14 DAY TRIAL // is yet to reach RTW, but the browser is already winning the hearts and minds of users worldwide.
With IE9 Beta released in mid-September and IE9 Platform Preview 6 launched the past week at the Professional Developers Conference 2010 (PDC 2010), the next major iteration of IE continues to make consistent inroads in worldwide market share.
The latest statistics offered by Internet metrics company Net Applications reveal that Internet Explorer 9 is already being used by over 0.3% of the world’s users for daily browsing.
“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,” notes Ryan Gavin, Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing.
“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.”
Gavin also points out that visitors of technology sites are already on the bleeding edge, leveraging IE9 in a much larger number compared to end users.
Right here on Softpedia, no less than 2.24% of the traffic coming to our website in October 2010 was through Internet Explorer 9.
This is equivalent with an over 50% increase in IE9 usage for Softpedia users compared to September, when a total of 1.05% of visitors had already made the jump to IE9.
What’s more important to note is that while IE9 usage has increased, Firefox’s has decreased. Between September and October 2010, the number of Firefox users coming to Softpedia dropped from 38.29% to 37.54%, a number which is still larger of IE users on our site, 36.34% the past month.
But it appears that IE9 is a hit where it counts, namely on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Internet Explorer 9 is designed to seamlessly blend into modern Windows clients, and to take advantage of built in goodies such as DirectX 11 APIs for hardware acceleration.
“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,” Gavin said.
“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.”
IE8 is still the world’s most popular browser, continuing to grow, and now up to 32.60% worldwide share.
At the same time, the overall market share of IE diminished to 59.65% in October 2010, taken down by the usage loss coming from users dumping IE6 and IE7.
“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,” Gavin explained.
Mozilla’s open source browser also dipped a little the past month. Firefox’s market share went down from 22.96% in September to 22.82% in October.
Meanwhile, Google Chrome also continues to grow, jumping from 7.98% in September to 8.47% in October, indicating that it might be a stronger opponent to IE9 than Mozilla.
Opera Software released the first taste of Opera 11 recently, but in the past two months, existing releases of Opera have lost market share, with the browser now down to 2.28%.
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,” Gavin concluded.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 6 (PP6) is available for download here.