Microsoft: IE9 Downloaded 27 Times Per Second

Internet
Explorer 9, which was

released Monday,
was downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours it was
available,according to Microsoft. The beta version of this iteration of the
browser was downloaded only 1 million times during the first day of its
availability.

For the final
version of IE 9, that’s almost 98,000 downloads per hour, or 27 downloads
per second, however you want to look at it.

“We want to
thank everyone around the world for downloading IE9 and the enthusiastic
reception,” Ryan Gavin, Microsoft’s senior director of Internet Explorer,

wrote
on the IE blog.

Compared to
other browsers though, IE 9?s numbers aren’t quite as impressive. In a few
hours after becoming available, Firefox 3.5 saw more than

1 million downloads
in 2009. And by the end of its first 24 hours the year before, Firefox 3.0
had been

downloaded 8 million times.

The updated
Internet Explorer includes
HTML5,
an improved UI and a built-in do-not-track function. It’s available for
download at
BeautyoftheWeb.com.

IE 9 will soon
face more competition from Firefox, which is set to release the final
version of

Firefox 4
on March 22.

Image courtesy of

www_ukberri_net via Flickr