IE Share Grows as IE9 Approaches RTW

With Microsoft putting the finishing touches on Internet Explorer 9, the overall usage share of Internet Explorer increased after half a year of decline.

Internet metrics company Net Applications share fresh statistics of the browser market on March 1st, 2011, indicating that IE’s share jumped by no less than 0.86% across Windows.

IE is now at 56.77%, up from 56.00% in January 2011, but it still remains to be seen whether this jump in share was a fluke or the moment broke the downward trend for Internet Explorer.

Net Applications did indicate that the browser usage numbers (based on C.I.A. data) have changed drastically because of a shift in the number of internet users worldwide, with more in China, and less in countries such as U.S., U.K, Germany, France, but also additional developed countries.

“With the new C.I.A. numbers factored in, Firefox loses global share since many of the countries it is most popular in (Western European, in particular) now have a lower percentage of global internet users. Internet Explorer gains as browser usage shifts to countries with higher percentages of Internet Explorer users,” Net Applications reveals.

Firefox’s share dipped from 22.75% to just 21.74% at the end of February 2011, with Chrome usage increasing slightly from 10.70% to 10.93% over the same period. Opera also dropped from 2.28% to 2.15% over the course of the past two months.

“Across all operating systems, IE share also grew 0.78%. In some part, this is due to the geographic weighting change according to Net Applications,” noted Roger Capriotti, Director, Internet Explorer Product Marketing.

“However, when adjusted using the older weighting, IE8 and 9 actually show even stronger growth on Windows: up 1.31% (versus 1.13% using the new February weighting) – or over three times Chrome’s 0.42% growth.

“We continue to measure our share progress relative to our addressable base, and in this case our addressable base is Windows.”

It’s important to note that the adjustments made by Net Applications refresh changes to usage shares and not to the actual number of users for the browsers mentioned in this article.

IE9 is certainly pulling its own weight already according to statistics. The successor of IE8 was downloaded over 25 million times while in Beta. Add another 11 million to that figure for the IE9 Release Candidate (RC) downloads this month alone.

IE9 is expected to hit RTW (release to web) extremely soon.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Release Candidate (RC) Build 9.0.8080.16413 is available for download here.