You may have read some of the many announcements about the latest Windows Live Beta that went out today. There is a lot of good stuff in there, and I can’t possibly mention it all. But there is one new feature which I really find innovative, functional, and just plain better than anything else out there.
That is the new Image Search. Try this search for our fearless leader.
Now, pull the scrollbar a bit. See that?! Whoa! That is AJAX at work. No more next-next-next navigation taking foreever. Just tap the mouse and keep browsing until you find what you are looking for! That rocks!
On the room-for-improvement side, the beta still has a few shortcomings. In particular, I think the ajax usage is almost gratuitous – sometimes being used maybe more for its techie-cool-factor than for actual functionality. I’ve found that bookmarking pages is difficult at best, and sometimes pages render slowly. There could be a whole bunch of reasons for this, so I’ll defer to the Live.Com guys to sort that out – but there is no oubt that this image search is better than anything else I’ve seen.