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Microsoft Says IE9 Beta Demand Overwhelming
cgriffin21 writes "Microsoft expected Internet Explorer 9 to be popular, but after more than two million people downloaded the IE9 beta in the first two days after its release, the software giant is having a hard time choosing which eye-popping statistics to cite. Microsoft says its "Beauty of the Web" site, which illustrates the aesthetic advantages of IE9's support for HTML5 and hardware acceleration, has had more the 9 million visits and 26 million page views since the IE9 beta launch on Sept. 15. Microsoft's developer-oriented IE Test Drive Site has had 4 million page views during the same period."
Everyone just had to see if they were actually doing a browser without the retarded gene.
Two million malware distributors want an early start on the game...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Now I can go on 4chan and view the full beauty of... oh god is that an anthropomorphic hermaphrodite squirrel orgy?!?
Say what you want about IE's history (and lets face it, the jokes that come to mind are bountiful), but with Firefox and chrome pushing them that Microsoft has again started pushing IE development. Im not happy about that because I want IE to dominate, but because it keeps ALL the vendors honest.
Say it with me, competition is GOOD.
No, it's not being pushed, believe it or not people do have to download it. Although, you are correct in that the "Beauty of the Web" is the first page it loads up to.
I can see a few reasons for this:
1. Lots of intranet and other internal company websites are I.E. only. It would be good to know now if those sites will continue to function.
2. Lots of employees are locked into I.E., and want to know what is coming up.
3. I.E. still means "the internet" to a lot of people.
4. Everyone who has a plug-in or toolbar needs to know if this will work with their "product."
5. There are about 2 billion internet users worldwide. I.E. has about %50 marketshare. 2 million downloading a beta out of a group of 1 billion users is about half of a percent. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn't seem out of line with expectations.
The ______ Agenda
Browsers do not excite people. Getting their problems resolved does. Microsoft's "overwhelming" response is a strong indicator that people are displeased with what they have now and are looking for it to be fixed.
This is nothing new. Nearly every upgrade from the previous version of Windows was enthusiastically received by users who were hopeful that the problems of their previous version are resolved in the new one. People were happy with Windows98 and so WindowsME did not receive any welcome from users. (If they called in Windows98enhanced it might have gained popularity though) And the same happened when trying to get people to go from WindowsXP to Vista... people were happy with XP (and still are!) and see no compelling reasons to move to another OS. (The use of 64 bit will be the draw that will finally move people to Windows 7 though)
If there is a reason people WANT MSIE9, it is because the previous versions are not good enough.
Absolutely. Someone needs to put the pressure on the near-monopoly that Firefox/Opera/Chrome/etc. has.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I for one am happy to see IE becoming competitve again. It is good to have more than one viable alternative out there.
Highlights mine.
What do you define as a viable alternative? Firefox, Opera & Chrome have been around for quite a while and they all have been eating IE's lunch. By a lot of accounts, the big story is that IE9 is a radical departure from IE7/8 and has made major strides in catching up but it's not there yet.
Personally, I hope IE9 gets pushed out tomorrow. At work I'm stuck using IE8 and I would love to have something which approaches the Opera browser I use at home.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Because it belongs to Microsoft. Don't you know they're EVIL?
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Completely agree. I also like to see MS trying something new. The new UI is sweet, and this is FREAKIN FAST on my dual-core laptop with Win7. I haven't installed on the 6-core desktop yet, because its still rather buggy (several text fields on Facebook refuse to work), but I guess it wouldn't really matter, I still am a pretty big Firefox user and have it set to the default browser.
I was in shock with the HTML5 and the speed increase from going to GPU. Their Beauty of the Web pages are jawdropping, and I think this is REALLY going to change the web forever. I would have to say this (GPU accelleration and HTML5) is probably the biggest thing to hit the web since Flash / Shockwave came out 12 or 13 years ago.
I also like the increase in real-estate when browsing. Yes, I know I can turn my other browsers into fullscreen mode, but then I loose the address and search bars.
Actually, is it just me, or did IE9 practically copy Chrome's interface?
I feel the same way with the AC. Microsoft seems to use this marketing technique a lot, after picking it up from Apple. It tells people "Hey, this thing is like SO popular, everyone is doing it, so you need to do it too" to use artificial peer pressure to make them use its products. I personally think it's a despicable way to operate, and makes me like them even less.
... and it used to be 90%. There's been a large shift to other browsers over the past few years. That is significant.
i just gave beautyoftheweb.com two hits, one from chrome, in which all worked fine, but the fonts/scaling was borked to give me horrible alliased text, another in IE8 produced correct text, but all nice visual effects where gone, and surprise, all moving effects slowed to a crawl...
People, what a bunch of bastards
Actually I think this number not completely honest. 6 Days ago Microsoft because a sponsor of Reddit and asked the Reddit community to test it out and give feed back.
"See, Microsoft is getting ready to release Internet Explorer 9, and they reached out to us because they genuinely want to start a dialog with the reddit community. In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign. This is a great deal of trust for an advertiser to offer, and we should both take it as a huge compliment."
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_word_from_our_sponsor_because_for/
When are people going to grow up and admit MS has released several top-of-the-line products recently? IE is getting much nicer, especially with 9, and Windows 7 blows away any other OS available, except for certain *nix distributions for specific reasons. Likewise, if you would actually give the .NET framework and its associated languages a try you may find yourself impressed with the capabilities.
I guess I just feel like people should upgrade and quit whining like we're still in the early 00's. Technology advances, and with it comes a need for stronger hardware and new programming frameworks.
Surely you jest. Just because IE 9 and Windows 7 are vastly better than their horrid predecessors does not make them top-of-the-line. And .Net is just Java with a flood of feature creep and syntactic candy. As Microsoft has done so many times before, they took something successful and copied it, while completely overlooking the reason for its success: Java's strength was and is in its lack of syntactic fluff. It makes the code take slightly longer to write but dramatically and mercifully faster to read and maintain.
The Internet is full. Go away.
Yes, 2 million+ web developers are very interested in how you are going to continue to make their lives a pain.
And .Net is just Java with a flood of feature creep and syntactic candy. As Microsoft has done so many times before, they took something successful and copied it, while completely overlooking the reason for its success: Java's strength was and is in its lack of syntactic fluff. It makes the code take slightly longer to write but dramatically and mercifully faster to read and maintain.
Java's strength was in its simplicity, but that time is long gone. It was okay in mid-90s, but it's hopelessly outdated in 2010 (guess what, programming languages evolve, too!). Any simplicity that may be in the language has long been drowned by the complexity of the overengineered standard library and various "enterprise" frameworks with miles of XML configs, factories of factories, and other creative architectural decision.
In the meantime, C# has been adding features that actually make code both easier to write and clearer. LINQ is a prime example of that. Lambdas are another (when used with a well-designed framework of higher-order functions). A more obscure example, which might nonetheless resonate with Python developers, are iterator methods (Python calls them generators - with "yield" keyword).
And - "syntactic fluff", really? Then why did Java scramble to copy large parts of that "fluff" for 1.5 release?
Oh, and what about all the people begging for closures/lambdas in Java today (in C# since 2005)? Just to remind, it got postponed again, from Java 7 to Java 8. And a lot of people are quite angry about it.