In just three and a half months of existence, the next version of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 9 beta, has been downloaded over 20 million times, Microsoft said in a blog post.
The download rate is a record for a Microsoft beta release, according to a company representative.
The beta, which launched on September 15, accounts for 4.6 percent of all Internet traffic worldwide, according to year-end numbers from Net Applications. Separate numbers from Adobe's Omniture SiteCatalyst site-traffic monitoring software put the overall Internet average of IE9 beta usage at an even 0.5 percent for December.
Roger Capriotti, director of IE product marketing, said in the blog post that in addition to the beta, Microsoft has released seven "Platform Previews" of the browser's underlying engines on which Web developers can test their code. The last of these surprised browser observers by achieving the fastest results on a widely used industry benchmark, the WebKit Open Source Project's Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark. WebKit is the browser page rendering engine used by Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.
Over 900 sites have created IE9 experiences using some of its unique capabilities like Windows 7 jump lists and notifications, and the IE team recently introduced a Tracking Protection feature to give users control over which Web sites can keep tabs on their browsing activities.
The blog post also noted other IE version moves, with versions 6 and 7 declining from 38.51 percent at the end of 2009 to 22.98 percent, while IE8 and 9 grew from 24.15 percent to 34.07 percent. Overall, though, IE dropped from a 66.92 percent share in 2009 to 60.04 percent in 2010, and from 62.39 in January 2010 to 57.08 percent in December 2010. It remains to be seen whether IE9 will be able to buck this trend.
For more details, see PCMag's review of the IE9 Beta, and the slideshow below.
