14 DAY TRIAL // Internet Explorer 9 has certainly gained an impressive level of traction although still being in Beta for the time being, illustrating the strong interest generated by Microsoft’s next major iteration of IE. According to the latest statistics released by the Redmond company, IE9 Beta has been downloaded in excess of 15 million times since the initial release in mid-September.
There have been an average of 200,000 downloads of IE9 Beta per day since the first public development milestone of the browser was launched, two and a half months ago.
Microsoft did not reveal how many users are actually running the Beta of Internet Explorer 9, but they did point users to information released by Internet metrics company Net Applications today.
“The momentum of Internet Explorer 9 Beta continues at a healthy clip, reaching over 15M downloads through November and now equaling 0.38% of share worldwide,” revealed Roger Capriotti, Director of Product Marketing.
By my calculations, IE9 has the largest Beta testing program in Microsoft’s history, judging by the sheer volume of downloads alone.
And if massive Beta releases are any indication of the product’s future success, I’m ready to bet that IE9 will take the web by storm. Both Windows 7 and Office 2010 attracted multi-million Beta testers, and both went on to become the fastest selling versions of the Windows client and the Office productivity suite, respectively.
I’ve been running IE9 Beta as my main browser since it was released on September 15th, 2010.
I will tell you that the Beta is indeed ready for the public, but that I did manage to run into a few issues while testing, certainly less than for Firefox 4.0 Beta, which I’ve been running considerably less by comparison. This is of course, to be expected of a Beta release.
But IE9 is definitely worth a download, and users should not hesitate to take it out for a spin. It’s bound to surprise quite a few people.
Since the Beta release in September, Microsoft also offered early adopter two additional Platform Preview Builds, but per the pre-Beta model, the releases are only the core of IE9 and not the fully-fledged browser.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 7 (PP7) is available for download here.