Recent data shows that Internet Explorer has been on the decline in the browser market. But can Internet Explorer 9 still help Microsoft get back to a strong market percentage? Since its release on September 15th, IE9 Beta has been downloaded over 20 million times, according to a Microsoft blog posting.
With the launch of IE9 Beta, we have seen over 900 sites that have been created using some of Windows 7’s capabilities, such as jump lists and notifications. Also, this new version of IE aimed to protect consumer privacy by introducing Tracking Protection, which allows users to have control over which sites can track their online activity.
That said, here are some up-to-date statistics noted in an Internet Explorer blog post: Internet Explorer 9 Beta will account for 0.46% of Internet users worldwide at the end of 2010. Over the past year, we have seen IE6 and IE7 drop over 40%, and now only account for 22.98% of users worldwide, with IE6 hitting a low point.
However, alongside the decline of IE6 and 7, the usage of IE8 actually increased almost 40%. In fact, according to Net Applications and in light of the recent success of both IE9 Beta and IE8, the latest Internet Explorer browsers now make up for 34.07% of users worldwide.
Could IE9 be the browser to help Internet Explorer return to the top in the browser war? What do you think?