Microsoft Releases Preview Stats On IE9

Microsoft has released a series of statistics on the preview of the next major version of its Internet Explorer browser the company made available in mid-March, including download trends.

According to published reports, Microsoft has seen about 700,000 downloads of the Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview since its release on 16 March at the MIX 2010 conference in Las Vegas. The U.S. is the primary geographical region where the downloads have occurred, followed by Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia, Microsoft said.

According to Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, the company has seen 10 times the page views to the IE9 Test Drive site. Hachamovitch said as of week two, traffic to areas of the Test Drive site include: 33 percent of traffic to speed demos, 27.4 percent to graphics demos, 22.2 percent to HTML5 demos and 17.4 percent to benchmark tests.

Moreover, Hachamovitch said the top three areas for bug reports are graphics and SVG support, compatibility, and the Microsoft Trident layout engine and CSS support.

The Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview features expanded support for HTML5, hardware-accelerated graphics and text, and a new JavaScript engine. Together these allow developers to use the same markup and deliver graphically and functionally rich Web applications that take advantage of modern PC hardware through a modern operating system, Microsoft said.