Microsoft brings Bing instant previews to Internet Explorer 11

Microsoft has announced over the Bing blog that it is adding a new pre-render feature for the search engine, which will work with the company's own web browser—Internet Explorer 11. The pre-rendering feature will allow the browser to display instant previews of the first search result when using IE11. According to the post, the new feature doesn't involve wastage of either bandwidth (for those on a limited data cap), nor does it aversely effect the battery life of devices.

Instantly renders the first search result

"Today we are introducing an improvement available for Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) that helps you accomplish your search tasks even 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," said Microsoft in the blog post.

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With the update, whenever a user searches for something on Bing, the first result will always have a an instantly-generated preview ready. With this, Microsoft hopes to reduce the amount of time users have to spend while searching.

"With pre-rendering, you can now enjoy a faster end-to-end search experience, whether you are trying to navigate to a popular web destination (e.g. "New York Times") or looking for movie reviews (e.g. "Django Unchained reviews"). Because half of people click on the first result on the search results page, pre-rendering that page is an important addition in our quest to improve the overall task completion time," says the post.