Microsoft Officially Announces Internet Explorer 9 at the SXSW

We obviously saw this coming less than two weeks ago when we found out that Internet Explorer 9 was going to release on the 14th of March. And true to their words, Microsoft has announced the ninth iteration of their web browser. The announcement was made in the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival.

Better browsing experience?

Although the announcement has been made with quite a bit of fanfare, the big question is what will Internet Explorer 9 bring to the table? Apart from a cleaner look, the browser is also said to support graphics hardware acceleration and HTML5. Ari Bixhorn, a member of the IE9 team also says that the new version allows websites to “look and feel more like native apps”.

More from News Analysis

Users can also use the Pinned Sites and Tracking Protection features. Pinning a site places a button in the Windows 7 taskbar. Clicking on the button will launch the browser customized by the pinned site’s logo and colour theme. Also users will be notified if there’s any new web content on the pinned site.

As mentioned earlier, Internet Explorer 9 is available for download from Microsoft’s “Beauty of the Web” site. Also don’t keep your hopes too high if you’re using Windows XP, Internet Explorer 9 only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

via PCMag