Fast is Now Beautiful – IE9 Released

At 9:00 p.m. PST last night at SXSW in Austin, Texas, the final version of Windows Internet Explorer 9 was released and is now available for download. We were proud to be joined by sites and companies like Hulu, Groupon, Huffington Post, eBay, Slacker, ESPN and Foursquare, web luminaries like Ze Frank, and hardware partners like AMD, Dell, and HP as we celebrated the beauty of the web together.

To start experiencing a more beautiful web with IE9 and to visit a small set of the top 250 web-sites globally that have created a more beautiful experiences for all of us with IE9, go to http://beautyoftheweb.com/experience.

A Year of IE9

This is our ninth and final release milestone of IE9 in less than twelve months and we couldn’t be more excited to get IE9 in your hands. With over 40 million downloads and over 2% share already on Windows 7, IE9 is well on its way to become the fastest adopted browser in IE’s history. It’s amazing how much can change in a year. See what the year of IE9 has delivered for developers, consumers and the web in this short video.

A more beautiful web

We believe the browser is the theater, not the play. It’s your favorite sites that matter and developers and designers are the driving force behind creating a more beautiful web for all of us. With IE9, the sites and experiences they are creating will give you the best web experience on Windows.

Last night, we got a chance to celebrate and thank those developers and designers at SXSW in Austin as well as share a little bit more about our vision for IE9. Our ears are still buzzing from the show Yeasayer, The Head and the Heart, and Fences put on in front of a packed Austin City Limits house.

Earlier in the evening, we kicked things off by inviting sites, developers, and designers from across the web to join us in showing off the best the web has to offer. Here’s how some of the top sites and most influential developers are using IE9 to make a better more exciting web for all of us.

If you take all this together, IE9 is really about being four things: Fast, Clean, Trusted and Interoperable. IE9 redefines fast with a fully hardware-accelerated browser, harnessing the full power of the PC through Windows.  IE9 delivers a clean, site-centric experience, putting the focus on the site and using everything that Windows offers around the browser. Customers can pin sites to the taskbar just as they pin applications in Windows 7.  IE9’s delivers new protections from real-world threats to safety, privacy, and reliability that make it the world’s most trusted browser. With HTML5 at its core, IE9 enables a more interoperable web, so developers can write the same-mark across browsers and the web.

Your Favorite Sites Getting Better

In addition to new and amazing web experiences from Ze Frank and Foursquare, and the a cappella music of Mike Tompkins, some of the world’s top web-sites launched new offers for their customers who run IE9.

We’re excited to announce new exclusive offers from Groupon, Gilt Groupe, Slacker, Hulu, and eBay, for their customers running and using IE9. Some start today and some you will see over the coming months. These offers all have one thing in common – they showcase how sites can customize their web experience to take advantage of all IE9 has to offer.

Groupon features daily deals on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in thousands of cities worldwide. Since inventing the local daily deal model in November 2008, they’ve helped millions of customers explore their cities at a huge discount. Internet Explorer 9 will let subscribers pin Groupon to their taskbar, where they'll be able to see all of their nearby Groupon deals with a single click.

And the first time they click to a deal from their taskbar and buy it, they’ll award them $5 in Groupon Bucks to use towards any future Groupon purchase.

Gilt, the invitation-only lifestyle site offering highly coveted products and experiences at insider prices, has partnered with Microsoft to celebrate the launch of IE9. Members who pin Gilt to their Windows task bar and make a $250+ purchase from the Gilt dynamic Jump List will receive a free Xbox 360 4GB Standard Console, Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7, or Xbox 360 Kinect 4GB Console Bundle.

Offer is only valid from March 28-30 while supplies last. For more details on this upcoming promotion register today with Gilt at http://gilt.com/ie9launch.

Slacker has a great offer coming soon. First check out Slacker’s customizable radio stations. Pin Slacker to your taskbar, and you’ll get access to one free month of Slacker Radio Plus subscription service! Your Jump List gets smarter the more you listen, and you can even control Slacker Radio from your Windows 7 thumbnail preview.

In addition to these three, we also announced more offers to come launching over the next few months including:

Beginning March 28th, one month of Hulu Plus will be free to IE9 users who pin and access the offer through the Jump List.

In April – 8% extra eBay bucks on purchases made by eBay Buck users coming from the IE9 dynamic Jump List. And in May, a $5 discount coupon on the first purchase made by any eBay user coming from the Jump List.

We’ll have much more on these offers here on Exploring IE in the coming months.

Thank you

It has been an incredible journey this past year as we ride the wave of innovation web developers and designers are bringing onto the web. Thanks to many of you for your feedback throughout the last year, for testing the Beta and Release Candidate products, and for participating in our communities on Facebook and Twitter.

So what’s next for Internet Explorer? There’s no rest for the weary. We’ll head back to Redmond and get ready for MIX 11 and Dean Hachamovitch’s Day 1 Keynote, where we’ll continue to discuss the future of the web with developers and designers. And I know our customers wouldn’t want it any other way.

On behalf of the IE team, we hope you’ll enjoy Internet Explorer 9.

Welcome to a more beautiful web,

Ryan Gavin

Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing