We are pleased to announce that today we are releasing the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate (RC).

For a more detailed description of our approach in building and shipping the IE9 RC, you should read our engineering team’s post on the IE Blog.  The IE9 RC is feature complete and is available for download now at www.beautyoftheweb.com.

We’ve seen a fantastic reaction to the IE9 Platform Previews, and we’ve had over 25 million downloads of the IE9 Beta itself making it our fastest adopted browser beta of all time. IE9 Beta has been downloaded about 1.5 times more than IE8 Beta over the same time period. When adjusted for the installed base of PCs that can run IE9, IE9 Beta has actually been downloaded at a rate of almost 3 times that of IE8 Beta.

We’ve also received some great feedback from thousands of customers and developers over the last few months to help us make improvements to the IE9 Beta. In fact, we’ve received over 17,000 pieces of feedback from our Connect site. This video shows the reaction of the some of the developers who have been working with IE9.

The IE9 RC includes a number of important improvements consistent with our vision of delivering an all-around fast browser, one that puts the focus on your sites, strengthens our commitment to privacy and security, and delivers on our the commitment to developers to enable them to use the same markup and site-ready HTML5. For example, the IE RC includes:

  • Significant performance improvements in browser speed which, according to the WebKit SunSpider test, is now 35% faster than the IE9 Beta. Coupled with IE9’s innovative approach to graphics processing through hardware acceleration in Windows, IE9 is truly an all-around fast browser opening up opportunities for developers to create rich new experiences.
  • Numerous enhancements to the user interface such as new ways of handling notifications, the ability to place tabs on their own separate row, and enhancements to the already powerful site pinning functionality.
  • Support for additional HTML5 and web standards including Geolocation, and semantic tags.
  • Following through on the commitment we made in December to put users in control of their privacy online, and the RC of IE9 includes the Tracking Protection technology we announced then. In addition we are delighted that third party organizations such as Abine, TRUSTe, EasyList, and PrivacyChoice are already building and publishing Tracking Protection lists. For more information visit the Internet Explorer page of the Microsoft News Center.

We are especially excited to see the number of partners and developers embracing IE9 and taking advantage of the performance capabilities and the integration with Windows 7 to create great new web experiences for customers. At a small event in San Francisco to mark the release of the RC, we are joined by partners such hi5, Gilt Groupe, Archetype, Huffington Post, and Grant Skinner, and LIVESTRONG.COM. Partners are already seeing a strong return on their IE9 work.

  • LIVESTRONG.COM, who implemented dynamic jump lists at IE9 Beta release, found that IE9 users spent 53% more time on the site and are 40% more likely to return.
  • Huffington Post found that users who pinned Huffington Post to their Windows 7 taskbar spent 49% more time on the site.
  • Hi5 found that users who pinned the site became much more active responding to 3x more social requests (like new friends, game invites, messages).

You can see more of these partner experiences at www.beautyoftheweb.com.

The RC milestone is an important one. The code is feature complete and the final release of RTW is the next stop. IT professionals are encouraged to leverage the resources available on Springboard IE TechCenter to start exploring IE 9 RC. Bu t our most important call to action is for developers: get your sites ready for IE9 and start taking advantage of the new possibilities to help build a more beautiful web.

You can read more about the RC and the changes we’ve made on the IE Blog or by visiting the Internet Explorer page of the Microsoft News Center.

Ryan Gavin
Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,