Internet Explorer 9 is out!

Microsoft is reporting 2.3 million downloads of IE 9 in the first 24 hours of its release.  Before you jump to grab it, read a few reviews:  Ars Technica, Tech Republic, ZDNet.  The consensus is IE 9 is a worthwhile release, if you have updated from XP (IE 9 will not run on XP – odd, considering 55% of the Microsoft desktop OS market is still XP).

IE 9 supports the “Do Not Track” header developed earlier by Mozilla and due in Firefox 4, and has cleaned up  (or stripped down, if you like the previous controls) the appearance of the browser:  status bar and menu bar do not display by default, its performance trounces the laggardly IE 8 and is definitely competitive with Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers.  On the other hand, the performance of the 64 bit version of IE 9 is poor.  Most reviewers are recommending running the 32 bit version, even on 64 bit machines.

With Firefox 4 coming out in a week or so, and Opera 11.10 and Chrome 11 now in beta, it’s a good time to give IE 9 a test run and see how it will stack up against the new browsers from the competition.