We’ve heard and seen little bits here and there that Microsoft’s SkyDrive was coming along, but today the new revamped Windows Live SkyDrive site was updated to be fully HTML5 and is now available.

First things first, SkyDrive is already an excellent cloud option for Windows users and includes a free 25GB of online storage and all you need is a live email domain (@live.com, @hotmail.com…). The service was already great, but it could be a little choppy and really felt like you were in a web browser doing work. Now, with full HTML5 support, SkyDrive looks and feels like a native application on your computer and thanks to Internet Explorer 9, you can even pin the cloud icon to your taskbar and access it like it was a local program.

Straight from the Windows Live blog, here are the details:

It’s Faster.

• Caching and hardware acceleration – Common tasks and scenarios, like clicking on folders and navigating photo albums will go from 6-9 seconds down to 100-300 milliseconds. Microsoft has taken advantage of hardware accelerated graphics to make it fast to skip through slideshows.
• Support for HTML5 video tag – Playback H.264 videos (with support for files of up to 100MB).
• Pin SkyDrive to your taskbar – With Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, you can pin SkyDrive to your taskbar for even faster access to the files you want. Create Word, Excel or PowerPoint docs stored in the cloud in just one click.

Is Easier to Navigate.

• All your content in one place including SkyDrive groups - Microsoft has combined all your photos, docs, files shared with you and files in SkyDrive groups into one view. The software giant took elements of the common file system you’re used to on Windows and Mac OS so navigating SkyDrive is more intuitive.
• Quick views – Microsoft incorporated navigational elements and a layout that is consistent with Hotmail (Quick Views for recent docs & files shared with you).
• Information pane - Ads have been removed to create room for a pane of information about your files – so you can take actions such as opening a doc in Word or Excel on the desktop directly from SkyDrive.

Photos are More Beautiful.

• Mosaic layout – Microsoft has removed the chrome out of the way to let your photos fill the browser. SkyDrive creates thumbnails that reflect the original aspect ratio of your picture. Portraits, landscapes and panoramas can retain their personality even in thumbnail mode.
• Clean arrangement – Regardless of what size screen you have, how big your browser window is, or how many photos you have, SkyDrive always arranges your photos into a perfect, clean square. In achieving this, we use CSS3 Transitions to add life to your photo album by animating thumbnail rearranging when you resize the browser window.
• Living, breathing presentation – When viewing your albums, SkyDrive pulses through your thumbnails, letting you experience the contents of an album even before diving in.
• Infinite scrolling – Microsoft no longer have pages in the photo viewing experience; you just scroll the page and quickly see your photos fill in. It looks and feels like a native application.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with the upgrade and will continue to dissect it until I have experienced all of the enhancements. You can check out the new version of SkyDrive by visiting live.com and logging in with your LiveID or you can check out the video that was posted on the Windows Live blog.