According to a blogpost by Roger Capriotti, director, Internet Explorer Product Marketing, the beta version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) has been downloaded more than 23 million times.

 

The Redmond-based company’s latest browser is now employed by 0.5% of all internet users globally and is the preferred browser of 1.82% of Windows 7 users around the world.

 

Internet Explorer 8 also managed to grow its user base in January by 1.18% according to Net Applications, which Capriotti points out is around one and a half times the growth rate of Google’s Chrome browser (0.72%). IE8 is the world’s most popular browser according to Microsoft, with 34.79% of global users utilising it.

 

In contrast, Internet Explorer 6 continues its steady decline, with a 1.77% drop seeing its global usage figure lowered to 12.03% in January. IE6 user figure has on average declined by 1.3% per month over the last three months and by 9.31% compared to this time last year. Capriotti notes, however, that during that same time, IE8 has upped its user rate by almost the same margin (9.15%) since January 2010.

 

According to the latest Net Applications figures, Internet Explorer (all versions) holds a global browser market share of 56%, whilst Mozilla’s Firefox take up 22.75%, Google’s Chrome commands 10.7%, and Apple’s Safari claims a share of 6.3%. The adoption rate for Opera Software’s Opera browser has also climbed marginally to 2.28% last month.