Accelerator Spotlight
Accelerators are a robust and customizable way of bringing you closer to the services you use most. We’ve said a lot about the technology behind Accelerators and how to build on it, but I thought it might be nice to step back for a minute and look at some of the things people have already built. So for the rest of this post, I’ll be throwing a few interesting Accelerators into the spotlight.
These are five Accelerators that I thought were notable in some way, either because they did something completely different than I ever thought of the feature doing, or because they do something particularly well.
Shareaholic
One of the distinctions we made when designing the Accelerator feature was service integration versus service aggregation. Loosely speaking, one could view the feature itself as being service aggregation, since it binds a bunch of services in one place, and each individual Accelerator as service integration, since it occupies a place in that aggregation feature.
Shareaholic (add) comes closer to service aggregation in its own right than almost any other Accelerator I’ve seen. Their team has a blog post describing it, but it essentially takes the user selection, link, or document and sends it to the Shareaholic service, which interfaces in turn with roughly 30 other services of varying kinds.
There are tradeoffs to this approach, of course, but I think Shareaholic is a good example of the kinds of aggregation possibilities that are possible with Accelerators.
Entertonement
Entertonement (add) is a very unique Accelerator. Essentially, it takes the user selection and returns audio clips based on that selection. The real distinguishing feature, however, is what it does with the preview window:
Entertonement embeds a media player in the preview window and then plays the first audio clip returned by the user’s selection.
I think this Accelerator helps illustrate a class of preview window scenarios that I don’t think have been fully explored yet—namely, embedding outside content.
I could see a number of other applications for embedding a media player in the preview window, like music or video search services, some of which already have Accelerators. Given that the preview window can run ActiveX controls, the possibilities are virtually limitless, subject to the security restrictions we have in place for such controls.
Preview and Launch URL
Preview and Launch URL (add) fills one of the most-requested needs for Accelerators. It takes a user-selected URL and launches it. This alone is very useful, but what really sets this Accelerator apart is its use of the preview window.
It uses a service called WebSnapr to generate previews of web pages, which it then returns in the preview window. The end result is that you can see a page before you navigate to it:
We had created a “Launch URL” Accelerator for internal purposes, but the use of a thumbnail generator hadn’t occurred to us. As a result, I think this particular Accelerator really stands out.
Share with Facebook
Facebook (add) is another big service building on the Accelerator feature, and their “Share with Facebook” Accelerator deserves mention. You can activate the accelerator from the Page menu, which enables you to send whatever page you’re viewing to Facebook as an item to share with your friends. You can also right-click a link and share that, too.
This Accelerator is notable because it’s a good example of well-used document variables. Most of the Accelerators out there use selection context exclusively, perhaps not realizing that Accelerators can operate on links or the page as a whole, as well.
While selection context is definitely the “light-up” case for Accelerators, I think document context could be used to a greater degree than it currently is, and I think Facebook does a good job of doing so.
It’s also a good example of “bulk send” Accelerators, where the user selection is taken from a web page and shifted to the composition page of a service. Blogging and email would exhibit similar behavior, for example.
Shop and Save with Live Search Products
This Accelerator (add) manages to combine two of my favorite things in the world—saving time and saving money. As the Live Search blog explains, whereas a user normally would have had to copy a product term and then paste it into at least one shopping service somewhere, he or she can now just highlight that term and receive easy links to reviews and price comparisons.
In addition to its execution functionality, it makes very good use of the preview window, too, presenting the essential information to users inline.
Conclusion
I hope this post helped shine a little more light on a few Accelerators you may not have seen before. I also hope it may have helped you see some of the potential for Accelerators that may not be evident in the ones you use every day. The Accelerators above were notable for pushing the envelope in some way or another, and it’s my hope that users and developers like you will always continue pushing.
Thanks for reading!
Jon Seitel
Program Manager, Accelerators
Comments
Anonymous
March 27, 2009
The comment has been removedAnonymous
March 27, 2009
I'm confused... are those "untitled.bmp" files that IE8 produces Accelerators of WebSlices? IE8 is the best and BMP image format is the future!Anonymous
March 27, 2009
Hey Microsoft, what happened to the "Define with Encarta" accelerator? I tried to get that for my friend, but it's not on your site and wasn't included with the RTW of IE8. Thanks.Anonymous
March 27, 2009
Accelerators is one of my favorite features in IE8. When I tried Google Chrome, every time I highlighted text on a webpage, I kept expecting a little blue icon next to the highlighted text! LOLAnonymous
March 27, 2009
Did your internal version of launch url work without having to use a redirect url? I tried to make one which would simply attempt to open the selected text as a link but IE would not install it. I would rather not have to send the urls off to a 3rd party website.Anonymous
March 27, 2009
I know this isn't the right place for this, but I couldn't be bothered lodging a full bug report. It seems IE8 final breaks media sharing in some way. I've experienced this problem on the two machines I installed it on: http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.multimedia.windows.mediaplayer/browse_thread/thread/933cfb2d0e314134?hl=en#Anonymous
March 28, 2009
Eine schöne Schnellinfo, um sich vor dem Klick einen ersten Eindruck über eine Website zu machen oder um auf eine Url-Adresse, die nicht verlinkt ist, zu navigieren. Gefunden unter: IEBlog: Accelerator SpotlightAnonymous
March 28, 2009
