via IM, but also follow What’s New with them on Windows Live, which means you can stay on top of updates they make like new photos or blog entries.
• With Windows Live Writer, you can publish new blog posts to Windows Live Spaces.
• With Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can upload your photos to Windows Live Photos and share them with the people you choose.
• With Windows Live Mail, you can sync your Windows Live Hotmail e-mail and calendar to your PC.

Windows Live Essentials extends beyond Windows Live as well. Windows Live Writer is capable of publishing blog posts to most major blogging services, not just Windows Live Spaces. As a matter a fact - I use Windows Live Writer to publish all my blog posts here on this blog, which is powered by Telligents’ Community Server. Windows Live Mail supports POP3 and IMAP allowing for multiple e-mail accounts from a variety of e-mail providers including Gmail. And Windows Live Photo Gallery supports custom plug-ins for uploading photos to a variety of photo sharing websites (check out this awesome plug-in for uploading photos to Facebook).

For Windows Live Essentials, we have introduced 3 programs as the successors to programs that were introduced in Windows Vista:

• Windows Live Mail is the successor to Windows Mail
• Windows Live Photo Gallery is the successor to Windows Photo Gallery
• Windows Live Movie Maker is the successor to Windows Movie Maker

We made this change because we learned that many of the end-user experiences need to be updated more frequently. With Windows Live Essentials, we feel we are in a better position to innovate on these programs and enhance your experience as a PC user and at a much quicker rate - as they are outside of the Windows OS.

Windows Live Essentials doesn’t just consist of the above 3 programs, it also includes Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Toolbar, and Windows Live Family Safety adding significant value to PC users through its integrated and powerful features.

Windows Live Essentials today are free, key applications that make it easy to manage multiple e-mail accounts, edit and share photos, chat with IM for PC users and available today for you to download at download.live.com (available for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and the Windows 7 Beta).

In the coming weeks, I plan to dive deeper into many of these integrated and powerful features (many of which I use myself) that I that I hope you will enjoy.

As any browser vendor will quickly point out, accurately measuring the performance of a browser is extremely complex. On the surface, testing performance seems quite easy… visit a few sites with one browser and then again with a different browser, and simply time how long it took to load the page.

In reality, it’s much more complex than that.

Many things need to be taken into account when comparing the page load performance of different browsers. For example, due to the constantly changing nature of the Internet it is not easy to tell if the exact same content was delivered to each browser for each test. ISP’s, routers, and cable modems often cache their content, meaning that the page being loaded isn’t always coming all the way from the web server. The amount of network traffic can easily change between tests. All of these things (and more) can dramatically effect page load times.

Unfortunately, tools to accurately benchmark browser page load times don’t exist. All of the existing browser benchmarking tools available today are either narrow in their scope (SunSpider, Celtic Kane), inaccurate (iBench), or don’t consider important factors such as network latency, network congestion, and caching.

In the absence of effective benchmarking tools the Internet Explorer Team created a real world test which took the above mentioned factors into consideration and created a level playing field for all browsers tested. The results when comparing Internet Explorer 8 page load times to Firefox and Chrome were captured on video:

IE8 Performance

The performance video visually compares page load times between IE8, FF, and Chrome. Of the top 25 most popular sites in the world, IE8 wins 48% of the time, Chrome wins 38% 36% of the time, and FF only wins 16% of the time. Of course, they didn’t cherry pick the sites they tested. They chose the top 25 sites as reported by ComScore in December 2008. 

We encourage (and expect) people to run their own tests to measure page load times and for the browser industry at large to create a test that can accurately measure page load times – as seen by the user – across browsers. To assist people in running their own tests the Internet Explorer Team has also created a whitepaper which describes techniques that can be used to contend with some of the complex issues mentioned above.

For more information on Internet Explorer 8, visit www.microsoft.com/ie8.

UPDATED 6:16pm Pacific Time: Corrected percentage numbers to accurately reflect data from whitepaper.

Yesterday we announced a brand new offering for Windows Media Center users: Sports Channel. Sports Channel will be offered to Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate users as a new tile under “Sports” in Windows Media Center.

Sports Channel offers a variety of sports content from great sources CBSSports.com, Fox Sports, MSNBC.com and more. Content flowing through Sports Channel ranges from breaking sports news to interviews of your favorite players to the ability to track your fantasy sports teams.

Sports Channel is a great example of our continued investment in providing new and easier ways for people to find and access compelling content through Windows Media Center.

Instead of going through my own experience with Sports Channel, I’d like to call out Ian Dixon’s overview of Sports Channel here and Stuart’s screenshots of the Sports Channel experience here from The Digital Lifestyle.com (one of the best Windows Media Center sites on the web today).

For the best experience with Sports Channel in Windows Media Center, a broadband connection is highly recommended. Today, Sports Channel is currently available in the U.S. only.

I also recommend checking out MSNBC News in Windows Media Center (which I blogged about last October) – which is no longer in beta.

The Zune Team has updated Zune.net today with several new interesting features. Their entire podcast catalog is now available to be browsed via Zune.net and can be subscribed to. When you pick a podcast to subscribe to, it fires up the Zune software and adds it to your Podcast collection. What’s even better though is all 12,000+ audio podcasts can now be streamed directly from Zune.net using Silverlight. So if there is an audio podcast you may want to listen to but not necessarily subscribe to (or download to your PC) - you can give it a listen on Zune.net. Currently, audio podcast streaming is available to folks in the U.S.

Another new feature hitting Zune.net is the ability to create music quizzes on your user profile. This allows you to quiz your friends with all your awesome music knowledge. You create the question and answers and people try to answer.

Zune Team member Jessica Zahn goes a little more in-depth on the new music quiz feature in this blog post.

Special thanks to Brian Seitz over on the Zune Insider for the heads up on today’s Zune.net updates. I’m told the Zune Team isn’t done making news this year so it will be very interesting to see what else they have up their sleeves.

If you haven’t already, you should check out the Zune 3.0 software. It offers a unique music listening experience and is a great way to discovery new music. Give Mixview a spin. Because music is an important part of me, I am constantly living inside the Zune software or playing music off my Zune 80 here in the office writing blogs or posting to Twitter.

Psst, you can also use Mixview on Zune.net too.