14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer 11 will debut this week together with Windows 8.1, so it’s not at all surprising that Microsoft keeps talking big about the company’s latest in-house browser version.
But this time, Redmond has come up with something really exciting, as Internet Explorer 11 can now pre-render web pages displayed in Bing’s search results pages.
The whole concept is actually very simple. Microsoft claims that most users click on the first results displayed after performing a search, so Internet Explorer 11 automatically pre-renders these webpages in the background to make sure that they are loaded faster.
“The next time you perform a search in Bing using IE11, you’ll notice that when you click on the top result, the associated page is almost instantly rendered. To achieve this, we leverage IE11’s pre-render tag to automatically download and render the top result page in the background – it does this in a streamlined fashion taking care to not waste your bandwidth and battery life,” the Bing team said in a post.
Microsoft claims that a typical search process usually takes between 30 and 60 seconds, so the new feature can cut down this time to 15 seconds, makes page loading 50 percent faster.
“At minimum, a typical search process involves several stages, from typing a search query, waiting for results, then selecting a result link, and finally waiting for the selected page to load. This sequence of steps can take between 30 and 60 seconds. In practice we find that people engage in an iterative search process as they lead up to completing their task,” the company noted.
Internet Explorer 11 is the default Windows 8.1 browser and is being offered in two different versions, namely Modern and desktop. Both are coming with the same improvements, so expect pages to load faster regardless of whether you are using a touch device or a classic mouse plus keyboard combo.