All indications are that Microsoft is set to release a final version of IE9 on March 14, complete with a “Beauty of the Web” party at SxSW. It should be a good party for the IE team, who have been working on a new, more standards compliant browser for years now.
The IE9 betas and RC have been downloaded x times, and already make a bit of a dent in the internet browser user base. Here at LiveSide, where we are as you know quite Microsoft-centric, as you can see, the IE9 numbers are already impressive:
These are our visits in the last 30 days, by browser:
…and these are the IE stats broken down by version:
…doing the math, you can see that IE9 is already our most popular browser (hi, Softies! 
)
So will you use IE9? Chrome has come on gangbusters in the last year or so, releasing a new version today, and our totally unscientific “tests” show that it’s impressively fast, more so than IE9. We’ve been IE users forever, though, and something about IE9 just seems more comfortable, so we’ll keep using it. We put up a poll in our sidebar, what browser will you be using this year?