Download Internet Explorer 9, Get a Month of Hulu Plus

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After being upstaged by Firefox 4, Microsoft is trying to lure users to Internet Explorer 9 with a free month of Hulu Plus.

To take advantage, you must download IE9, then visit Hulu.com and make it a pinned site by dragging the open tab down to the Windows taskbar. After that, visit the Hulu Plus landing page, and the box that previously offered a week-long trial will offer one month instead.

The promotion isn’t completely arbitrary; Hulu takes advantage of Jumplists, a feature that’s part of pinned tabs in IE9. Once Hulu is pinned to the Windows taskbar, you can right click the icon and choose a section of the website to visit, such as movies, TV, playlists and queue.  Microsoft wants web developers to build these kinds of jumplists into their sites to increase the allure of pinning sites to the task bar.

Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 on March 14, and promptly boasted about 2.35 million downloads in the browser’s first 24 hours. A week later, Mozilla doubled that figure with 4.7 million downloads of the brand-new Firefox 4.

Hulu Plus normally costs $8 per month and provides all back-episodes of TV shows, compared to just recent episodes on the free site. But the main attraction to Hulu Plus is its support for other devices, including the Playstation 3, iPhone, iPad Roku and connected TVs and Blu-ray players from Sony, Vizio and Samsung — in other words those that have nothing to do with Internet Explorer 9.

(via Lifehacker)