Despite Chrome's seemingly unstoppable march, it appears that Internet Explorer is making a comeback and may regain the number one browser title. At least that's what the latest data from StatCounter shows. The analytics company found that Chrome overtook IE in early May to become the most popular web browser in the world.
But IE is not going down without a fight. Sometime in early June, IE saw a huge uptick in activity and managed to snatch back the title, if only for one week and by a very small margin. It wasn't to last though, Chrome continued its upward trend and started to distance itself from IE.
However, Microsoft's browser is seeing yet another big spike in activity, even bigger than the first, big enough to put it within 0.5 percentage points of Chrome, in the weekly figures.
If the current trend continues, it's going to overtake Chrome, again, this week for the entire week. On a day-to-day basis, IE is already bigger than Chrome during weekdays.
What is interesting though is that this time around, IE is grabbing market share from Chrome, quite a bit of it, rather than just from Firefox. In fact, it's one of the very few times in history when Chrome lost market share. Firefox took a hit as well, dipping below the 24 percent mark where it had been hovering for about a month now.
It's too fast to read anything into this. Seasonal browser usage patterns can be a cause for the ups and downs. Many people are taking a vacation this time of year, which means IE usage goes down.
At the same time, nice weather could be keeping people outside for longer meaning they spend less time online, at their desktops at least. This would explain a drop in both Firefox and Chrome usage. But these people would still be going to work and using IE.
All of this is speculation, but the point is that small changes and deviations from a trend aren't that important. The big picture is important and, in it, Chrome and IE are very close to each other with Firefox a somewhat distant third.
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