UK and Australian Bing homepages get animated homepage videos

By Tom Warren, on 16th Nov 11 8:19 am with 23 Comments

Bing UK homepage

British and Australian users of Bing can now experience Bing animated homepage videos in all their glory.

The software maker enabled its first ever UK and Australian video homepage on Wednesday, featuring a green frog. The white-lined leaf frog can be seen crawling up a branch in Manu National Park in Peru on the UK and Australian Bing homepages today. The expansion of Bing’s homepage videos follows an initial introduction in the U.S. during September. Microsoft switched the moving videos on in late September and explained at the time that the company would not be changing them daily. “We won’t be programming a video every day, just when the mood strikes us,” said Bing homepage team member Stephanie Horstmanshof.

The first animated homepage featured a video of the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Microsoft originally planned to enable animated homepages as part of its HTML5 preview site. The HTML5 version promised smooth animations to allow users to jump backwards in their search history. Bing also planned to introduce small, hovering windows as you scroll down the screen to keep navigation tabs in view. Microsoft is understood to be testing the HTML5 Bing features individually and will gradually roll them out to U.S. and international markets.

Check-out the animated frog at Bing.com.

  • http://techin5.com Jubbin Grewal @Techin5.com

    That’s actually quite cool. Now if only Bing could get annimated pages for Windows Phones.

    • GP007

      Animated video pages on WP would eat up your data though, or probably would anyways.

    • http://techin5.com Jubbin Grewal @Techin5.com

      Of course, it would just be pretty cool. I’m sure html5 video won’t take up too much data, like checking twitter or something. But yea, data would be the biggest problem.

    • phil jay

      *html5* video or not is no difference, the data is the same. But maybe enable an option to automaticly download the video as background and show it only when on wifi and probably only when fully charged.

    • http://techin5.com Jubbin Grewal @Techin5.com

      @google-a2b11a7ad519c5f9b2e617d707bc6e2c:disqus No I know, I was just merely pointing out that it’s not flash. Should have made that clearer.

  • http://davepermen.net davepermen

    Can’t wait to get that bing page here. not for the frog (though, it’s nice tech and a cute frog). I mainly hate that bing here does not search for any of the content like videos and stuff. It lacks all the extra searches (images, video, etc) here in switzerland. Annoying.

    I tried to switch from google to bing, but as long as these things aren’t here yet, it’s really hard to do so.

  • http://www.timacheson.com/ Tim Acheson

    At last! Now all we need on Bing UK is the Like button. Bing USA has had it for ages!

    • Anonymous

      actually, there was no ‘like’ button for videos until today…someone asked for it in the Bing Insiders group and I guess it happened :)

    • http://www.timacheson.com/ Tim Acheson

      True, though every other type of Bing homepage photo has had a LIke button since the feature was released some time ago. Here in the UK we still have no Like button and never have had one. I’ve been calling for one ever since the feature was launched for users localised localised to the USA.

    • Anonymous

      Ah, misunderstood what you were asking for :)

  • Guest

    Bing Germany too

  • reddi muvva

    its pretty awesome:D

  • http://twitter.com/karlcramer Karl Cramer

    Tell that frog to eat something. He’s too skinny!

    • Anonymous

      he’s way ahead of you. There is a fly right in front of him.

  • http://twitter.com/rikimini Richard Kimini

    Isn’t time to release the bing (not beta) to other countries?

  • Yann

    Bing.fr is animated to

  • http://twitter.com/J88NYr Jonny Rose

    It was working on my work computer (Win 7 with IE 9) but not on my home Win 8 and IE10… anything I can do to fix it?

    • http://twitter.com/J88NYr Jonny Rose

      Not working at my house on my old Win 7 PC either, or in Opera… what the hell!! im with O2 broadband if that makes any difference

    • Emi Cyberschreiber

      IE10 isn’t an official version. if you want to see videos with it, you have to go to F12 and change it to IE9 mode. thats who it works when i use win8.

  • Goko Smileski

    I have animated wallpapers every 2 day.  And i’m from Macedonia. All you have to do is to instal html5 web browser and wholaaa you are good to go

  • http://profiles.google.com/carlosrfonseca Carlos Ribeiro da Fonseca

    Right, Microsoft owes me a new cool-meter because the one I had just exploded.
    :)

  • trashoner

    The animated bing page is also available here US.

  • Pragati Singh

    Videos seems to be in a very good quality.. Bing is improving itself and being a biggest competitor of Google in future according to this speed.. :)

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