Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 has been available for 18 days and remains the company’s weakest web browser at launch since version 3. While the software now seems to be close to 4% market share, it appears to be unable to stop the bleeding of other IE versions. Since the beginning of the year, Mozilla’s Firefox has picked up more than half of the users IE lost; the other half went to Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. This trend is evident in new market share numbers published by Net Applications and StatCounter, which show that Firefox hit a new record market share in March. On an average basis, IE remains the dominant browser globally, according to Net Applications. However, the market share was 66.82%, the lowest level for IE in about a decade. Firefox marches on and came in at 22.05%, the highest number published by the market research firm so far.
Safari climbed back up to 8.23%, after having dropped to 8.05% in February, and Google’s Chrome continued to gain slightly to 1.23%. For the month, IE was down 0.62 percentage points, Firefox up 0.28 points, Safari up by 0.21 points and Chrome up by 0.08 points. We will leave the Opera browser out of consideration in this article, as its share has always remained between 0.69% and 0.75% over the past year and has not shown substantial gains or losses. Its current share is estimated at 0.71%. We also know that IE is much more popular in the U.S. than it is in the rest of the world – and that IE8 has been adapted much quicker in the U.S. than it has in other geographies (which can be seen, for example, through hourly market share numbers posted by Net Applications.) Also, StatCounter recently reported that Firefox 3 has become the most popular browser with a share of 35.05%, exceeding Internet Explorer 7 (34.54%) for the first time.
Source: TG Daily
