Microsoft and Top Sites Celebrate the Beauty of the Web With Internet Explorer 9 Beta Release

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Microsoft Corp. announced the worldwide beta availability of its new Web browser, accompanied by over 70 top websites and global brands that created new experiences to show off the capabilities of Windows Internet Explorer 9, at the Beauty of the Web event in San Francisco. The new browser delivers a fast, clean, trusted and interoperable online experience that takes full advantage of Windows 7, putting the focus on the sites and applications people care about. Developers and designers from partners around the world are showcasing how they have used the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 to tap into the power of the PC hardware, Windows 7, a new user experience, and support for modern standards such as HTML5 to create immersive sites that feel increasingly like native PC applications. Together these partners reach more than 800 million visitors, or about two-thirds of the active people on the Web. Users can download the new Internet Explorer 9 Beta and experience many of these new sites at http://www.BeautyoftheWeb.com.

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"Internet Explorer 9 uses the power of Windows and the whole PC to bring you a better Web," said Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft. "We're proud to join our partners in releasing the beta of Internet Explorer 9, delivering a more beautiful Web to Windows customers across the globe."

Top Sites: Partners Bring HTML5 to Life With Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 has been re-architected to be the only Web browser to focus on bringing sites front and center through Windows 7, enabling a new class of experiences on the Web with partners such as Facebook, Red Bull GmbH, Quiksilver Inc., Rough Guides Ltd., eHow Inc., LiveStrong, Twitter, Dailymotion, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Orbitz LLC, as well as top design studios such as Metia, Soleil Noir S.A.S. and Joshua Davis Studios.

"The Web is about sites; your browser should be too. Internet Explorer 9 is about making those sites shine, and we're delighted that so many sites have come out with us today to create the kind of richness on the Web that wasn't possible before," said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Windows Internet Explorer at Microsoft.

The partners at the Beauty of the Web event, which collectively reach over 800 million visitors daily, include these:

• The top four social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Netlog
• Twitter, the largest real-time information-sharing service
• The No. 1 sites for retail (Amazon.com), auction (eBay) and entertainment information (IMDB)
• The leading European entertainment network (RTL) and the top brand and portal in China (Sohu)
• Leading sites in news (CNN, USA Today), search (Bing), travel (Orbitz), movies (Flixster), multimedia (Hulu), music (Gorillaz) and photos (Photobucket)

"Dailymotion is excited to take advantage of the new Internet Explorer 9 with the release of its new HTML5 Player Beta, delivering streaming video playback without the need for plug-ins," said Olivier Poitrey, chief technology officer and co-founder, Dailymotion. "Internet Explorer 9 sets itself apart by supporting hardware-accelerated graphics and offering users a more app-like experience with its new pinned site capability, making our customer experience even better."

Clean Site-Centric Design Integrates With Windows 7 and Makes Sites Shine

Internet Explorer 9 puts the focus on the applications with a clean experience, Windows 7 integration, and more pixels dedicated to the website, not the browser, allowing sites to shine. Browser controls are reduced and framed in "glass" so that, while they are discoverable, people see their Web content first and foremost. In addition, the design principles in Windows 7 carry through to Internet Explorer 9 so that sites appear more like native applications on the PC. Features include these:

• Pinned Sites. With Pinned Sites, a user's favorite websites can be accessed directly from the Windows Taskbar without having to first open the browser, making it quick and easy for users to get to the content they care about. The site's branding comes through both in the icon and in the site colors in the navigation buttons.
• JumpLists. JumpLists offer a quick and easy way to get to a common website task without having to first launch the browser. For Pinned Sites where developers have created JumpList capabilities, users can quickly create a new e-mail message, check their inbox, change the music station, accept a friend invitation or see breaking news. The possibilities are endless.
• Tear-off tabs and Windows Aero Snap tabs. Users often need to use more than one website or page to accomplish a task. Tearing off a tab by dragging it away from the browser and using Windows Aero Snap enable users to show two sites or pages side by side. Users can compare products from different websites, watch a video while reading e-mail, or look at a map while reading an itinerary for a trip. To tear off a tab and snap it, the user simply clicks a tab and drags it to the edge of the screen. Content on the site is rendered continuously, and videos continue to play when snapping a window in place, providing a fluid experience just like a native application.

