14 DAY TRIAL // Just ahead of the general availability milestone of the latest iteration of Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft announced that it would not release the new browser version in Japan.
While IE9 RTW downloads went live worldwide, the release of the Japanese language variant was postponed, with the software giant arguing that it had to protect the communication infrastructure in Japan.
Just days ahead of IE9’s launch, on March 11, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit Japan followed by a devastating 7 meter high tsunami.
Almost a month later, the country is still struggling to recover from the natural disaster.
Certainly, the IE team did the right thing in not making the availability of the final Japanese language version of IE9 a priority, especially since it needed to keep the load on network bandwidth as low as possible.
And fact is that the software giant will still wait a few weeks before releasing the Japan localized version of IE9.
Here’s a rough machine translation from Bing (via Ankur Mittal):
“Japan Microsoft due to the earthquake disaster of the latest browser, Internet Explorer (R) 9 consideration to offload to the network line has become a key communications infrastructure, as had been scheduled for March 15, (Tuesday) 1: 00 pm (Japan time) on postponement of the Japan language version product edition offers, but we've been offering, this time a new April 26 (Tuesday) at midnight (Japan time) was decided to attention, please.
“Intends to implement progressively at a later date for automatic updates for users, to reduce the load to the network, on the same day in download only, on the same day that implementation had originally planned beta and release candidate.”
Recently, Microsoft has also started serving automatic upgrades of IE9 RTW to the testers that were still running the RC and Beta releases.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 and Windows 7 SP1 is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows Vista SP2 64-bit edition and Windows Server 2008 SP2 64-bit edition is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 64-bit edition, Windows 7 SP1 64-bit edition, Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit edition and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 64-bit edition is available for download here.