Internet Explorer 9 (beta) was launched to the public this week, and it's gotten a lot of buzz and high marks. It's also gotten a lot of web properties doing things to utilize its features. Microsoft's own Bing features are certainly interesting. 

WordPress is utilizing the browser's functionality for both bloggers and blog readers, so its new features should have pretty far reaching impact, within the space of IE9 users. 

WordPress is taking advantage of the pinning feature of the browser, specifically, with different feature sets for readers and bloggers. Joy Victory explains on the WordPress Blog:

When you sign in to your blog, you can pin your own site and get extra tasks that make blogging easier and faster. A logged-in user can quickly access links to their dashboard to write a new post, moderate comments, upload a new file, or view blog statistics. (Each task only appears if the user has that task’s capability, such as site administrator’s.) A custom list also displays up to 5 latest posts for the current blog context.

You can pin someone else’s blog, too. When you do, an icon appears that lets you subscribe to the blog feed, signup for a free blog, read Freshly Pressed, and access WordPress.com Support and forums.

To take advantage of the WordPress pinning capabilities, users simply need to drag the tab onto the taskbar. It will either display as a large WordPress logo or  if you're a blogger, your "Blavatar" if you've uploaded one.