Internet Explorer 9 Reaches 17% Usage Share on Windows 7 in the US

We continue to see good momentum around Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 this month. In the US, IE9 has now passed 17% usage share on Windows 7 as of the last few days in May. As we mentioned last month, we built IE9 to help developers unleash faster and richer web experiences by tapping into the capabilities of Windows 7 and modern PC hardware. For Windows 7 customers, the best browser for experiencing these web experiences is IE9. And the good news is with the recent release of 53 additional languages last month, IE9 is now available to more and more Windows customers with a total of 93 languages supported ? more than any other browser on Windows. Worldwide, IE9 usage share on Windows 7 averaged 12.2% for the month of May ? a 60% increase from April.

As more and more real sites adopt HTML5 and take advantage of the functionalities of Internet Explorer 9, it is amazing to see the range of innovative experiences that designers are dreaming up.  Even well-established verticals, such as news and entertainment, are starting to experiment with new ways to help people to search through the avalanche of headlines and find the information they are looking for. Recently, we worked with How Splendid and Conde Nast to create a new way for their readers to keep up-to-date on the latest trends and big ideas in technology on the Wired UK website.  An extensive brainstorming session and story boarding process ensued as the team pushed the boundaries of how information could be indexed, presented and searched.  The end result was The Wired Mind.

     

The Wired Mind uses article tags to build an interactive visualization of content by topic. The reader can see what topics are popular now, what topics were popular on any date in the past, how topics are related to one another and what the top stories for a given topic are. The team took advantage of HTML5 Canvas, WOFF and CSS3 to create a lively and fluid UI.  Internet Explorer 9 is capable of compositing hundreds of visual elements on the screen smoothly thanks to Chakra, IE9?s JavaScript engine, and full hardware acceleration.  Finally, pinning the Wired Mind to your Windows 7 Taskbar allows you one-click access to the Wired Mind and the top topics of the day.

Not only are more and more sites like Wired UK putting features in IE9 and Windows 7 to good use, we continue to see positive momentum in people upgrading to a modern browser with the share of IE6 and IE7 worldwide dropping almost another point in May. Our website ie6countdown.com continues to get great traffic with more than 1.5 million unique visitors and 2.8 million page views since its launch in March. Nearly 600 partners have joined the cause with US sites like Kayak and WordPress and international sites like Aol Latino and Doodle all helping the world move to a modern browser.

If you haven?t already made the move to Internet Explorer 9, try it by visiting www.beautyoftheweb.com.

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Product Marketing

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