Last week at the Professional Developers Conference, we announced IE9 Beta has been downloaded over 10 million times since its release in the mid-September. Today, with the release of Net Applications’ monthly browser share report, we’re pleased to see that in addition to 10 million downloads, 0.32% of customers worldwide and 1.46% of Windows 7 users are using Internet Explorer 9 as their daily browser. On some of the sites frequented by early tech adopters, IE9 Beta has even higher usage share – like 2.24% at Softpedia and 3.96% on Ed Bott’s ZDNet blog. As Ed describes, “what I’ve seen consistently is that the public at large tends to follow the same trends as this group of early adopters.”
Beyond the early adopters, partners are also tapping into the capabilities of IE9, with over 900 sites having created experiences like Jump Lists and notifications from their pinned sites in Windows 7. More and more sites worldwide are taking advantage of what IE9 has to offer – including news site Virgilio in Italy, social networking site studiVZ in Germany, and tech enthusiast site Ars Technica here in the US. You can check them out by pinning their sites to your taskbar and right clicking on their favicon from your taskbar.
IE9 allows customers to take advantage of full hardware acceleration across the entire PC, and we’re already seeing many of our Windows 7 and Windows Vista customers adopting IE9 and getting the benefit of using your whole Windows PC. According to Net Applications, IE 9 Beta usage share on Windows 7 grew about 2.5 times, from 0.61% in September to 1.46% for the month of October.
As we have said many times before, we remain committed to getting customers onto a modern browser. We’re pleased IE6 and IE7 usage share continues to drop (by 0.85% in October); it’s an indication that customers recognize the benefits they can realize when using a modern browser. Our latest browser offerings (IE8 and IE9 Beta) saw a 0.45% increase in market share this month worldwide. In fact, that is higher worldwide growth than Chrome’s Stable and Beta channels (Beta/Dev/Canary) from September to October of 0.19% (7.69% in September with Chrome 5/6/7/8 versus 7.88% in October with Chrome 6/7/8/9). And in the US, IE8 and IE9 combined grew 0.58%, compared with Chrome’s 0.41% total growth.
Check out what IE9 has to offer by visiting the Beauty of the Web - and for developers, the Internet Explorer Test Drive.
Ryan Gavin
Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing
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