Microsoft Launches Internet Explorer 9 In UAE

Microsoft partners with six leading consumer websites to enhance online experience

Microsoft Gulf today announced the launch of the latest version of the world’s most-used browser with the release of Windows Internet Explorer 9 for consumers across the UAE in partnership with leading websites namely Dubizzle.com, Gulfnews.com, Nahel.com, anaZahra.com, Timeout.com and Dubai Financial Market (www.dfm.ae).

Through this partnership, Microsoft and these leading consumer websites will further leverage the power of the whole PC and enhance online experience for consumers with many featured on www.beautyoftheweb.ae.

“The best experience of the Web is on Windows with Internet Explorer 9,” said Samer Abu-Ltaif, Regional GM, Microsoft Gulf. “Today, the Web can unlock the power and performance of the best PC hardware through Windows and Internet Explorer 9. Websites also can act more like applications within Windows 7, with features such as Pinned Sites. In less than a year, Internet Explorer 9 went from early preview to final release with the help of hardware partners and the Web community. We are pleased to have launched Internet Explorer 9 in partnership with prominent sites in the region to ensure providing the consumer with the ultimate browsing experience. ”

Partner Websites – IE9 in Action Across the Gulf

Saeid Nejazi, Founder and Director of Nahel.com, said: “Heightened security, speed and user experience are three of the most important factors for an e-Commerce website. These are inherent with IE9, so it makes sense for Nahel.com to take advantage of the latest browser, and we’re very excited to hear the feedback from our customers. IE9 has allowed us to take a completely new approach to development, and enabled us to become more creative with its heightened features.”

“At anaZahra.com, we constantly strive to create and offer our readers a fuller experience about the things they love. With IE9 being one of best makeovers the web can get, we couldn’t wait to experiment with it in our video gallery, and share it with our users. It’s fast, well-designed and highly functional; it feels natural and effortless,” said Zoya Sakr, the Editor-in-Chief of anaZahra.com.

Will Milner, Group Editor, ITP Digital commented: "With new restaurants opening every month choosing a restaurant has never been so difficult. The Dubai Restaurant Explorer takes the pain out of making the decisions by using the power of cutting edge HTML 5 technology and social media interactivity to give readers inspiration. Time Out teamed up with Microsoft to give readers using the latest version of Internet Explorer 9 an innovative way of choosing a restaurant in the city as well as build an archive of places they have been and the places they still want to visit.”

“Prior to the IE9 launch, we teamed up with Microsoft to enhance our users’ online experience by leveraging the browsers new features. Our developers rapidly appreciated the benefits of IE9s ‘pinning’ and ‘jump list’ features. Implementation was quick and simple. Now Dubbizle’s IE9 users can access our website’s features very quickly,” said JC Butler, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Dubizzle.com, the Middle East and North Africa’s largest classifieds and community website.

Ian Wallace, Business Development Director, Gulf News, said: “We’re glad to be a regional partner with Microsoft on the launch of Internet Explorer 9 here. As a leading news website in the region, gulfnews.com visitors not only demand up-to-the-minute news and information but also a design and user experience that evolves with the evolution of the web. Microsoft allowed us to try new features in IE9 that aided us to evolve our product and offer a richer web experience to our readers.”

Internet Explorer 9 is designed to bring sites front and center through Windows 7, enabling a more immersive, more beautiful Web experience. Features such as Pinned Sites and Jump List enable people to put their websites directly on the Windows 7 Taskbar, as though they were native applications, and then to quickly and easily perform tasks related to those websites, such as check their inbox, change the music station, accept a friend invitation or see breaking news.

“What people care about on the Web is their sites, not their browser. That’s why Internet Explorer 9 is about making those sites shine. The browser is the theater and the sites people visit are the play, and that is what Internet Explorer 9 makes better — your favorite sites,” said Kerim Ozbakirci, Product Marketing Manager, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Middle East and Africa.

Fast is Now Beautiful: Internet Explorer 9 with Hardware Acceleration

The new version of Internet Explorer takes advantage of the power of modern Windows PC hardware to improve all-around Web browsing performance. The only browser with fully hardware-accelerated HTML5, Internet Explorer 9 harnesses the power of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), unlocking 90 percent of the PC’s power that went previously untapped by Web browsers.

Developers can now build faster, more immersive websites that feel like native applications using interoperable HTML5 or by using plug-ins such as Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, both of which will take advantage of the hardware acceleration in Internet Explorer 9 in their next versions.

Improving Privacy and Security Online

Because the Web is increasingly less secure and private, Internet Explorer 9 is designed to be the most trusted browser because it contains a robust set of built-in security, privacy and reliability technologies that keep customers safer online.

In December, Microsoft introduced Tracking Protection in Internet Explorer 9, which puts people in control of what data they are sharing as they move around the Web, by enabling consumers to indicate what websites they’d prefer not to exchange information with. Consumers do this by adding Tracking Protection Lists to Internet Explorer 9, and partners such as Privacy Choice, TRUSTe, Abine and Adblock Plus have already published these lists.

Malware is now the No. 1 risk to people’s security online, and Internet Explorer 9 provides the first Download Manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection. The browser also introduces SmartScreen download reputation, 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. Studies show that Internet Explorer 9 blocks 99 percent of socially engineered malware attacks, five times more than Firefox and 33 times more than Chrome.

Globally, Microsoft has partnered with more than 250 top sites from around the globe to take advantage of the capabilities in Internet Explorer 9 to deliver differentiated experiences to their customers, these partners include top social networks worldwide like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, top commerce sites like Amazon & eBay and top news sites like CNN, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, to name a few. Together, these partners reach more than 1 billion active Internet users on the Web. The result is a more beautiful Wed experience.
 

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