Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 launch partners in Gulf are firing up their websites today in time for the public release of Internet Explorer 9 in the Middle East and Adrica region.

Microsoft Gulf has partnered with a variety of sites including Gulfnews.com, Nahel.com, Dubai Financial Market, Dubizzle.com, anaZahra.com and TimeOut. The sites have build web apps specially designed for browsers that take advantage of HTML5 and have leveraged the pinning and jump-list capabilities in IE9 to deliver a better experience for Windows users. Gulfnews’s app offers a simple and animated way to check XPRESS' users pictures. TimeOut’ app provides an innovative and fun way to choose your next restaurant. AnaZahra offers an animated video carousel of their latest original content for women. Microsoft’s launch partners demonstrate exactly what can be achieved with hardware accelerated browsing and HTML5.

Microsoft’s fast pace Internet Explorer 9 development has seen a number of changes from the beta version to RTW:

  • Tabs will now be able to be placed in a separate row, providing more space for opened tabs
  • Less important notifications will now be automatically dismissed, emphasizing higher priority notifications and ensuring the browser doesn’t get in the way
  • Pinned sites will now be able to include more than one homepage, enabling you to click one pinned site on your taskbar and opening multiple sites at a time
  • Customers will now be able to pin sites to their taskbar wherever it’s positioned and developers can implement drag-to-pin support right on their pages
  • Tracking Protection and Tracking Protection Lists are now enabled
  • ActiveX Filtering to block ActiveX across your sites, turning them back on for sites you trust
  • InPrivate browsing is now supported on pinned sites to allow greater privacy right from your taskbar
  • Microsoft has also added CSS2D Transforms, HTML5 Semantic Tag, Geolocation and WebM support to IE9, in the spirit of same markup and interoperability


Here’s the full list of partner sites, more to be added as they become available: