The 22nd of March was a big day for two big name companies in the browser world, mainly Opera Software and Mozilla. Norwegian developer Opera Software rolled out rolled out two major updates for two of its products, mainly Opera Mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11. Opera Software also announced a contest that gives you the chance to win a Samsung Nexus S or Samsung Galaxy Tab if you can spot all the musical references included in the press release that announces Opera Mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11.

Mozilla rolled out the final version of Firefox 4 to the masses. In case you don’t know this, Firefox went through 12 Betas and 2 Release Candidates. It is now available for download in more than 80 languages to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux users all over the world.

With all this talk about Opera and Firefox, it got me thinking – what about the Microsoft-developed Internet Explorer (IE) web browser? The final version of IE9 has been released earlier this month (on the 14th of March). What happened until then? Turns out that the launch of IE9 final was a big success: 2.3 million downloads were recorded in the first 24 hours.

“That is over 27 downloads every second, or over 240 downloads every 9 seconds. Wow,” said Ryan Gavin, Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing. “We want to thank everyone around the world for downloading IE9 and the enthusiastic reception. 2.3 million downloads in 24 hours is over double the 1 million downloads we saw of the IE9 Beta and four times that of the IE9 RC over the same time period,” Gavin continued.

Here are a few other numbers if you’re curious to see how IE9 did so far. 2 days after the launch of IE9 Beta it was downloaded more than 2 million times; in all, IE9 Beta was downloaded more than 25 million times. 2 million IE9 RC (Release Candidate) downloads were recorded after its launch. On the 1st of March, 11 million IE9 RC downloads were recorded.

As a little reminder, here are the features that make IE9 an interesting download:

• A fresh new UI (user interface) that, as Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch said, is meant to put the focus on the site, not the browser.
• Pin websites to the Windows 7 taskbar.
• The New Tab Page displays the sites you visit most often (like Opera's Speed Dial).
• All notifications are displayed at the bottom of the page.
• Tear-off tabs feature that allows you to snap pages side-by-side using Windows Aero Snap.
• Tabs that are related are color coded.
• Add-on Performance Advisor identifies add-ons that may be slowing down your browser.
• New, faster JavaScript engine.
• Support for HTML5.
• Tracking Protection Lists – a do not track feature that works much like the “Do Not Call” telephone registry and enables users to control how their information is shared
• ActiveX filtering – feature that allows the user to block all ActiveX content and then selectively activate it on a per-site basis.

If you would like to get IE9 you can grab it straight from Microsoft here. XP users needn't bother. IE9 is available only for Vista and Windows 7.