With IE9 Beta in Sight, IE8’s Strong Growth Pushes Firefox and Chrome Down

With the Beta for Internet Explorer 9 due in September 2010, the tide has turned for Internet Explorer. In just the past two months alone, the overall market share of IE has grown by approximately 1%, in the detriment of rivals Firefox and Chrome, according to statistics shared by Internet metrics company Net Applications. Internet Explorer has climbed back up over the 60% market share milestone in June 2010, after it dipped under it in March, and managed to continue the ascendant trend with strong growth in July.

IE jumped from 60.32% to 60.74% in the past month, and the browser seems to be on a roll having added no less than .42% since June. Meanwhile, both Firefox and Google Chrome dipped over the last month. Mozilla’s open source browser is down to 22.91% from 23.81% and Google’s own open source browser dropped from 7.24% to 7.16%. Over the past years, Firefox and Chrome were the two browsers that grabbed the most market share away from Internet Explorer. And although it was somewhat to be expected of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) to reverse the trend, it appears that this is happening much sooner, while IE9 is still in pre-Beta stage.

“Last month, we saw coverage about Internet Explorer posting a worldwide gain in usage share. That encouraging news continues today with Net Applications’ release of their July usage share numbers. Net Applications reports overall Internet Explorer share grew 0.42% worldwide in July, while Firefox lost 0.90% share and Chrome dipped 0.08% in share. Most interesting is the fact that Internet Explorer 8 continues to be the fastest growing browser with a 0.98% increase worldwide in July – and now represents more than 30% of browser usage worldwide. In the US, Internet Explorer 8 picked up share for the third month in a row,” revealed Ryan Gavin, Senior Director, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing.

For the time being Internet Explorer 8 is doing all the heavy lifting for the Redmond company. IE8 accounted for an impressive growth between June and July 2010, jumping over 1% from 25.84% to 26.87%. IE8 is followed by IE6 with 16.97%, Firefox 3.6 with 16.15%, IE7 with 11.43% and Chrome 5.0 with 6.48%. The past month also saw Safari grow to over 5% market share, and Opera increase to 2.45% from 2.27%.

“Internet Explorer extended its usage share gains by another .42% in July, gaining about 1% global share since May. This is the second month in a row of global gains for Internet Explorer and the third straight month of gains for Internet Explorer 8 in the United States. The gain comes at the expense of Firefox (-.9%) and Chrome (-.08%). Internet Explorer 8.0 extended its lead as the world's leading browser by gaining .98% share globally (all editions included),” Net Applications revealed.

But Gavin wanted to make sure that the world understands, it’s not all about market share. “As I’ve mentioned(…), usage share is simply one of several ways we measure our progress with Internet Explorer. Ultimately, we know customers have a choice when it comes to the browser they use, and that choice has a lot to do with the good work that developers and our partners do to build a better Web with Internet Explorer,” he added.

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).