IE8 Now No. 1 Browser Worldwide, but Firefox Is Close Behind

As of the start of this year, Internet Explorer 8 is on top of the world, well, at least the browser world. At the end of January 2010, IE8 became the world’s most-used browser, according to statistics released by Internet metrics company Net Applications. However, Internet Explorer 8 is far from dominating the worldwide market as it is followed “uncomfortably” close by version 3.5 of Mozilla Firefox. Still, usage statistics from Net Application indicate that IE8 has managed, for the first time ever to gain a larger audience than either of its two predecessors, IE7 and IE6. The fact that users seem to be moving away from Internet Explorer 6, dumping the decade-old browser for the much newer version is not only good news for Microsoft, but for the world.

The “report shows that Internet Explorer 8 is not only the most popular browser on Windows with 27.9% usage share, but that it now has 25.6% of market share across all OS’s on a worldwide-weighted usage share basis (data provided by Net Applications). We launched just less than a year ago, so it’s both humbling and thrilling to see so many people choose our product so quickly – making it the most popular browser of choice worldwide,” revealed Brandon LeBlanc, Windows Communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team.

Firefox 3.5 is credited with a market share of 17.08% which makes it the third most-used browser worldwide, following Internet Explorer 6. But fact is that the gap between almost a year-old releases of Internet Explorer and Firefox is extremely close. While Firefox 3.5 has yet to overtake Internet Explorer 6 which dropped as low as 20.00% at the end of the past month, it does have a larger market share than Internet Explorer 7, which accounts only for 14.53% of the market.

Both IE6 and IE7 have lost market share, with users upgrading to Internet Explorer 8. In March 2009, when IE8 was released to web, IE7’s market share was as high as 35.15%, with IE6 at 31.38%. Both releases have since then seen their audience move away, both to IE8 and to rival browsers, including Firefox. IE6 suffered a severe blow in January 2010 because of a highly mediatized security vulnerability which was exploited by Chinese-based hackers in attacks targeting Google and other US-based companies. As a direct consequence, governmental organizations, including from Germany and France, and Google itself advised IE6 users to dump and upgrade to a more recent release of IE8 or to a rival browser.

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).