Barry Schwartz at Search Engine RoundTable has noticed something interesting, although there doesn’t seem to be any official news about it (although Webmaster Tools PM Duane Forrester retweeted the news): Bing Webmaster Tools, which up until recently required Silverlight, has apparently backed off that requirement. The site is now HTML5 compliant, according to a post Schwartz did on Search Engine Land. Schwartz quotes noted SEO expert Vanessa Fox on the pitfalls of the Silverlight requirement:
most of the data is available only graphically, and not as a download, without Silverlight, you basically can’t use Bing Webmaster Tools at all
The Webmaster Tools, similar to Google Analytics, offers webmasters a way to analyze the traffic to their site coming from Bing. Along with an SEO Toolkit, which uses a local copy of IIS 7 to analyze a website and helps improve a Web site’s relevance in search results, the Bing Webmaster Tools provide a simple graphical way to see how your website is interacting with Bing. The tools can track pages crawled, crawl errors, pages indexed, and traffic coming from Bing search queries.
Bing Webmaster Tools added some new features last August, and recently dropped support for Bing.com/siteowner, and this move away from Silverlight should pave the way for more improvements to come.