IE loses more ground to Firefox, Safari, and Chrome
By Michael W. Jones
During the last month of 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continued to lose market share. Competitors Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all gained ground on the browser from Redmond.
Although it is still the most popular browser, presumed by most to be so because it is shipped with Windows, almost every new month brings news that Internet Explorer has lost more market share to the competition. December of 2008 was no exception. Net Applications, a firm that specializes in Web analytics and publishes hitslink.com, has once again confirmed the slow but steady slide of Internet Explorer.
In December of 2008, Internet explorer was the browser of choice for 68.15 percent of Website visitors. In October, that statistic had been 71.27 percent; in November it had dropped to 69.77 percent. Across the entire length of 2008, the share of the market held by Internet Explorer has fallen about 7 percent, from about 75% in January to about 68 percent in December.
Browsers from three competitors gained the most from Microsoft’s losses. Mozilla’s Firefox browser rose a half a percentage point to 21.34 percent, up from 20.78 percent a month earlier and 19.97 percent two months earlier, meaning that the Firefox share is growing at more than half a percent per month. Apple Safari’s share grew nearly that fast, up to 7.93 percent in December from 7.13 percent in November and 6.57 percent in October. The Google Chrome share grew .30 percent across those two months and had a 1.04 percent market share in December, over 1 percent for the first time.
There may have been other factors at work in these statistics, as well. Net Applications noted that “The December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage. This in turn increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and other products that have relatively high residential usage.” Thus, since Internet Explorer is used in most workplaces, there is some chance that more time away from work for many employees in December skewed the statistics in favor of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, which are more likely to be used by home Web surfers.
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Stumble It!
January 2nd, 2009
Awesome. As of today, IE is the worst browser on the web, it should be losing market share. MS should realize that it didn’t win The Browser Wars against Netscape simply because of the bundling(It played a huge part but it wasn’t the only reason), they won because IE was better and free.
Today IE pales in comparison to the competition.
January 2nd, 2009
IE wasn’t better then netscape and it may have made the OS Microsoft sold more expensive then