Microsoft sets 15 March for official IE9 launch

Microsoft will officially launch the latest version of Internet Explorer at 5am GMT on 15 March at the South by South West (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

IE9 will contain almost all of the features in the release candidate that went live in February, but senior IE director Ryan Gavin said in a blog post that there will be some new features.

"We still have a few surprises left. There are a lot of new amazing things to share," he said.

IE9 will have an updated interface focused on maximising the browser window with a single URL and search bar. It will also be possible to pin web sites, or strings of URLs, onto the main Windows task bar, and a new download manager has been added.

Microsoft has faced criticism for its lack of HTML5 support and, while IE9 does support some HTML5 standards – noticeably for hardware graphics acceleration – others are not being added.

Dean Hachamovitch, IE corporate vice president, said that Microsoft wanted to avoid getting too committed while the technology was still evolving.

The company has set up an HTML5 Labs site to allow developers to try different evolving Microsoft implementations of the technology, which will speed up development, he said.

"HTML5 is enormous. It's important and a lot of it has to do with the quality, with the performance, with the fit and finish and with the depth of implementation, not just ticking check boxes on a site," he said.