Internet Explorer 9 goes live

IE9 available for download It’s been a long time coming, but the final release of Internet Explorer 9 has made its way to the Microsoft Download Centre.

IE9 was first released as a beta back in March of last year, and the first release candidate was rolled out just over 1 month ago. Combined together, both the beta and released candidate were downloaded over 36 million times according to figures from Microsoft.

With its updated javascript engine, hardware acceleration support, a completely overhauled user interface and full support for HTML5, Microsoft is looking to gain back market share lost to Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome. At one time the software giant enjoyed well in excess of 90% of the browser market but with advances and adaptation of Chrome and Firefox this number has dwindled in recent years.

If you want to test-drive the new IE, you can grab it here. Microsoft provides both a 32-bit and 64-bit download. You will need to be running Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 (there is no support for Windows XP).