Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta 13 Million Downloads and Counting

At over two months since release, the Beta development milestone of Internet Explorer 9 has amassed an impressive number of downloads, no less than 13 million, and counting. By my calculations IE9 is responsible for the largest Beta testing program in the history of Microsoft, and I have already asked a member of the IE team to confirm that, just waiting for a response. Just to put things into perspective, Mozilla is looking for just over 2 million testers for the Beta of the next major version of its open source browser before it ships Firefox 4.0. IE9 already has 13 million in just two months. And is quite a milestone, as the announcement made on November 17th, 2010, came exactly one year after the software giant introduced Internet Explorer 9 for the first time to the world at the professional Developers Conference 2009. “We continue to see broad developer excitement and rapid user adoption of Internet Explorer Beta. Since the beta launch, we have already had over 13 million downloads of Internet Explorer 9 beta and it continues to be our fastest adopted browser to date,” revealed Microsoft’s Ziad Ismail. At that time, Dean Hachamovitch was still just General Manager of IE, and not Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer, and IE9 was lagging rival browsers in terms of performance, most visibly in terms of JavaScript speed as reported by the WebKit SunSpider benchmark. Following the release of IE9 Beta in mid-September 2010, two more development milestones shipped to early adopters and developers. On November 17th, testers got the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 Build. The IE team continues to hammer at the browser, and IE9 PP7 is now the fastest browser worldwide in terms of JS, according to the results of the SunSpider benchmark. “The momentum around Internet Explorer 9 continues to build. Since the beta launch, we have already had over 13 million downloads of Internet Explorer 9 beta and it continues to be our fastest adopted browser to date. “Download IE9 Beta today and see first-hand what a browser built for real-world performance can enable,” Ismail added.