In just a few days, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta has been downloaded a staggering 2 million times.

“The initial reaction has been pretty overwhelming, and we are very humbled by the response our customers have had.  In first two days, over 2 million people worldwide downloaded IE9 Beta” wrote Microsoft’s Roger Capriotti.

This compares with only 1.3 million downloads of IE8 Beta in 5 days back in August 2008.

Microsoft is very pleased with the response so far. “We are encouraged about the very early response to the IE9 release this past week, namely because it signals that the emphasis on making websites shine through Windows is resonating.”

Microsoft is yet to announce a release day for the final version of Internet Explorer 9.

With the release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta yesterday, IEBlog has taken a look at the history of the Internet Explorer logo, celebrating it’s 15 year history.

The article explains the origins of the logo, and shows development throughout the life cycle of creating the now infamous browser logo.

The below picture really sums it up.

The full article can be read on the IEBlog.

Microsoft have released Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta to the public, at a launch event during the “Beauty of the Web” keynote at the San Francisco Design Center.

Microsoft also hosted a launch event in the UK, teaming up with the Gorillaz to launch the browser.

IE9 includes many changes over its predecessor, including a new user interface, support for some HTML5 and CSS3 tags, faster rendering and JavaScript engine, hardware accelerated rendering, and many more.

On opening the browser, it will also prompt users to disable slow loading plugins, making the browser fly. Early benchmarks look very promising, with speeds passing that of Firefox 3.6. Both Engadget and Neowin have performed some benchmark testing.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta is available to download now for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users.

Microsoft’s Russian Press site has released a screenshot of the upcoming user interface scheduled to make an appearance in Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

Soon after, the screenshot was pulled indicating it is likely real, but Microsoft journalist Jo Foley managed to save the image before it was removed.

New features are set to include a combined URL and search bar, tear-off tabs, and a consolidated menu.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta will be released on September 15th during a launch event in San Francisco.

Microsoft has released a fourth and final platform preview release of Internet Explorer 9.

This latest release scores 95/100 in the Acid3 test, compared to the first platform preview which only scored 55/100. For comparison, Firefox 3.6 scores 94/100.

Also new in this release is full support for hardware accelerated HTML5, improved SVG support, and improved JavaScript performance. A more detailed list of changes can be found in the IEBlog.

A public beta is widely expected in September 2010.

Internet Explorer 8’s Smartscreen Filter has passed a new milestone, passing the one billionth stopped malware download.

“Socially engineering attacks like malware are a growing threat on the internet and are one of the most common risks to people’s safety online” wrote Microsoft’s James Pratt.

“We have got better and better at blocking malware through the SmartScreen Filter because we have continued to invest in our back end service since we released IE8 in March 2009” said Pratt.

In the last two months, more than 100 million malware attempts have been blocked by Internet Explorer 8, 5 times as many as the same time last year, with more than 1.7 times the users.

The continued investment and development of malware protection is great for consumers, and helps keep their home PC’s safe.

Malware, also known as phishing (pronounced fishing), protection can also be found in other popular browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.

Seven weeks after their last release, Microsoft have let Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 3 out of the bag.

The updated preview release includes support for the HTML5 video tag, canvas tag support and embedded fonts using the WOFF standard.

“The third Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9, available now, continues the deep work around hardware acceleration to enable the same standards-based markup to run faster. This is the latest instalment of the rhythm we started in March, delivering platform preview releases approximately every eight weeks and listening to developers. You’ll see more performance, same markup, and hardware accelerated HTML5″ wrote Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer.

This latest release performs well in benchmarks, now scoring 83/100 in the Acid3 test, up from 68/100 in the last platform preview. SunSpider testing shows the browser is almost on par with the recently released Safari 5, which our own testing confirmed.

Willing testers can check out the IE9 Platform Preview release from the Test Drive IE website.

Today Microsoft have released the IE Cumulative Security Update for June 2010 which is now available via Windows Update.

Available for many versions of Windows, starting at Windows 2000, and covering all versions of Internet Explorer from IE5.01, the update is highly recommended for all Windows users.

The update fixes six security vulnerabilities, with the most serious allowing remote code execution if a user visits an infected website.

Windows users with Automatic Updates turned on will receive the update in the coming days.

Microsoft is still hard at work on Internet Explorer 9, and today provided an updated on how they are going with the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) web standards.

Latest results show that IE9 is now fully HTML5 standards compliant.

Microsoft conducted W3C Web Standards tests for HTML5, SVG 1.1 2nd edition, CSS3 media queries, CSS3 borders & backgrounds, CSS3 selectors, DOM level 3 core, DOM level 3 events and DOM level 2 style across a variety of browsers.

These browsers included IE9 May 2010 Preview, Firefox 3.6.3, Opera 10.52, Apple Safari 4.05, and Google Chrome 4.1 all running on Windows. The results are very promising for IE9.

A preview IE9 build can be downloaded from the IE Test Drive website.

An article written by Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb suggests that Google Chrome’s battle is with Firefox, and not with Internet Explorer as many think.

They base this data on their Google Analytic data that is collected from their website, with users of the site being described as early adopters.

ReadWriteWeb data shows a big drop in Firefox users over the last 12 months, from 54% to 39%, while Chrome has enjoyed a jump from 7% to 18%, all while Internet Explorer usage has stayed constant at around 25%. These statistics make this theory sound plausible.

We can’t vouch for these figures in our own statistics, but it is interesting none the less. Market Share data from Net Applications shows that Firefox is still gaining share slowly, while Chrome is also growing, and Internet Explorer is on a one way slop down.

This would suggest that Firefox may be taking users away from Internet Explorer, but that older and more experienced Firefox users are taking the plunge to Google’s Chrome browser.

Either way, the entrance of Chrome into the market has surely stirred things up. Statistics over the next few months will be very interesting, with yesterdays release of Chrome for Mac and Linux.