For more than a decade from the mid-1990s through 2006, IE commanded an 80%-plus market share, and Microsoft did very little to improve it. But Mozilla Firefox,Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Europe’s Opera browser have been steadily eroding that dominance.
And as of Tuesday, you can download Mozilla’s Firefox 4 “release candidate” software, the latest version of the popular open source Web browser, which is nearing its official release.
“In the long term, IE9 will help stabilize Microsoft’s share in browsers, assuming they can keep up with the fast pace of research and development coming from the open-source crowd,” says IDC software applications analyst Al Hilwa.
Hilwa also notes that one of IE9’s distinguishing capabilities is the inclusion of a “Do Not Track” privacy mechanism that’s similar to a privacy feature introduced by Chrome. Microsoft and Google have taken steps to block some advertising networks from monitoring everywhere you go on the Internet, referred to as “click-stream tracking.”