Microsoft Says IE9 Beta Demand Overwhelming 203
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."
Backwards compatability? (Score:1, Interesting)
The main thing with me is does IE9 deal well with IE8 plug-ins?
Obligatory (Score:3, Interesting)
Say it with me, competition is GOOD.
Unless it threatens a brand you like or comes from a brand you don't like.
(the general "you", not "you, Sprouticus")
I.E. lock? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can see a few reasons for this:
1. Lots of intranet and other internal company websites are I.E. only. It would be good to know now if those sites will continue to function.
2. Lots of employees are locked into I.E., and want to know what is coming up.
3. I.E. still means "the internet" to a lot of people.
4. Everyone who has a plug-in or toolbar needs to know if this will work with their "product."
5. There are about 2 billion internet users worldwide. I.E. has about %50 marketshare. 2 million downloading a beta out of a group of 1 billion users is about half of a percent. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't seem out of line with expectations.
Re:Good to see (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one am happy to see IE becoming competitve again. It is good to have more than one viable alternative out there.
Highlights mine.
What do you define as a viable alternative? Firefox, Opera & Chrome have been around for quite a while and they all have been eating IE's lunch. By a lot of accounts, the big story is that IE9 is a radical departure from IE7/8 and has made major strides in catching up but it's not there yet.
Personally, I hope IE9 gets pushed out tomorrow. At work I'm stuck using IE8 and I would love to have something which approaches the Opera browser I use at home.
Re:People are desperate for a fix! (Score:3, Interesting)
I beg to differ.. If browsers didn't "Excite" people then we wouldn't have this fascinating "War" of Google vs Firefox vs IE vs everything else. If browsers didn't excite people the open source projects would be ghost towns and people wouldn't be downloading & trying out a browser.
For me, the browser doesn't really "Excite" me, i'm just giddy for that "early days" feeling that comes about whenever some new stuff that we can tinker with heads out way. MS didn't just release a browser and say "here you go", they dove headfirst into an HTML5 experience and developed a showcase to go along with it. That is pretty exciting :)
Do my eyes deceive me? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hell may have frozen over. A JS engine that rivals the best, support for most of the CSS3 goodies, and budding hardware acceleration. This is looking like the best IE release in a while.
If they can keep security snafus down, alternative browsers are going to be a harder sell.
Compete on Linux and OS X too please (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not one for Linux or Mac too....Why compete on your turf only ?
Re:I can only assume (Score:4, Interesting)
i just gave beautyoftheweb.com two hits, one from chrome, in which all worked fine, but the fonts/scaling was borked to give me horrible alliased text, another in IE8 produced correct text, but all nice visual effects where gone, and surprise, all moving effects slowed to a crawl...
Re:I can only assume (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I think this number not completely honest. 6 Days ago Microsoft because a sponsor of Reddit and asked the Reddit community to test it out and give feed back.
"See, Microsoft is getting ready to release Internet Explorer 9, and they reached out to us because they genuinely want to start a dialog with the reddit community. In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign. This is a great deal of trust for an advertiser to offer, and we should both take it as a huge compliment."
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_word_from_our_sponsor_because_for/ [reddit.com]
Re:I can only assume (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I just feel like people should upgrade and quit whining like we're still in the early 00's. Technology advances, and with it comes a need for stronger hardware and new programming frameworks.
Re:Compete on Linux and OS X too please (Score:3, Interesting)
Because there are plenty of alternatives on other platforms. There are plenty of alternatives on windows as well, but "IE" has become a platform in itself, due to the prevalence of shitty microsoft-HTML sites in corporate intranets. Currently the only browser that deals with the corporate intranet AND the internet without needing 2 browsers is IE. And its shit.
If you're on an open platform and don't use microsoft corporate intranet websites, you have no need for IE.
Re:I can only assume (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Java's strength was in its simplicity, but that time is long gone. It was okay in mid-90s, but it's hopelessly outdated in 2010 (guess what, programming languages evolve, too!). Any simplicity that may be in the language has long been drowned by the complexity of the overengineered standard library and various "enterprise" frameworks with miles of XML configs, factories of factories, and other creative architectural decision.
In the meantime, C# has been adding features that actually make code both easier to write and clearer. LINQ is a prime example of that. Lambdas are another (when used with a well-designed framework of higher-order functions). A more obscure example, which might nonetheless resonate with Python developers, are iterator methods (Python calls them generators - with "yield" keyword).
And - "syntactic fluff", really? Then why did Java scramble to copy large parts of that "fluff" for 1.5 release?
Oh, and what about all the people begging for closures/lambdas in Java today (in C# since 2005)? Just to remind, it got postponed again, from Java 7 to Java 8. And a lot of people are quite angry about it.