Microsoft announced today their latest version of Internet Explorer reached 2.3 million downloads in 24 hours. Will IE9 be the catalyst to allow Microsoft to gain some ground back in market share?

The past few years, IE has steadily lost ground to the likes of Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome. In 2007, IE controlled 80% of the market. The latest reports have them sitting at 57%.

Simplistic interfaces, faster load times, better security, have all been reasons behind IE losing ground. It appears Microsoft has remedied many of these problems, and reviews have pointed out these improvements.

PCMagazine gave IE9 a 4/5 rating, saying this of the browser, “Microsoft’s new browser is faster, trimmer, more compliant with HTML5—a major improvement over its predecessor. It also brings some unique capabilities like tab-pinning and hardware acceleration, but only Windows 7 and Vista users need apply.”

Unfortunately I’m unable to provide my own thoughts as I’m on a Mac computer at this time. If you have a Windows computer and use XP, you’ll be left out in the cold as well.

While it has a small window of platforms for which it’s available, IE9 has these improvements listed on their product page: pinned sites (for Windows 7 users), tracking protection, InPrivate browsing, HTML5 compatibility, and more.

One feature I’m excited to see in motion is how IE9 will share the burden of graphics rendering with the GPU on more graphic intensive websites. HTML5 is supposed to push the capabilities of graphics integration, and being the go-to browser for this integration could be a strong investment for the browser’s future.

Firefox 4 will release next Tuesday; this version has been in beta since July 2010. The release certainly will provide IE9 with some staunch competition out of the gate. In a couple of weeks it will be interesting to see how the pieces of market share will be divided up. Many have switched to Google Chrome as well, providing a third option in the market.

Has anyone had the opportunity to use IE9 yet? If so, are the improvements as great as many reviewers have been letting on? Or are you still waiting for Firefox 4?