There certainly appears to be more than a little enthusiasm for browser numbers these days, and it’s great to see early adopters adopting the latest browsers across the industry. With Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4.0, and Chrome 10 all hitting their final releases recently, drawing instant comparisons around downloads or initial usage is a natural temptation, but unfortunately you can’t do it quite yet. Here’s why.

Every browser has a mechanism for updating their users from a previous version of a browser to the latest and greatest. For IE9, it is done through Windows Update. In the case of FF 4.0 and Chrome 10 their update mechanisms are turned on as part of their initial release to web (RTW). In the case of IE9 which RTW-ed on March 14th, we just turned on Windows Update for IE9 RTW yesterday – even then only for existing IE9 Beta and RC users. We have yet to turn on any updating for any Windows customers who have not previously downloaded the IE9 Beta or IE9 RC. So, every IE9 download is from a customer actively seeking out Internet Explorer 9 and downloading it. No automatic update or in-product prompts. As a matter of fact, of the downloads we’ve seen through Sunday, March 27th, over 90% have come from non-IE9 RC and Beta users. And remember, we report completed downloads – not attempted downloads where a user may hit a download button repeatedly but without fully downloading IE9.

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. The net of all this is that any comparison of browser share adoption at this point is premature at best, and misleading at worst. In a few months we’ll be better placed to look at the share of the latest browser versions and get a sense for relative progress and adoption.

IE9 on Windows 7 is our focus: To truly move the web forward and give developers and designers new capabilities that will make their experiences as rich as native apps, you can’t optimize for the lowest common denominator. IE9 is the best browser on Windows 7 because it takes full advantage of the capabilities of everything around the browser: the modern Windows operating system and modern PC hardware. When you look at adoption of browsers it’s easy to report the top-line result across all operating systems, but it’s a narrow view of what’s actually happening. Adoption on Windows 7 is what we care about most. That is the experience that we built for developers, designers, consumers and enterprises around the world. That is the experience that will push the web forward. Other browsers support other platforms, so if you want to draw comparisons you really need to take account of addressable base. With IE9, you essentially need to multiple by a factor of almost 3x to account for the difference in current addressable base.

Unlike other browsers, we have a singular goal, which is to give Windows customers the single best way to experience the web. That’s what drove our development of IE9, and continues to drive us. We’ve been humbled by the customer reaction and reviews and continued pace of IE9 adoption over the last few weeks. We have had millions of new users to IE9 since RTW - these are users that never downloaded the IE9 Beta or RC, and many that appear to be people who had previously turned away from IE and are giving it another chance with IE9. Windows Update for all our Windows customers will start sometime next month and by the end of June we will have a great sense of the enthusiasm on Windows 7 for IE9. Until that time, don’t get too wrapped up in the browser number gymnastics currently going on.

Ryan Gavin
Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing