Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft Corp.’s newest and fastest-ever browser, has scored around 2.3 million downloads since it launched on Monday evening. Microsoft has issued a back-slapping blog post detailing the feat, and certainly seems pleased as punch that people are flocking to their new browser.
After going through what must have been a fairly embarrassing series of public apologies for the continued burden of IE6, even going so far as to make a website counting down until the browser’s death, being able to focus on the here-and-now must be fairly relieving for the intrepid IE staff.
Despite Firefox and Chrome making a lot of noise about hardware acceleration in browsers, Microsoft has slipped past them and becomes the first company to release a major browser that includes the new technology (hardware acceleration unloads some of the processing onto your computer’s GPU, making resource-hungry sites run a little smoother) – and early tests have certainly shown it to be speedy.
To put that 2.3 million number in perspective, Download Squad rightly points out that although it sounds mighty big, Firefox 3 actually managed almost four-times more downloads (about 8 million) in its first 24 hours of availability back in 2008. Also, lets not forget that Google Inc.’s Chrome is the only major browser out there that auto-updates, meaning a pretty high proportion of all Chrome users get the newest version within the first 24 hours.
Regardless, we’re pleased Microsoft are having success with their newest, stripped-down browser. It may not support quite as many technologies as its competitors (see Mozilla’s take on IE9 here), but it’s an HTML5 and Javascript powerhouse – and that’s a pretty good start.
