Microsoft announced the availability of the first stable version of Internet Explorer 9 on Pie Day 4-13 at South-by-Southwest film/music/geek fest in Austin, Texas. And if you are a PC user running Vista or Windows 7, you should download and install this newest iteration of IE immediately after you have finished reading this article.

If you are a devoted Google Chrome user like me or a Firefox fanatic you may be wondering "Why would I want to do that? I've despised IE for years?" The answer is: a) this is some amazingly good software and b) you need to get any other buggy version of IE off your system and replace it with this newest version of IE. Think about it. It's virtually impossible to delete IE from a PC. Plus, you have to have some version of IE installed in order to get Microsoft updates so it is far safer to have the latest version of IE installed. Besides at some point in the very near future Microsoft will "force" us PC users to install IE 9 in the form of a critical or important update. So, even though I intend to continue to use Chrome as my primary browser and I'll explain why further on in this article, I have installed IE 9 on all my PCs and you probably should too.

Oh, if you're still running XP, sorry but IE 9 will not install on your operating system. If you are still using Windows XP, you are using an out-dated, insecure OS and you are much more susceptible to malware infiltration or worse than those of us who are using newer versions of Windows. But if you are running XP, be sure you have the latest version of IE 8 installed on your system. Windows updates are only available through a version of Internet Explorer and running the latest version IE available to you is the smart thing to do.

You could look at IE9 as a Chrome knock-off and you wouldn't be far from wrong. But I'll give Microsoft credit. They did an excellent job. IE7 and IE8 were skunks. But IE9 is a beautiful browser that can compete with anything out there. IE9 introduces some features that Mozilla and Google will be looking to duplicate. And that's a first for the Evil Empire. Normally, they're playing catch-up in the browser market.

Here's an example. IE9 introduces the most advanced Tracking Protection feature yet available in Web browsers, allowing users to subscribe to lists of sites known to profile them for targeted marketing. While I'm not sure that this is a feature that too many millions of people will take advantage of, it's a feature that Google, in particular, might see as threatening to its marketing approach ie. its bottom line. Google's bottom line is advertising while although ads are important to Microsoft, Microsoft's primary business is still software - namely the Windows Operating System and all of the software enhancements associated with it like IE9 for instance. I see IE9's Tracking Protection not so much as an added convenience to potential users or as an inducement to stay with or return to Internet Explorer so much a shot across the bow of Google. It will be interesting to see how Google will respond.

All in all, IE 9 is a giant leap forward compared to any browser Microsoft has ever offered to us before. It looks sleek and modern mostly because Micorsoft copied Google Chrome's design of what a modern Web browser should look like. It's blazing fast thanks to its new javascript engine and it does far better with the Acid Test than any of its previous iterations and it is for the most part HTML 5 compliant.

I will continue to use Chrome as my primary browser for two important reasons. First, Chrome offers more flexibility in customizing its browser. You can read my review of Google's newest release of its Chrome browser and judge for yourself. Second, every black-hat hacker on this planet is working to compromise IE9 and many of them will find exploits to attach it. The reason for this is that most of the many millions of PC users around the world will stick with Internet Explorer since it came pre-installed on their computers and for some reason Internet Explorer seems to be easer to hack than Chrome. The bad guys spend so much effort attaching Internet Explorer because it is by far the most widely used browser in the world. That's pretty much due to the fact that the corporate world is tied to it due to the fact that the business world is for the most part married to the Windows Operating System.

Firefox 4 is due to be released a couple of days from now on March 22, 2011. I can't wait to see it. You probably can't either. I plan to install it and play around with it for awhile before I write a review of it here on this site.

Back in April of 2009, I posted an article titled What's the Best Web Browser in which I provided graphs depicting the latest (at that time) market share among the most popular browsers. Almost a year ago I added updated information to that page. And now, the image below depicts the very latest information I could find on browser usage in the US which I would imagine would not vary much from browser usage world wide.