According to the Windows Team blog the release of IE9 RC1 has already gleamed 11 million downloads since Feb 10. And together with the IE9 beta this has reached a total of 36 million downloads (beta was released in September last year).
The blog continues by claiming that IE9 now represents a 0.66% worldwide browser usage share on Windows with 2.09% on Windows 7 alone. In other words, they were pleased by the figures, but in the real world does the 36 million downloads provide a true representation of users and their browsing habits?
For example, Internet Explorer is built into the operating system by default and Microsoft like to push out browser upgrades via their Windows update service (eventually there won’t be a choice, as just like IE8 the browser update will be forced out to users by default). Additionally, Microsoft don’t want to admit that there are plenty of Windows XP users still out there, who of course can’t run IE9.
And why would they want to switch away from what is still for me one of the fastest operating systems Microsoft have produced? I built a PC for my Dad just before Christmas and the XP Pentium 4 machine with 2GB RAM absolutely thrashes my own Vista PC. It has a far greater spec, quad core 3GHz AMD Phenom II (with plenty of RAM), but it’s meaningless due to the sluggishness of Vista (I know I should switch to Windows 7, but it costs money and time to transfer my data to a new OS).
However, I have to admit that the hardware acceleration of the IE9 browser does seem appealing, but to be honest I’ve yet to download it as I primarily use Firefox and only switch to IE8 because I have to for compatibility reasons.
I digress slightly, but at the end of the day I think Microsoft should release their browser as a separate install like all the other browsers and not integrate it or make it operating system specific. This has happened in Europe, but that’s only a part of the market Microsoft caters to. If it happened everywhere we would start seeing some true real-world figures for IE usage.
