IE9: RC, Windows Update, Performance Objectives, 25 Million Downloads

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 15 Feb 2011

Here are four things about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 web browser you may want to know about. First up, you may want to know that last week the web browser hit an important milestone in its development process – IE9 moved from Beta to Release Candidate.

If you would like to get IE9 RC, you can grab it from the Beauty of the Web site, which Microsoft set up to tout the browser’s capabilities, or you can get it in your native language here.
The IE9 capabilities I mentioned above are:
  • 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.

Sounds nice, right? I bet you really want to go click that download link above. And so we get to the second thing you may want to know about IE9 – Microsoft announced it would deliver IE9 RC via Windows update.

Microsoft announced this yesterday, on Valentines Day.

“Starting today, Monday, February 14, 2011, the Automatic Update (AU) feature of Windows Update (WU) will offer users of Internet Explorer 9 Beta an upgrade to the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. This rollout will start with a narrow audience and expand over the next few days to cover all Internet Explorer 9 Beta users,” announced yesterday Vishwac Sena Kannan and Jatinder Mann, IE Program Managers.

Moving on, here’s the third thing I want you to know about IE9. Jason Weber, Lead Program Manager, Internet Explorer Performance, has recently announced the five IE9 performance objectives the IE Team wants to achieve.

These objectives are:
  1. Display Time: Perform user actions faster than any modern browser
  2. Elapsed Time: Execute Web site code faster than any modern browser
  3. CPU Time: Effectively scale computation better than any modern browser
  4. Resource Utilization: Require less overall system resources than any modern browser
  5. Power Consumption: Require less power than any modern browser

The last time I reported on IE9 was when I was telling you IE9 Beta is a 23 million downloads success. When it rolled out IE9 RC, Microsoft has announced that IE9 Beta has been downloaded more than 25 million times. “IE9 Beta has been downloaded about 1.5 times more than IE8 Beta over the same time period. When adjusted for the installed base of PCs that can run IE9, IE9 Beta has actually been downloaded at a rate of almost 3 times that of IE8 Beta,” explained Ryan Gavin, Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing.


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