Microsoft Says IE9 Beta Demand Overwhelming

cgriffin21 writes "Microsoft expected Internet Explorer 9 to be popular, but after more than two million people downloaded the IE9 beta in the first two days after its release, the software giant is having a hard time choosing which eye-popping statistics to cite. Microsoft says its "Beauty of the Web" site, which illustrates the aesthetic advantages of IE9's support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration, has had more the 9 million visits and 26 million page views since the IE9 beta launch on Sept. 15. Microsoft's developer-oriented IE Test Drive Site has had 4 million page views during the same period."

Re:I can only assume

[nullifi]

No, it's not being pushed, believe it or not people do have to download it. Although, you are correct in that the "Beauty of the Web" is the first page it loads up to.

Its running on windows azure

[cybrthng]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ [microsoft.com] :)

Re:Good to see

[Jorl17]

Because it belongs to Microsoft. Don't you know they're EVIL?

Re:Good to see

[gravis777]

Completely agree. I also like to see MS trying something new. The new UI is sweet, and this is FREAKIN FAST on my dual-core laptop with Win7. I haven't installed on the 6-core desktop yet, because its still rather buggy (several text fields on Facebook refuse to work), but I guess it wouldn't really matter, I still am a pretty big Firefox user and have it set to the default browser.

I was in shock with the HTML5 and the speed increase from going to GPU. Their Beauty of the Web pages are jawdropping, and I think this is REALLY going to change the web forever. I would have to say this (GPU accelleration and HTML5) is probably the biggest thing to hit the web since Flash / Shockwave came out 12 or 13 years ago.

I also like the increase in real-estate when browsing. Yes, I know I can turn my other browsers into fullscreen mode, but then I loose the address and search bars.

Actually, is it just me, or did IE9 practically copy Chrome's interface?

Re:Good to see

[StuartHankins]

... and it used to be 90%. There's been a large shift to other browsers over the past few years. That is significant.

Re:"Pushed" is a stretch

[HermMunster]

IE updates have always been optional but they have always been checked by default.

Re:I can only assume

[VGR]

When are people going to grow up and admit MS has released several top-of-the-line products recently? IE is getting much nicer, especially with 9, and Windows 7 blows away any other OS available, except for certain *nix distributions for specific reasons. Likewise, if you would actually give the .NET framework and its associated languages a try you may find yourself impressed with the capabilities.

Surely you jest. Just because IE 9 and Windows 7 are vastly better than their horrid predecessors does not make them top-of-the-line. And .Net is just Java with a flood of feature creep and syntactic candy. As Microsoft has done so many times before, they took something successful and copied it, while completely overlooking the reason for its success: Java's strength was and is in its lack of syntactic fluff. It makes the code take slightly longer to write but dramatically and mercifully faster to read and maintain.