Microsoft to hold special Internet Explorer 9 press event on March 14

By Tom Warren, on 18th Feb 11 2:50 pm with 5 Comments

Microsoft announced a special press event for IE9 on Thursday.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 team are planning to host a party during the South by southwest (SXSW) music and film festival in Austin, Texas. The party will be held on March 14 and will include free drinks and music performances from Yeasayer, The Head and The Heart, and Fences. Microsoft also teased a “special press pre-event” with its invitations sent to press and analysts on Thursday.

WinRumors received the special invitation on Thursday and understands Microsoft is planning to announce music and video related partnerships for Internet Explorer 9. We don’t expect Microsoft to launch the final version of Internet Explorer 9 as some rumors and speculation suggest. The software giant is likely to issue the final version of Internet Explorer 9 at its annual MIX event in April.

Microsoft revealed on Wednesday that Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate (RC) has reached 2 million downloads just a few days after its release. The software maker launched its final development milestone version of Internet Explorer 9 on February 10. Microsoft’s main change in Internet Explorer 9 RC is the addition of Tracking Protection. The new privacy feature allows consumers to address their concerns about being tracked on the web. Internet Explorer 9  RC offers users a new opt-in mechanism to identify and block many forms of undesired tracking such as cookies, web beacons, advertisements and trackers. Tracking protection involves lists that can be published online.

Microsoft’s second security enhancement is the ability to block ActiveX controls. Internet Explorer 9 RC includes an “ActiveX filter” option. The filter allows users to switch off ActiveX elements within their session, furthering Microsoft’s commitment to security within its browser.

Microsoft also unveiled Internet Explorer 9 for mobile earlier this week. The company is planning to ship the software as part of a platform release and update for Windows Phone later this year. Internet Explorer 9 mobile is currently part of “Mango”, the codename for the next Windows Phone release expected to be named 7.5. Internet Explorer 9 mobile will be identical to Microsoft’s desktop browser according to the company and will allow Windows Phone to take advantage of the latest advances in web technologies, including HTML5. Microsoft is also likely to ship a Silverlight runtime inside of IE9 mobile but the company is refusing to comment until its MIX11 conference in April.

Internet Explorer 9 special invite

  • Anonymous

    Do you know if Microsoft is planning to continue updating IE9 after it goes gold? They’re getting better at standards, but since the standards are evolving very quickly waiting another 2 years before they update it again would be rather dumb.

    • http://www.winrumors.com Tom W

      Well as it’s separate from Windows this time around I’d expect they’ll release regular updates on Windows Update this time.

    • Anonymous

      Thanks. Guess we’ll just have to wait see and hope then :)

    • JohnCz

      No worry, HTML5 won’t be fully spec’d out and ratified until 2014. That said, I suspect we’ll see a new IE v.next sooner than you think. Not just to address standards but I think it will strive to integrate much further with the OS/deskop environment than the pinned site capability we see in IE9.

  • http://twitter.com/Daniel_H_UK Daniel Hartshorn

    IE9 is setting a new standard (about time) with some of their new features so im guessing that it will be updated moe frequently to attempt to iincrease the amount of people which use the IE browser and to direct rival chrome and firefox again

    Good Luck to them IE9 is great and they need to keep it this way