Today we are excited to launch Rethink– a showcase of how Internet Explorer is helping to create a web that is fast, beautiful, and perfect for touch. Over the past two years, we’ve been honored to partner with the people that push the limits of what’s possible on the web with innovative new experiences like Everest: Rivers of Ice, Contre Jour, and Red Bull Rampage. We even brought back the Windows 95 cult classic game, Hover, with 3D graphics on the web. You can enjoy all the experiences here.
Rethink is about where the Web has come from and where it can go with a modern browser like Internet Explorer. We’ve taken a different approach than others by helping create experiences that work well not only with Internet Explorer but across any modern browser and device. People expect their browser to be fast and so do we. But that’s not enough, we’ve also built the best touch-first browser for your tablet. And we’ve made real progress over the past two years with continued gains in market share worldwide. People are starting to ‘rethink’ Internet Explorer as we’ve challenged them to reconsider their outdated perceptions of the browser by poking fun at ourselves in a series of videos, some nostalgic, some self-deprecating, including “Child of the 90s” and “Do you know this guy?” We even took to the streets to ask real people their thoughts on Internet Explorer.
For developers, Rethink is also about exploring new, innovative techniques and making it simpler to build real-world sites. Many of these new web experience feature a developer tear-down on how they are built. Atari Arcade helped make CreateJS much easier to build web games with HTML5 Canvas. Contre Jour helped prove that JavaScript could do nearly everything that Objective-C could with concepts like encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. And with Everest, we utilized new Microsoft Research RIN technology with Gigapixel imagery – giving visitors on the web the first ever birds-eye view of the mountain allowing everyone to become an explorer. We also appreciate the feedback that the developer community has given us – it has made sites like this possible and also helped us (and you) save time with testing tools like the virtual machines on modern.IE.
As we look towards 2014, we’re more excited than ever at the possibilities – real-world web standards, hardware-accelerated 3D Web graphics and new touch-first experiences. Join us as we rethink what is possible on the web with Internet Explorer.
Roger Capriotti
Senior Director, Internet Explorer Marketing