New figures show that IE is much more popular than Chrome and Firefox

Jan 2, 2014 08:20 GMT  ·  By

The battle between the top browsers on the market continues with another round. Market researcher Net Applications revealed new statistics for the month of December 2013, claiming that Internet Explorer continues to be the number one desktop browser worldwide.

What’s more shocking is that the leading spot is currently held by Internet Explorer 8 with a market share of 20.64 percent, followed by Google Chrome 31 with 12.88 percent.

Three other Internet Explorer versions come next, namely IE10 with 11.05 percent, IE11 with 10.42 percent, and IE9 with 8.96 percent.

If you’re wondering what happened to Mozilla’s Firefox, version 25 is only sixth in the new charts with 7.48 percent of the market, while Firefox 26 comes next with only 6.60 percent.

Shockingly, Internet Explorer 6.0 continues to be quite a popular choice for many users across the world, as Net Applications claims that no less than 4.43 percent of the desktop computers are still running it right now.

Internet Explorer 6.0 was launched more than 12 years ago as part of the Windows XP operating system and is no longer able to cope with today’s standards.

Surprisingly, IE8 holds the leading spot, but IE11 is also gaining ground every month
Surprisingly, IE8 holds the leading spot, but IE11 is also gaining ground every month
Overall, Internet Explorer is clearly the top leader of the browser world with 57.91 percent of the market, while Firefox is next with an overall share of 18.35 percent. Chrome is third with 16.22 percent, while Safari is way behind with 5.82 percent.

The good news for Microsoft isn’t necessarily the fact that IE8 is such a popular browser, but the impressive growth of IE11, the latest version of its in-house browser that is part of Windows 8.1.

Internet Explorer 11 is also available for Windows 7 users as a separate download, but the Modern version is only offered to those who made the move to the Windows 8.1 OS update.

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IE keeps leading the browser charts worldwide
Surprisingly, IE8 holds the leading spot, but IE11 is also gaining ground every month
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