Internet Explorer 9 Beta Attracts 20M Downloads
In just three and a half months of existence, the next version of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 9 beta, has been downloaded over 20 million times, Microsoft said in a blog post. The download rate is a record for a Microsoft beta release, according to a company representative.
The beta, which launched on September 15, accounts for 4.6 percent of all Internet traffic worldwide, according to year-end numbers from Net Applications. Separate numbers from Adobe's Omniture SiteCatalyst site-traffic monitoring software put the overall Internet average of IE9 beta usage at an even 0.5 percent for December.
Roger Capriotti, director of IE product marketing, said in the blog post that in addition to the beta, Microsoft has released seven "Platform Previews" of the browser's underlying engines on which Web developers can test their code. The last of these surprised browser observers by achieving the fastest results on a widely used industry benchmark, the WebKit Open Source Project's Sunspider JavaScript Benchmark. WebKit is the browser page rendering engine used by Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.
