More Than 2.3 Million Copies Of IE9 Downloaded In First 24 Hours

Internet Explorer 9, the new release of Microsoft's browser software, was downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours after its release Monday night, Microsoft said yesterday.

That works out to more than 27 downloads every second, according to a blog posting by Ryan Gavin, Microsoft senior director, Internet Explorer business and marketing.

Microsoft formally launched IE9 this week at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Tex.

Microsoft is hoping the new software will reverse a long decline in the company's share of the browser software market against rivals such as Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome browsers. All editions of Internet Explorer now account for 57 percent of the browser market, although Microsoft has attributed the shrinking IE market share to declining use of older versions of the product.

Last week Microsoft launched a campaign to move users off the aging Internet Explorer 6 release.

IE9 offers better performance, a smaller memory footprint, support for new Web standards, and a new feature called "tracking protection" that allows users to select the Web sites they want to block from gathering information. But perhaps the most significant aspect of IE9 is that it won't support the aging-yet-prevalent Windows XP, only the more recent Windows Vista and Windows 7 desktop operating systems.