AFTER doing a thorough case study on Web browsing habits and concerns among people in 11 countries, including Malaysia, and 21 countries in Europe, Microsoft launched its latest browser, the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).
According to Microsoft Malaysia's chief marketing and operations officer Danny Ong, the days of the Internet was just a place to get information was long gone.
"Today, people use the Net to interact, connect, share thoughts through videos, photos and applications, and the IE9 has been designed to meet that needs, offering features that the users like most," he said at the launch of the browser last week in Kuala Lumpur. Ong said based on the study that Microsoft did, speed, safe, abd cluter-free browser took top priority among Malaysians when it comes to Web browsing.
"In Malaysia, 91 percent of users named speed as an important feature of their Web-surfing experience, more so than most other countries in the region," he said.
Like most other countries in Asia-Pacific, Malaysian users tend to struggle the most with loading video content on the Web. It is also found that Malaysians have the desire to have greater speed for their browsers, especially when 77 percent of them want to watch high-definition (HD) movies on the Internet in the future.
Aside from speed, users in Malaysia seemed to be the most concerned about security, with only two percent of responses admitting to never worried about downloading unsafe content online. Another aspect that holds clear to Malaysian users is the need for a clean and clutter-free browser as part of their Web-surfing experience.
What Microsoft did with IE9 is featuring new features like Hardware Acceleration to harness the full potential of the PC and make online experience much faster. The company has also added a tool called SmartScreen Filter which can protect the computer by warning users when attempting to view sites or download files that are potentially unsafe.
A Tracking Protection is also added to allow more level of control and choice about the information users reveal about their online activities. Elaborating further on the features of IE9, Microsoft Asia Pacific's product manager Jonathan Wong said the new browser now has site-centric approach to bring sties front and centre through Windows 7, to enable better Web experience. "We've include features such as Pinned Sites and JumpList to enable people to put their Websites directly on Windows 7 taskbar as though they are native applications, and then to quickly perform tasks related to those Websites, such as check their inbox, see breaking news or accept a friend invitation," he said.
"Currently, there are about 1,000 of the world's top sites are offering the pinning features, like FB, Twitter, Wordpress, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Huffington Post, etc," he adds. Besides that, the new version of IE also takes advantage the power of modern Windows PC hardware to improve all-around Web browsing performance. For example, IE9 harnesses the power of graphics processing unit (GPU), unlocking 90 percent of the PC's power.
"Developers can now build faster Websites using the interoperable HTML 5 or by using plug-ins such as Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight," he said.
On the security aspect, Wong said IE9 is now designed with built-in security, privacy and reliability technologies that keep users safer online," he said, adding that the Tracking protection feature in IE9 put users in control of what data they are sharing as they move around the Web. IE9 also provides SamrtScreen filter, a feature which uses reputation data to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files and more severe warnings when the download has a higher risk of being malicious.
To date, Microsoft claims that the SmartScreen feature has blocked over 1.5 billion malware and phishing attacks and blocking over three million attacks each day. Users can view more features of the IE9 at www.BeautyoftheWeb.com
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