As mentioned, the release came just one day after statistics were released that Internet Explorer was losing market share ... not to Firefox ... but to Chrome.
A few things to consider.
1) If you visit Google's home page in IE and/or you have any Google programs loaded on your computer, there's a very good chance you're going to see an invite to try Chrome :
2) The recent EU - Microsoft settlement is now clearly giving users a choice in many countries.
3) Chrome is lightweight to begin with, which very simply means it should launch and run faster on older PC's with limited system resources (and there is no version of IE for the Linux audience. Small, yet potent).
The increase in Chrome usage probably was expected.
With all of that to be considered, this morning, Microsoft released the second preview of their next generation browser, IE9. It's a simple preview, the Flickr search is cool ... but not much else ... yet?
The complete explanation can be found here. The download is here.
Our previous post is here. Does this graph look familiar??
Despite partnerships in some areas ... Microsoft, Apple, Google, and yes Facebook are at war (in a big way) and at a pace that we haven't seen in tech .... ever.
It'll be great for the consumer. It remains to be seen how great it'll be for the companies' bottom lines.
Updated March 5, 2010 6 PM ET