IE8 Continues to Increase Dominance as IE9 Is Cooking

Internet Explorer 8 continues to increase its dominance on the browser market worldwide, as Internet Explorer 9 is cooking in Redmond.

The latest statistics made public by Microsoft indicate that IE8 has enjoyed strong growth over the first month of 2011.

Data from Internet metrics company Net Applications reveals that IE8’s usage share climbed to 34.17% at the end of January 2011, jumping considerably from 33.02% at the end of 2010.

Firefox 3.6, which is a runner up for the most used browser worldwide, only grew a small 0.5% from 18.50% at the end of December 2010 to 18.55% in January 2011.

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer 6 continues on its downward trajectory and is approaching the 10% usage share milestone fast.

“Internet Explorer 6 (…) continued its decline, with a 1.77% drop reaching 12.03% in January worldwide. IE6 has dropped 3.9% over the last three months (an average of 1.3% drop per month) and 9.31% from a year ago,” revealed Roger Capriotti, Director, Internet Explorer Product Marketing.

“During that same time, IE8 has grown 9.15% since January 2010. This trend is even more accelerated in the commercial segment.”

IE7 is also down from 8.76% to just 8.29% in the past two months, with more and more users opting to either embrace IE8 or rival browsers.

Chrome 8.0 also gained considerably in terms of market share in the past month, growing from 7.32% at the end of 2010 to 9.33% in January.

“Internet Explorer 8 also continued its rise in January with 1.18% growth according to Net Applications – over one and a half times of the growth of Chrome (0.72%). With 34.79% of users worldwide, Internet Explorer 8 remains the most popular and fastest growing browser in the market,” Capriotti said.

But while Microsoft is right in saying that IE8 grew more than Google Chrome, fact is that overall, IE continues lose market share, while Chrome amasses more and more users every month.

For example IE dropped from 57.08% in December 2010 to 56.00% at the end of the past month. In the same period of time, Firefox also lost market share dipping from 22.81% to 22.75%, this while Chrome usage increased from 9.98% to 10.70%.

But there is good news ahead for Microsoft. Internet Explorer 9 was downloaded some 23 million times while still in Beta, and the software giant is getting ready to offer the Release Candidate of IE8’s successor in the immediate future.

“We are glad to see IE9 popularity continues to rise with our developers and partners. More partners are coming online every day, including Gilt, Hi5, and Huffington Post most recently. We look forward to working with our partners in bringing more beautiful web experiences to life,” Capriotti concluded.

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

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 7 (PP7) is available for download here.

Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 for Windows is available for download here.