Chrome Outpaces Firefox and Opera, Forces IE Under 60%

Internet Explorer 9 cannot get here soon enough, as Microsoft certainly needs a breath of fresh air in the browser race. The Redmond company has seen its share of the browser market drop constantly from month to month over the past years, and with the new open source browser from Google making headway competition, Internet Explorer’s dominance continues to be eroded. There’s no telling what impact IE9 will have exactly on IE’s overall share of the browser market, especially after IE8 failed to stop users converting to rival browsers.

But then again, IE9 will be a new Internet Explorer altogether, a sort of IE on steroids, with a new JavaScript engine, modern web standards support, and hardware-acceleration capabilities. It’s safe to say, after the advent of the Platform Preview release, that the fully fledged Internet Explorer release has excellent chances to win back the hearts and minds of users and developers.

However, for the time being, IE is hurting. The market share of Microsoft’s proprietary browser dropped to a low of 59.95% at the end of April 2010, from 60.65%, according to data from Net Applications. Mozilla’s Firefox saw just a minor increase, from 24.52% to 24.59% in the past couple of months. Safari’s usage share was up to 4.72% in April from 4.65% the previous month, while Opera went down from 2.37% to 2.30%.

Statistics shared by the Internet metrics company reveal that Chrome benefited from the largest growth, jumping from 6.13% in March 2010, to 6.73%. It appears that, with IE continuing to lose market share and Firefox stagnating, Chrome is reaping all the benefits.

As far as specific browser versions go, IE8 continues to be the most used one worldwide, with a share of 24.66%, followed by IE6 with 17.58% and IE7 with 12.50%. Firefox 3.6, Mozilla’s latest iteration of its open source browser, is now at 15.33%, up from just 11.25% in a single month. The jump in market share for Firefox 3.6 can be explained by the drop suffered by Firefox 3.5, down from 9.28% to 5.81%.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).

Firefox 3.6.3 for Windows is available for download here.

Google Chrome 4.1 Stable is available for download here.

Opera 10.53 is available for download here.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.