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."

Comments

Re:Good to see

[jazman_777]

Absolutely. Someone needs to put the pressure on the near-monopoly that Firefox/Opera/Chrome/etc. has.

Re:I can only assume

[Solidblu]

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/

Re:I can only assume

[VGR]

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.

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.