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Web slices and Accelerators are important new features in Internet Explorer 8. What you may not know is how easy they are to implement and how much value they bring to your Web sites.
Hear what country music star Dolly Parton has to say about Internet Explorer 8.
Many companies and ISVs and those hosting applications online are finding Web Slices and Accelerators help increase customer awareness and responsiveness to their Web applications.
For example:
By helping give Internet users faster, easier access to a broad array of Yahoo services such as mail, search and online mapping, Internet Explorer 8 is helping Yahoo maintain its status as one of the world’s largest Internet content providers.
“When we saw this new version of Internet Explorer come through, with its enhanced security and a whole lot of engaging new features, we realized that this was a great opportunity for us to promote this browser in a Yahoo! flavor.” — Rajiv Thondanoor, North American business lead for Web search, Yahoo
For more information, see
OneRiot, a real-time search provider that scans social networks such as Twitter and Digg to find the most popular news stories, blogs, and videos, developed one of the first Web Slices. Over a one year period, users who added OneRiot’s Web Slice visited their site 18 percent more than users without the Web Slice.
“The combination of the popularity of Internet Explorer and the very compelling user experience we could offer just made the decision to invest in Internet Explorer a no-brainer for us.” —Tobias Peggs, general manager, OneRiot
“Internet Explorer 8 allows our customers to have jumping points to search directly from the browser without having to navigate anywhere else…It allows us to inspire our customers with some great merchandising and great items on the site.” —Jonathan Gabbai, global innovations manager, Internet marketing, eBay
Stimulant, an innovative Web development company, is working with its customers to help identify opportunities to extend the value of existing content by using Web Slices and other Internet Explorer 8 add-ons.
“The beauty of working in Internet Explorer 8 is that we’re able to leverage our existing talent and, with a few additional lines of code, suddenly we’ve got a Web Slice….If you can dream it, you can put it in a Web Slice.” — Darren David, president and technical director, Stimulant
Note: Slices, Accelerators, and Search Providers can be embedded in your Web pages for all browsers. If the functionality is not available, no additional code is needed. You don’t need to branch your code, no need for if/then logic. In IE8, the functionality will be there. For IE 6, no changes needed.
In addition, an add-in for Firefox will allow the functionality to work without changes in your code.
Downgrades as expected, but without the functionality. No code changes are needed.
Web slices can drive deeper and more sticky connections to Web applications. Use Web slices Anytime you have information on your site that users will want to see and discover when not in your Web application. For example, you can provide a set of alerts for a particular user as information changed.
Accelerators can help your users take action on information that they highlight. For example, a user can highlight a product. An accelerator can be used to add that product to the shopping cart.
Users simply highlight some text from any web page and then click on the blue ... faster, safer and easier browsing experience.
Many line of business applications include ways to look up information. Search providers give you a way to integrate your application with searches in the same way users already look for information.
MSDN Technical Documentation: Web Slices, Accelerators, Visual Search Providers
Videos for developers on Channel 9: IE 8 on Channel 9
The goal of this Web Application Toolkit is to leverage the new features in Internet Explorer 8 (Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search Providers) to extend the reach of your web site and services also to those users that are not on your site. The Web Application Toolkit includes a set of ASP.NET Web Controls that you can use to take advantage of these IE new features in your own Web application.
Publish in the IE Add-ons Gallery.
Bruce D. Kyle ISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation