NOW HIRING. In preparation for the upcoming film Prometheus (in theaters on June 8), Weyland Industries is accepting applicants to join the crew of the Project Prometheus spaceship. Today, the Internet Explorer team is proud to announce our partnership with Fox Studios to create the Project Prometheus Training Center — designed entirely in HTML5 — giving fans the chance to demonstrate they are capable of being a crew member on the Prometheus ship.
The Training Center hosts a series of online physical and cognitive assessments that will test your ability to be a functioning member of the Project Prometheus team, including testing emotional and intelligence quotients, spatial relations, agility, and even your ability to withstand 46 G’s. The top performers will be featured, and every day we will highlight one “Elite Applicant” that has top performing test results across all five assessments. We know there are Prometheus fans that can’t wait for the summer blockbuster release (those of us on the IE team included!), and we think the Training Center provides fans a fun way to jump into the world of Weyland Industries and Project Prometheus.
The HTML5 experience leans heavily upon jQuery for the UI and controls, and the team even created a special 3D library for the Spatial Relations and Prefrontal Cortex Assessments to import features such as 3D models, lighting, hit testing and camera rotation. The code library will be available for download on our Internet Explorer channel on GitHub in the coming weeks.
“By partnering with the Internet Explorer team, we were able to create an online experience that makes visitors part of the Prometheus experience. The HTML5 and hardware accelerated capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 gave us the power we needed to provide amazingly realistic mental and physical challenges that bring the Training Center to life,” said Ira Rubenstein, EVP Digital at Twentieth Century Fox.
Since the introduction of Internet Explorer 9, one of our big focuses on the IE team has been to create rich and compelling online experiences showcasing the power of HTML5. From our launch of the popular game Cut the Rope, to creating interactive music videos, and highlighting futuristic graphic novels with Brandon Generator, we’re continuously looking to drive the web forward and push the envelope with regards to what can be developed in HTML5. Working with Fox on the Project Prometheus Training Center gave us the opportunity to build our interactive HTML5 content on top of the rich narrative from the Prometheus movie.
We built the Project Prometheus assessments so you can use any futuristic browser you like – though “Weyland Industries recommends” using the latest version of Internet Explorer. When using Internet Explorer 9, you will have the opportunity to participate in preferred candidate assessments reserved exclusively for IE users. These preferred assessments will boost your overall score, giving you a competitive edge to place in the top scoring percentile of those who are accepted to Project Prometheus.
Do you have what it takes to keep your head at 46 G’s? Good luck!
Ryan Gavin, General Manager, Internet Explorer
This Sunday, Dell launched a new TV commercial in the US, and we’re excited that they’ve chosen to feature Internet Explorer. The ad does a nice job highlighting just how central the PC and the web have become in our family lives – bringing folks together to enjoy a game like Cut the Rope, view photos, or listen to music as a family.
Dell has always been a great partner and we’re honored that they have chosen to recommend IE along with some beautiful Dell PC’s.
“Surfing the web is the number one thing people do on their Dell PCs, so we want to ensure they have the best experience possible,” said Alastair MacPhail, marketing director at Dell. “We love how Internet Explorer offers a fast, fluid and safe browsing experience for our customers and think it helps people get straight to the sites they love.”
We hope you enjoy the spot!
-Ryan Gavin, General Manager, Internet Explorer
Spring is in the air, and April proved to be another great month for the IE team. In our continued efforts to support the HTML5 platform, we partnered with teen music artist Jasmine Villegas to launch an interactive music video, and also launched an online throwback to arcade games, based on the popular Marshmallow People online video series.
With a new month brings new usage share data to report. As always, we look to Net Applications for the most current data given the depth and quality of their methodology as we focus on our core metric: IE9 growth on Windows 7.
I’m pleased to note that we continue to see IE9 growth on Windows 7 continuing, hitting 35.5% worldwide as of the end of April. The data is particularly encouraging for users and developers in the US, with IE9 growing 4 points of share on Windows 7, hitting 52.9% usage share in April.
Source: Net Applications, April 29, 2012 (daily). Latest mainline browsers compared with exception of Firefox, as Firefox 12 just released on April 24th.
This continues to be great news for consumers and developers alike who can benefit from the richer web experiences and standards support in IE9.
If you haven’t yet made the move to Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, try it by visiting www.beautyoftheweb.com.
Roger Capriotti Director, Internet Explorer Product Marketing
Back in March at Internet Explorer's Badger Palooza event at the 2012 SXSW Interactive festival we unveiled an arcade machine running Internet Explorer 9 featuring an HTML5 game based on the popular animated short film “Marshmallow People” from FilmCow. It was so popular, we’ve made the game, developed by Bradley and Montgomery, available for everyone – be sure to check out Marshmallow People: Bored to Death
Bored To Death is an arcade style brawler intended as a throwback to arcade games of the past and powered by JavaScript and HTML5.. The game has our bored Marshmallow people running around the playing environment trying to keep themselves from literally being bored to death. Even cooler, a second player can join the game on the same physical keyboard. For those interested in the arcade setup, we’ll be taking the Marshmallow People on the road at events around the US over the coming months to give developers a chance to get hands on with the arcade.
For developers interested in the JavaScript and HTML5 behind the game, the team created an in depth Behind the Tech page that discusses some of the challenges the team faced and how they overcame them. We also just launched BuildNewGames.com which provides a lot of great content on how developers can harness HTML5 for web gaming. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Jason
#boredtodeathie
Today we heard about a recent study completed by web performance management firm New Relic. The study confirmed that when it comes to real world page load times - Internet Explorer 9 is fastest on Windows. The study can be found here: http://blog.newrelic.com/2012/04/05/fastest-browsers/
New Relic found that IE9 loaded pages, on average, half a second faster than both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. What is worthy of note regarding New Relic's study and resulting data is their test methodology. As they note on their blog, New Relic is “sitting on what can plausibly be considered the world’s largest database of application performance data in existence.” In this study, they captured 690,000 page views per minute of real-time performance data that came directly from the browser across an extensive network of sites and users.
New Relic's findings mirror the results from web performance experts at Strangeloop, who in January found that IE9 and Firefox were both about 5% faster than Chrome at loading real websites.
There are a lot of web performance benchmarks out there, often built by browser makers in fact. And based on their design, they can often obscure real-world browser performance. New Relic is well positioned to able to comment credibly on the state of web performance from the end user perspective due to its reach (monitors 150,000 unique domains on the internet) and its test methodology. It’s great to see New Relic’s focus on the actual user experience when it comes to performance on the web.
For over a year we have told you that what we care about on the IE team is real world performance, and our commitment is to making sure that Internet Explorer gives you the very best performance with the sites you love. Ensuring that level of performance starts with our testing and performance facilities here at Microsoft. Our engineering team recently posted a thorough blog post explaining exactly how we test, measure, and engineer Internet Explorer so it is fast where it counts – on the web pages you visit every day.
We will continue to push the web forward with our investments in hardware accelerated HTML5 - and what that means for Internet Explorer users is that the web is not going to just get faster, but richer and more dynamic than ever before.
If you haven't given Internet Explorer 9 a try lately we encourage you to test it out and see just how far Internet Explorer has come in the past year.