14 DAY TRIAL // Nothing spectacular happened in the browser market in January, apart from a big milestone for Chrome and a (negative) record for Internet Explorer. Google's browser broke through the 10 percent mark for the first time, according to Net Applications numbers. Meanwhile, IE saw its lowest market share number since the analytics firm started keeping track in 2004.
However, the trends haven't changed, all browsers carried their momentum in the last month. Google Chrome snatched another piece of the pie, gaining 0.7 percentage points in just one month, going from 9.98 percent market share to 10.70.
Google's browser has been gaining about 0.7 percentage points each month for the past three months, and it doesn't look like it's slowing down. Other companies keeping track of the browser market share generally grant Chrome an even bigger share.
Chrome has been gaining market share largely at the expense of Internet Explorer, though there's no way to know for sure whether users are actually moving from IE to Chrome or are going from IE to Firefox and from Firefox to Chrome. Most likely it's a mixture of the two.
All versions of Internet Explorer now account for 56 percent of the browser market. Internet Explorer 6 saw its biggest one month decline to date, but is still the third most popular browser.
At 9.33 percent of the market, Chrome 8 has IE6 in sights and we should see Google's browser become bigger than the ancient IE6 in a few months.
Firefox continues to stagnate. While even more people update to the year-old Firefox 3.6, overall, Mozilla's browser is holding on to its close to 23 percent of the market. The release of Firefox 4 could bring a change in that direction.
However, IE9 is also coming soon and it should also slow down the rate at which people are switching away. Considering that IE7 is still used by 8.29 percent of those visiting sites tracked by Net Applications, two years after IE8 was released, perhaps Microsoft shouldn't put all of its hopes on IE9 adoption, though.