16 Incredible IE9 Sites / Web Apps You Must Try

Unique Cloud experiences are just the thing to let users get a glimpse at the under-the-hood innovation built into Internet Explorer 9.

At the bottom of this article you will find a list of no less than 16 incredible sites / web applications that you must try in conjunction with IE9.

First off make sure that you download and install IE9 Beta (over 10 million people already have) or the latest post-Beta developer release, IE9 Platform Preview 6. You can even blend the two into a super-Beta which offers the Beta UX on top of the PP6 internals.

And then head over to Cloud apps put together by participants to the 10K Apart contest from MIX Online in association with An Event Apart.

“The 10K Apart Challenge had a simple premise: Could you build a complete web application using less than 10 kilobytes? That we may trace the predecessor of the 10K Apart—the 5K Awards—to a time almost exactly a decade ago is sheer coincidence,” revealed Nishant Kothary & Joshua Allen, Standards Evangelists, MIX Online.

“What isn’t coincidence, however, is its backing by a pioneering web community fronted by Jeffrey Zeldman, A List Apart. (…)

“As you may have guessed from the title 10K Apart, not only was Mr. Zeldman involved this time around, but so was his honorable partner, world-renowned CSS pioneer, and one of the original web standards champions, Eric Meyer.”

There are a total of 16 winners of the 10K Apart contest, but there are a total of 367 web applications that have been submitted and that can be tested, all weighing less than 10K, obviously, and all designed to take advantage of modern web standards such as HTML5.

“Perhaps the most striking thing you notice when browsing the entries, is how many of them don’t look like Web pages. Using modern Web technologies like Canvas, SVG, CSS3, and fast JavaScript, contestants were able to create Web apps that could easily be mistaken for native applications, Flash apps, or iPhone apps,” Kothary Allen added.

Here is the list of applications: 1. Sinuous by Hakim El Hattab – "A game built using canvas and JavaScript - no external libraries. The game requires only mouse movement or swiping (iPad/iPhone/Android) as input. Total size: 6.9KB.

"The outstanding Sinuous has won the 10k Apart Grand Prize, for the best overall app. Sinuous's makers will receive a paid pass to any AEA Event, a $3000 Visa Gift Card and a copy of HTML5 for Web Designers."

2. Fontanero by @private_face & @whoozle - Best Technical

3. Matchuppps by Ian Storm Taylor – Best Design

4. RGB Invaders by Egor Balishev - People's Choice

"All three winners will receive paid registration to any AEA event, a $1000 Visa Cash Card, and a copy of HTML5 for Web Designers."

And the Notable Mentions:

5. Rainbow Blocks by Nick Lockwood

6. How fast is your typing by Didats Triadi

7. Lines by Dmitry

8. TinyBounce by ZURB

9. SunCalc Lite by Vladimir Agafonkin

10. Filterrific by Jacob Seidelin

11. Pintura by Lúcuma labs team

12. Taskboard 10k by Bartek Szopka

13. Asteroids 10K by Kevin Roast

14. Spendo by Oliviera Freer

15. JsNebulo by Tulin

16. 10k Tower Defense by Team Sauceawesome

And just as it was the case with the first list of amazing IE9 websites, the 10K Apart web apps are designed to work seamlessly not only in Internet Explorer 9, but also in Firefox and WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta is available for download here.