14 DAY TRIAL // In the browser race, Internet Explorer 8 is outrunning its rivals, without breaking a sweat. It’s always interesting to insist on certain statistics in order to get a deeper perspective, and browser-market data certainly offers the chance for insights beyond an initial interpretation. Earlier this month, Internet metrics company Net Applications released its monthly overview of the browser’s evolution in terms of usage share, harvesting and compiling info from approximately 160 million visitors per month.
Internet Explorer 8 continues to be the most used browser worldwide, a position it grabbed in January 2010, and that it is unlikely to lose anytime soon. IE8 currently accounts for 24.66% of the browser market, benefitting from a growth rate of no less than 1.08% in April 2010. At the start of this year, IE8 dethroned IE6, to grab the no.1 spot with a share of 22.37%, at that time, as opposed to IE6’s 20.00%. Still, Microsoft will need some fresh browser blood (I’m thinking IE9) to turn things around as far as the overall browser market is concerned, as the usage share of all IE versions continues to decrease.
At the end of the past month, Firefox 3.6, the latest iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser, occupied the third position after IE6, with a market share of 15.33%. While Firefox 3.6 jumped from 11.25% in March to 15.33% in April, fact is that v3.6 is in that sweet spot, a few months after launch, when users are still upgrading en masse. In the same period, Firefox 3.5 dropped from 9.28% to 5.81%, with the difference made up almost completely by Firefox 3.0 users that upgraded to the latest version.
Firefox 3.6 will certainly plateau in the next few months, and will settle to smaller gains in usage share, as any remaining 3.5 users will make the jump to the latest version. Depending on when Mozilla will release the next major version of its open source browser, Firefox 3.6 might hit the 20% market-share mark or it might miss it. Firefox 3.0, for example, got to spend only a few months at over 20% market share, just before v3.6 was launched. Since then, in approximately one year, no other Firefox version has made it even close to the 20% milestone.
Chrome might be growing overall at half the rate of IE8, namely 0.6%, but version 4.1 of Google’s open source browser was just at 5.34% in April 2010, less than Firefox 3.5, which accounted for 5.81%. Chrome has undoubtedly enjoyed consistent growth on the browser market since it was launched in 2008, especially with Google’s resources behind it, but its main “contribution” to the browser war seems to be making Firefox flat-lining ahead of anything else. For example, in Europe, where Microsoft is serving the browser-choice update to Windows users with IE as their default browser, IE8 is growing 0.28% month-over-month, the same as Firefox.
Combined, all versions of Opera are at 2.30% of the market as of April 2010, with Opera 10.x at just 1.79%. What’s interesting is that, without exception, the data from Net Applications doesn’t indicate that the browser-choice update is helping Chrome, Firefox or Opera grow at an increased pace compared to the period before the refresh was launched.
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.