Bing HTML5: search engine provides welcome video

The Bing search engine will now welcome internet users with a background video.

Microsoft has decided to animate their Bing search engines home page a little. The site will now come with a video running in the background. The HTML5 technology has been called upon for this function, which is the reason that a compatible Web browser is required.

This new video function is for the moment only available in Bing in the United States, with it to be deployed to other markets in the coming months. There also won’t necessarily be a new video displayed every day. Could this be Microsoft’s answer to compete with Google’s doodles?

The first video of this kind was launched to coincide with the first day of autumn. To be able to view this, you simply have to select your Bing location as being in the United States. By scrolling past all of the pictures (to the bottom of the page) you will see this first video is an autumn landscape which is compatible with IE9, Firefox and even Google Chrome.

The aim is to provide Bing with a nice looking interface, even though it may annoy more than a few users. Numerous comments have been left stating that the service is useless, with many fearing their computers CPU will be overloaded while the video plays.

With the release of Microsoft’s financial results in the summer, it was made known that the company would be heavily investing in updates to Bing to try and gain market share in the United States. Despite this, the losses continue to mount.

Last week, CNN Money reported that Bing cost Microsoft more than a billion dollars in the last quarter, and 5.5 billion since its launch in June 2009. The total losses on the search engine are up to 9 billion dollars since development began on Bing in 2007.