14 DAY TRIAL // With the advent of Internet Explorer 8 earlier this year, Microsoft didn’t exactly manage to keep it a secret that it hoped the browser would turn things around when it comes down to market share. At the end of November 2009, IE’s usage share was down 6% compared to the start of the year, according to statistics offered by Net Applications, and IE8, released in March, did nothing to change the downward trajectory of Microsoft’s proprietary browser. By all means, while indeed eroding the market shares of its predecessors, IE6 and IE7, IE8 is in no way stopping IE users from converting to rival browsers, with Mozilla’s Firefox grabbing the largest portion of converts.
Internet Explorer accounted for no less than 69.72% of the browser market at the end of January 2009, and just 68.46% in March this year. Since March, IE’s usage share dropped dramatically, and is now down to only 63.62%. This in the context in which, Microsoft’s latest and best variant of Internet Explorer is available for free to all users of supported Windows versions.
During the same period, Firefox jumped from 22.11% in January 2009, to no less than 24.72% the past month. Mozilla too launched a new version of Firefox, namely v3.5, and is currently making its way to v3.6, which is planned for availability by the end of this year, although it will most probably slip into 2010. Firefox’s continuous growth makes it obvious that in no way has IE8 manage to retain IE users.
And fact is that Firefox’s growth would have been even more consistent had the open source browser not needed to share IE converts with Google Chrome. The immense audiences that crowd on a daily basis to Google’s online properties have boosted Chrome from just 1.52% in January to 3.93% at the end of November. More successful than Safari and Opera combined, Chrome is also eating large chunks of IE audiences, sinking its teeth deep into Microsoft’s share of the browser market. Meanwhile, both Safari and Opera have accounted for market share boosts, albeit less spectacular than Firefox’s and Chrome’s. Safari is up to 4.36%, while Opera climbed all the way to 2.31%.
What is particularly interesting for Microsoft, is that the release of Windows 7 had no impact on IE8’s browser share. Internet Explorer 8 continued to climb at a pace of just over 1% per month, this despite the fact that Windows 7 exploded to approximately 5% share of the OS market in just a month since it was released. This is a clear indication of the fact that although users are indeed embracing the latest iteration of Windows, they’re not exactly sticking with the native Internet Explorer 8, but switching to their preferred third-party browser, even if, at this point in time, all rival apps deliver an inferior user experience to IE8 when it comes down to the integration with the Windows 7 shell.
Internet Explorer 8 is available for download here.
Opera 10.20 Alpha is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Linux is available for download here.
The latest releases of Google Chrome are available for download here.