"The user features offered within Internet Explorer 9 further Kaboodle's mission of making the overall online shopping and product discovery process easier and more convenient," said Shari Gunn, chief marketing officer, Kaboodle Inc. "Kaboodle's integration with Internet Explorer 9 allows shoppers to treat Kaboodle like an actual application on their desktops, allowing one-click access to their personalized shopping content."

"Orbitz is a leader in the online travel industry with innovations like our powerful hotel search capabilities that make finding hotels faster and easier," said Sam Fulton, senior vice president of retailing at Orbitz Worldwide. "We are excited to leverage Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 9 features such as pinning, dynamic JumpLists and streamlined browsing to further simplify and complement the fresh Orbitz hotel shopping experience."

All-Around Fast: Internet Explorer 9 Uses the Whole PC for Improved Performance

The new version of Internet Explorer takes advantage of the power of modern PC hardware to improve all-around Web browsing performance. This comprehensive approach to performance includes the introduction of a new scripting engine, Chakra, that uses common multicore central processing units (CPUs) in PCs to deliver significant performance gains. Internet Explorer 9 is also the first browser with full hardware acceleration of HTML5, harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU), reallocating much of the graphic processing to the GPU instead of the CPU. By using the GPU, Internet Explorer 9 unlocks the 90 percent of the PC's power that went previously untapped by Web browsers.

Trusted: Building a Browser With Safety, Privacy and Reliability in Mind

Internet Explorer 9 is designed to be the most trusted browser because it has a robust set of built-in security, privacy and reliability technologies that keep customers safer online. Built on the industry-leading protections in Internet Explorer 8, these new features provide the trust people need to feel safer online:

• Download Manager with SmartScreen Filter integration. Internet Explorer 9 provides the first Download Manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection and introduces SmartScreen download reputation. SmartScreen download reputation is a groundbreaking browser feature that uses reputation data to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files, and show more severe warnings when the download has a higher risk of being malicious. Users today are often conditioned to ignore generic warnings that are shown for every download. Other browsers show the same warning whether a file is an extremely common program or a piece of malware created literally minutes ago. Internet Explorer 9 is the only browser that uses download reputation to help users make safety decisions.
• Add-on Performance Advisor. Add-on Performance Advisor notifies users when add-ons are slowing down their browsing session. By default, users are notified if the total load time of all enabled add-ons takes more than 0.2 seconds, giving them an opportunity to make an informed decision to use the add-ons that they find valuable and disable those that may be less useful or are affecting performance.
• Reliability features. Tab isolation, automatic crash recovery and the new hang recovery feature in Internet Explorer 9 all help ensure users' information isn't lost and keep them browsing when a website isn't working correctly.

Interoperability: All in for HTML5

Internet Explorer 9 has support for industry standards including built-in extensive support for HTML5, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), CSS3 and other modern Web standards. This commitment delivers a new set of capabilities, meaning developers can write one set of markup and know that it will work and look the same in all modern browsers.

Raise Expectations for a Better Web

Internet Explorer 9 transforms the capabilities of the Web, delivered through Windows and modern hardware. With Windows and Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft lets customers re-imagine the role of the browser to deliver an experience that makes the Web feel as native as the user's favorite PC applications. The result is a more beautiful Web experience. It creates the foundation for a wave of compelling, immersive websites and applications that deliver an experience like the one people expect from an application running on Windows. Microsoft is helping the Web go native and unlocking the Beauty of the Web. More information can be found at http://www.BeautyoftheWeb.com.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.