Release Candidate for IE9 already downloaded by millions

by Steven Mostyn - Feb 17 2011, 10:18

Keen to applaud its Internet Explorer (IE) browser, software giant Microsoft has taken to the rooftops to let the world—and market rival Mozilla—know how much user appeal its new Release Candidate (RC) for IE9 is generating.

According to Roger Capriotti, director of Internet Explorer product marketing, the upcoming browser’s latest RC has already attracted more than two million user-initiated downloads despite only being available for a few days.

“We continue to be humbled by the enthusiasm and uptake of IE9,” he commented in an official blog post. “Early testers are already experiencing the beauty of the web across their favorite websites—and enjoying one-click access to a site-centric browsing experience by pinning their sites directly to their Windows 7 taskbar.”

Adding to that, Capriotti said Redmond-based Microsoft is “encouraged by this early response” and is looking forward to processing even more user feedback when existing IE9 beta users receive the RC via Windows Update at the end of February.

Some of the more notable additions bundled into the new RC include improved JavaScript performance via Chakra, dynamic GPU usage, “industry-leading” power consumption, a cleaner and more effective interface, Tracking Protection, ActiveX Filtering, Pinned Site while browsing InPrivate.

It also offers up support for the CSS3 2D Transforms module, several HTML5 semantic tags, geolocation, and H.264-encoded video using the HTML5 video tag.

This latest round of chest-beating comes after Firefox maker Mozilla Corp. slammed IE9 by saying that Microsoft’s web platform is not a modern browser and lacks important standards such as Web Workers, offline Application Cache, HTML5 forms, JavaScript Strict Mode, the File API and WebGL.

In answering that accusation, Microsoft has offered up a statement explaining that the IE9 team has spent considerable time “researching and looking at what developers are building today and what they want to build tomorrow to define what we build in Internet Explorer 9 today.”

The new Release Candidate for Internet Explorer 9 can be downloaded directly from Microsoft by clicking here.

And, in case you're wondering, Internet Explorer 9 has been downloaded around 25 million times during development.

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