A few things: 1.) for your add links, you need to remember that 90% of the browsers out in the wild ARE NOT IE8! therefore, wrap you addAccelerator link in a function that can advise non-IE8 users why this won't work before they get the JavaScript error and can't understand why the site is broken. (this goes for the IE team, as well as anyone implementing an IE8 Accelerator) 2.) What tools are in place to manage this list of accelerators? Judging by the number of goofy toolbars I see on most IE user's machines, they are going to have tons of garbage in this right click list which will only render the functionality useless. 3.) Can you please FIX THIS BLOG so that the "home" page DOES NOT load the full article for every article on the front page. It consumes massive ammounts of bandwidth when you post all those pictures in all those articles. 1 paragraph of text ONLY please, with a link to [more...] 4.) Where does one see the privacy policy for a given accelerator? Over time a site can aggregate a lot of data about users, the sites they visit and what they search for before arriving at their site. I'm not so sure I want all this data tracked. 5.) Finally as a usability issue, the onhighlight activation of the blue accelerator icon tends to mess up lots of pages that use a drag-n-drop metaphor to organize data (e.g. add to cart scenarios) Is there a way for developers to force this feature off on a given page, or at least within a given area? e.g. if I return false from the onbeforedragstart event or similar can I evade the accelerator icon from popping up? thanksAnonymous
March 28, 2009
todd // "Manage Add-ons" takes care of accelerators, as well as other add-ons. Disabling/uninstalling is a breeze.Anonymous
March 29, 2009
Hi, Shareaholic does not have a link to Live or MSDN Bookmarks?Anonymous
March 29, 2009
@Rob Parsons - Why would you want a link to Live or MSDN Bookmarks? You don't seriously actually use either of those inferior services do you? +1 glad that Sharaholic hasn't cluttered their service with legacy Live/MSDN Bookmarks options. I don't want my Internet cluttered with layers of useless second grade MS Services.Anonymous
March 29, 2009
Hmmm, it seems the superpreview has been released (trial) by Microsoft Download link: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/6/8/568F0D28-0434-4794-B7FC-FB293BCC98FB/SuperPreview_Trial_en.exeAnonymous
March 30, 2009
Why don't you just come out and admit it, accelerators are Microsoft's response to the popularity of Firefox and its extensions. One of the best things about Firefox is its extensibility, which is exactly what you are doing with accelerators. People can add the extra features and functions they want, which is something people have always asked for with IE. At least we are finally seeing some progress in this area.Anonymous
March 30, 2009
I don't think the accelerators are working properly for me, when I try to add the one for wikipedia it says its already there, but there is no accelerator for wikipedia listed. Ever since installing one of the betas for IE8, I have never had the little search bar to the right of the address bar. How can I get it back as installing the final version hasn't helpedAnonymous
March 30, 2009
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March 30, 2009
Personally I can't stand this new addons manager, the close button takes up loads of real-estate, and sometimes you just want to hide the bar not disable its functionality. I have PrivBar installed, so that I can see if I'm still a member of the local Administrative group, and its just too time consuming to have to answer that blasted dialog!Anonymous
March 30, 2009
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March 30, 2009
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March 30, 2009
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March 30, 2009
I would love to see a different type of the Suggested Sites feature. Id like for it to show Similar Favorites.. it would be great if I started researching a topic and my favorites lit up with similar sites Ive saved prior. This would really accelerate me when researching topics that I have a large amount of favorites on.Anonymous
March 30, 2009
@EricLaw [quote]The www.ieaddons.com site is a relatively new site offering IE Addons, but not all are listed there[/quote] Actually most addons seem to have been removed from the site since two years agoAnonymous
March 30, 2009
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March 30, 2009
Er, its my PC the network administrator is me. Well thankfully the .REG file has fixed it, but theres no way I would have turned it off I like the feature far too much. As you say, the setup procedure does indeed once finished allow you to choose when it reboots as described on the last page of the setup. It is after this initial reboot, that the spontaneous reboot happens. After the "Setting up Internet Explorer" messages that have appeared since the year dot when installing a new version of IE. This is the third time it has happened after I installed each IE8 candidate. I looked in the NT event logs and there where no red error messages around the time of the reboot.Anonymous
March 31, 2009
@Peter Nimmo: The "NoSearchBox" setting is carried over from IE7, if you had applied it there. We're not aware of any way by which this setting can get changed on its own. If you're installing on XP with IE7 or pre-release IE8, there are two reboots: The first after IE7 or IE8beta is uninstalled, and the second after the final IE8 bits are installed. (On Vista, there is only one reboot). The second reboot does occur without waiting for you to push a button or do anything similar, but because Windows does not actually log in and provide access to the shell (which would allow you to launch other tasks which would be disrupted by a reboot) such a prompt would result in unnecessary delays. This is particularly true in the event that you kick off the install and walk away after the initial reboot.Anonymous
April 01, 2009
I'm waiting for a "Web slices spotlight". Btw, Microsoft (MSN) India's weather web slice is dead 99% of the time even though MSN Weather is up.Anonymous
April 02, 2009
You’ve probably already seen how Internet Explorer 8 Accelerators allow you to search very quickly theAnonymous
April 03, 2009
You’ve probably already seen how Internet Explorer 8 Accelerators allow you to perform searches veryAnonymous
April 04, 2009
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April 05, 2009
The "Preview and Launch URL" accelerator now supports the expansion of shortened URLs directly from the preview window! This is convenient for users who want to know what is the real URL for a shortened URL before actually clicking on the link. Currently supported URL shortening services include: TinyURL, bit.ly, ping.fm, s3nt.com, cli.gs, twurl.nl, poprl.nl, budurl.com, xrl.us, is.gd, short.ie, kl.am, idek.net, sn.im, snipr.com, snipurl.com, snurl.com and tr.im. Check it out!Anonymous
April 09, 2009
Please, why does the address bar remain in edit mode after the accelerator has been launched. The Launch Link and Google Maps plugin are just two examples. This is very annoying as I can't use zooming on google maps right away!!!