Microsoft has unveiled updates to SkyDrive, including speed boosts, a revamped UI, and improvements to photo viewing. took advantage of modern browsers and HTML5 to make SkyDrive faster, easier to navigate, and more beautiful for viewing photos.

The latest version of the almost four-year-old service has cut wait time on actions like clicking folders, from six to nine seconds down to 100 to 300 milliseconds taking advantage of hardware accelerated graphics to make it fast to click through photo slideshows. The updated software also features H.264 (up to 100 MB) video playback, a navigation system more akin to desktop browsing, and a single view for files, docs, and photos. Focused on building a site powered by HTML5 so that we could include advancements like HTML5 Video, CSS3, and client rendered experiences, as well as making sure slide show experience is great in all browsers without any special software.

Provides a single place to see your photos, docs, files shared with you, and files in SkyDrive groups. When you view your photos in SkyDrive, you get a clean, rich view that fills the browser. When you select an album, the new mosaic layout displays your pictures in a way that lets you see all your photos in their original aspect ratio. It creates thumbnails that reflect the way you took the picture, whether it be a portrait, a landscape, or a panorama shot. Regardless of what screen you have, how big your browser window is, or how many photos you have, SkyDrive always arranges your photos in a clean layout that preserves the original aspect ratio. By using CSS3 Transitions, a new standard that lets us use subtle animations to rearrange the thumbnails when you resize the browser window. There are early levels of support already in Firefox 4+, Chrome X+, and in IE 10+. With infinite scrolling, we’ve eliminated pages in the photo viewing experience. Now, you can just scroll the page and see your photos quickly fill in. It looks and feels like a native application.

SkyDrive for the modern web