Launching a little over two weeks ago, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 has already secured 3.6% usage share on Windows 7 over the course of March, an adoption rate that is five times higher than that of its predecessor Internet Explorer 8. Posting to theWindows Team Blog, Ryan Gavin Senior Director, Internet Explorer notes that 90% of the downloads the company registered were from third-party browsers or older versions of the browsing software, with the remaining 10% upgrading from the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate or Beta....

Those of you eagerly awaiting the full, official launch of Microsoft’s browser don’t have much longer to wait. Internet Explorer 9 will officially launch on Monday 14 March (this coming Monday) at 9am PST, the company hasannounced. The new release boasts improved speed; a streamlined UI; tighter integration with Windows 7 via the ability to ‘snap’ websites to display side-by-side and ‘Jump Lists’ to favourite websites; a Chrome-like ‘One Box’ for URLs and searches; the ability to add websites directly to the taskbar, and improved security features....

Microsoft has begun the week’s PR campaign byhighlighting a studythat paints its Internet Explorer 9 browser in a positive light. The study, executed by the independent NSS group, ran a test on malware protection among the five most popular browsers, a competition that Internet Explorer 9 won handily. Why? As it turns out, when Microsoft was going on about the ‘SmartScreen’ technology that it had baked into IE9, it had a point....

Internet Explorer today added support for53 new languages, bringing the total number of languages that it supports to 93. By comparison, Safari 5 supports a mere 5. But there are other browsers that are also quite multilingual, including Firefox 4 which supports 86 languages. According to Microsoft, this is the lay of the land in terms of browser language support: Internet Explorer 9 is Microsoft’s most recent browser product for PCs....

Microsoft continues to knit its products together, today releasing anew line of integrationbetween Hotmail and Internet Explorer 9. The new browser now supports desktop notifications for the popular webmail provider, deepening the ties between Microsoft’s services and software. The notifications are tied to the user’s desktop taskbar, and are part of the ‘pinning’ function that Microsoft has touted heavily since the release of IE9. With pinning a site can be attached, like any other application, to the taskbar of a computer, quickening its launch....