The popular music streaming service Pandora has decided to launch a major revamp of its web site. The company announced today that the new site design comes after over a year of work and beta testing.
The site now uses HTML5 rather than Flash, which eliminates the need for browsers to download a plug-in in order to use the site"s features, making it simpler than ever before. Pandora said it tested the the new design on some of its users over the past couple of months in order to fix some final bugs.
Besides the switch from Flash to HTML5, the new Pandora will now let its users listen to music for as long as they want as the company has removed its previous 40 hour listening cap. There is still has an optional premium service that eliminates ads on the site and offers an increase in the bitrate for songs to 192 kbps.
The new design also features improvements to creating Pandora stations and lets users share station URLs with others on Facebook, Twitter and sites, and listeners can now make the choice to shuffle their Pandora stations to add some more variety to their listening experience.
Pandora launched its public stock offering back in June 2011, at which time it said the service had 80 million users with over 800,000 music tracks. However, there"s a lot of competition in the music streaming business, the biggest being Spotify, which has a large following in Europe and finally launched here in the US earlier this summer.
Image via Pandora