Since its availability on March 14th, IE9 has been available for manual download and we are pleased by the early and continued enthusiasm for IE9.  We are seeing not only strong customer and business demand, but some of the highest web and application compatibility rates in IE history, not to mention all the sites that are taking advantage of HTML5 and IE9’s Windows 7 integration.  On March 28^th, we began to upgrade existing IE9 Beta and RC users through Windows Update.

On April 18^th, a little over a month after the final release of IE9, we will be ready to start the rollout of IE9 to our Windows 7 and Windows Vista customers.  We will offer IE9 to customers via a gradual rollout and expect the rollout to be largely complete by the end of June.  Similar to our approach for IE8, we will use Windows Update to deliver IE9 to users.  IE 9 will not install automatically on machines.  Users will have to agree to install IE 9.

For our business customers who require time to plan and test their deployments, we will make IE9 available on Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) in June.  WSUS allows use of management tools that make it easy for IT professionals to deploy IE9 in their environments in an automated fashion and at their own pace.  We would also like to remind our business customers who do not rely on WSUS they have the option to use the IE9 Blocker Toolkit to prevent IE9 rollout via Windows Update until they are ready.

Internet Explorer 9 will not be broadly rolled out on Windows Update until the end of June. We do this because we have hundreds of millions of business customers that rely on Internet Explorer and require an appropriate window of time to plan and test their deployments. We also have a responsibility, as the most popular browser on the planet, to ensure that IE9 is introduced in a timeline that allows web site developers to have the chance to ensure their site is 100% ready.

Internet Explorer 9 has now been downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours since its Monday night release.

Performance: “screamingly faster”

Last week, my colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols benchmarked the performance of Google’s just-released Chrome 10 and called it “screamingly fast.” That conclusion was based on a set of benchmarks that mistakenly compared the unoptimized 64-bit version of Internet Explorer 9 to the 32-bit version of Chrome. When he re-ran the tests, IE 9 came out ahead. I guess that makes the new Internet Explorer “screamingly faster” and, at least for now, dethrones Chrome as the speed king.

Screamingly faster :-)

IE9 Preview 6 available, now with secret Beta UI

By Kurt Mackey | Last updated 11 days ago

Microsoft demoed the latest developer preview of IE9 during the PDC 2010 keynote. Much like earlier previews, this one doesn't have much in the way of a UI. It's effectively a toolbar and the new rendering engine. The engine is wicked fast, however, and Microsoft has a number of demos that really put it through its paces.

The lack of UI is kind of a bore, so we asked how to make it more useful (and Microsoft told us). If you'd like to make it look and act like the beta (including all the chrome and new UI features), we have instructions. But first... a video!

Microsoft To Disclose IE 9 Details in March