Well now, just weeks after the sixth developer preview for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) was let loose by Redmond the seventh has been released and the company is prouder than hell of the progress that Internet Explorer has made.
As it turns out Internet Explorer 9 has been downloaded an impressive 13 million times, explaining the early market share that we have seen it record. Please do note that the release from Microsoft today is not aimed at consumers, it is a developer release that again has no user interface.
That aside, you can download it here if you are so inclined. According to WebKit SunSpider Internet Explorer 9 is now 345% faster in terms of Javascript performance from its first demonstration at PDC10 to today, with the 7th preview release.
Where does that place IE9 in relation to other browsers? Microsoft put together a chart for us to enjoy. Before we get to this, there are some qualms among competitors that the SunSpider test might not be fair, or that Microsoft is gaming the benchmarks. We are looking into the matter.
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Use the following chart to more compare IE9 to IE8 than to wonder if IE9 is a hair faster than Firefox:
As you can clearly see, IE9 has made worlds of progress since the days of IE8. Microsoft has also released new demonstrations of its IE9 technology, namely ‘Galactic,’ ‘Shakespeare’s Tag Cloud,’ and ‘HTML5 Sudoku.’
We asked the question before, how is IE9 doing? We seem to have an answer: its userbase is growing larger, and its results are getting better. I’m not leaving Chrome, but Microsoft is sure making me turn my head and look.
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