Microsoft adds HTML 5 power to SkyDrive

Microsoft is updating its SkyDrive cloud-based storage service, providing a quicker experience by using HTML 5 technology and hardware acceleration.

Microsoft is using HTML 5 and hardware acceleration to speed up SkyDrive. Photo credit: Microsoft

The software giant boasts that common tasks, such as clicking on folders and navigating photo albums, will take 100 to 300 milliseconds, down from as long as nine seconds in the earlier version. And by powering the site with HTML 5, Microsoft is able to include HTML 5 video and CSS3.

"Browser modernisation has really opened up the window for us to rethink and re-architect how we build our websites," SkyDrive Group program manager Omar Shahine wrote in a blog post. "While we have always focused on improving the performance of our websites, it was clear that we had reached a point where the kinds of performance gains we were hoping for would not come without an assessment of our entire experience from the ground up. SkyDrive has been around since 2007 and was simply not built for the modern web."

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Microsoft makes SkyDrive storage faster, cleaner on CNET News.