After only 24 hours of its release IE9 managed to chalk up a pretty impressive 2.35 million downloads, according to an article on Techtree by Nachiket Mhatre. But when you compare it to what Firefox 4 has just achieved its not so good, as this was downloaded a staggering 4.7 million times on its first day.

This is still a lot lower compared to the last version which managed 8 million on its first day, but this was promoted more. The latest version of Firefox has even got 3D acceleration support that users of Windows XP can utilize.

Mozilla will be looking to further enlarge its user base with Firefox 4, but it has seen Google’s Chrome which is now home to 10% of internet devices across the world. Whether Firefox can persuade users to ditch Chrome for its new version of browser remains to be seen.

But what other browsers could challenge the likes of Chrome and Firefox? Some of our readers have mentioned the often ignored Opera, or is they anything better which you use? Tell us what your favorite browser is.

It has been confirmed that Microsoft managed to achieve 2.35 million downloads in the first 24 hours of becoming available to download, as reported from Engadget. You may think that this number is pretty impressive for a day, but it’s nothing to what Mozilla achieved with Firefox back in 2008.

Microsoft is obviously proud of their 24 hour stats for Internet Explorer, even giving themselves a pat on the back with the words, ‘wow’. On the other hand, Mozilla can counter with their own ‘wow’ since Firefox 3 racked up 8 million downloads in 24 hours back in 2008 just to put things in perspective for you.

Is this a clear sign that Internet Explorer is firmly behind in the pecking order against the likes of Firefox, Chrome and Safari? Probably, but let’s wait and see how IE9 manages to perform over the weekend, since downloads are surely going to multiply over Saturday and Sunday.

Are you impressed by the 2.35 million download figure or not? Did you download IE9? Don’t forget to check out our IE9 problem thread here.

Since then I have been using Google Chrome which is much faster and stable, but today I downloaded IE9. On first impressions the screen is less cluttered and has a cleaner feel to it. Speed wise it is much quicker than IE8, and have not experienced any problems with freezing so far. It is slightly slower than Google Chrome, but is faster than Firefox.

At first I didn’t notice the favorites and tools button in the top right hand side of the screen, but this adds to the cleaner look of the browser. Upon downloading I have found one problem, as I was met with an error message for my wireless Canon printer. At the moment there were no updates available for the drivers for the printer, but it is not an old model.

We had reported earlier this year that toolbars and other add-ons caused has caused a lot of problems in Internet Explorer, now IE9 keeps a watch on your add-ons and will then warn you if one is unnecessarily slowing down the browser.

The URL bar at the top of the screen is less than half the size of what is was before, which is a nice feature. It is also on the same line as the tab bars, instead of being above. I still prefer the look and feel of Google Chrome, but IE9 is a vast improvement over the old IE browser.

Conclusion
Internet Explorer has been trailing behind its rivals for years and the improvements in IE9 is going back to the progress that began in IE7 to return the browser to respectability. In my mind this is the best version of Microsoft’s browser so far, but it is almost shameful that Windows XP users won’t get to use it. The new browser is fast and highly usable, but it might not be enough for fans of other browsers to switch. Microsoft at least has a respectable choice on the browser market. How have you been finding IE9?

You can read a more in-depth review by clicking here.

If you haven’t downloaded IE9 yet, you can do so over at Microsoft’s Beauty of the Web page here. It’s only available for PC users at the moment and you may be disappointed to hear that Windows XP is not supported, only Windows 7, Vista, and Windows Server 2008 for the time being.

Aside from a completely revamped User Interface, Internet Explorer 9 will benefit from much faster overall performance thanks to a brand new javascript engine called Chakra. You’ll also get a security-enabled download manager, address bar search and many more features.

While there may not be any noticable problems with IE9 now since the download has only been up for a few hours, it is inevitable that problems and bugs will filter out in the coming weeks, so if you notice anything serious with the software that you feel we should know about, leave us a comment below.

Our only problem with Internet Explorer 9 right now, is that Mac is not supported at the moment. We’re hoping that Microsoft is planning to change this though since it’s in their best interests to make it available on all operating systems.