Firefox 4 has a big advantage in usage statistics over IE9: Windows XP. Mozilla’s browser works on the decade-old operating system, but IE9 requires a minimum of Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7. Given that Windows XP machines represent 54.4 percent of the usage on the Internet right now to Windows 7′s 24.2 percent and Vista’s 10.6 percent, Windows XP is a big ally even if the growth is with Windows 7.

IE9 has injected a massive dose of new competition into the browser market.IE 9 supports a raft of new Web standards, hardware acceleration and offers much higher performance than its predecessors. But IE still isn’t the browser of the technophiles, so it’s reasonable to expect IE9′s usage to trail that of Firefox.Expect usage of both to increase more when people are actively encouraged to update.

As for Microsoft, “Internet Explorer 9 will not be broadly rolled out on Windows Update until the end of June,” said Ryan Gavin, senior director of IE business and marketing, Courtesy Windowsteamblog

When all versions were taken into account, IE still leads the overall market with 55.9 percent of usage in March, with Firefox in second place at 21.8 percent. Only IE, though, ceded share to the up-and-coming browsers in the market right now, Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari.IE dropped 0.9 percentage points from February to March, while Firefox staved off the rivals with a 0.1 percentage point gain. That’s not much, but it’s a stronger showing than the steady losses that Firefox has experienced since reaching its high-water mark of 24.7 percent of usage in November 2009.

Chrome continued its steady rise, from 10.9 percent to 11.6 percent. Safari rose from 6.4 percent to 6.6 percent. And fifth-place Opera stayed level at 2.2 percent for both February and March.Net Applications’ statistics are based on the activity of about 160 million visitors per month to Web sites using its services. It adjusted its technique slightly for February’s statistics after the U.S. government released new per-country Internet usage statistics that the company factors into its results.For example, IE got a small boost in February because it’s widely used in China, which showed higher Internet usage, while Firefox slipped a bit.

If you remember even the Internet explorer 9 Beta hit 2 million downloads in just 5 days and this RC build is also in par with the Beta.The browser still has a long way to go to match the 23 million beta downloads, which was announced earlier this month. Who knows, perhaps Microsoft might go for the most downloads in a 24-hour period to beat the current world record holder, Firefox, with 8 million downloads.

Sandboxing is nothing but the process of isolation and containment of untrusted executable code — is an important tool in securing your browser, and thus your computer, against unruly malware.Google Chrome has been sandboxing HTML rendering and JavaScript execution for a while, but now they’ve followed through on their promise and brought sandboxing to the Flash plug-in. Not only can Chrome sandbox the built-in Flash plug-in, but also the standalone Adobe version too — so no matter whether you’re running the latest Flash beta, or the automatically-updated Chrome one, you can browse a little bit safer.

Sandboxing in Chrome is currently only available for Windows, where it’s particularly important for the relatively insecure Windows XP, and is rolling out to all Chrome Dev installations on Windows automatically. If you have a particular aversion to sandboxing your Flash experience, you can easily disable it with the flag –disable-flash-sandbox.

This is still a bug fix dev release i.e it’s not even beta so Windows users might consider waiting a bit more until it comes out officially in the stable releases.Anyways those who want to try it out and can dowload the latest dev release.

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Via Blogsolute