A tweet today had a link pointing me to a graph and data on the current market share of the most popular browsers, which you can see here. It came as a shock to discover that Internet Explorer, although with a drop of 4%, still had such a massive share of the market at 60.40% as of August 2010.
What would be interesting is to see and actual breakdown of people using IE6, IE7 and IE8. Personally, I can’t wait to see the back of IE6 and it seems that Microsoft cannot either. It’s amazingly buggy and comes with a bagful of security flaws, I have no clue why Microsoft have allowed people to use it to this date. Microsoft’s
Google Chrome on the other hand has steadily gained ground, having more than doubled their share of the browser market in the space of just nine months from 3.58% to 7.52%. This is most likely due to its tremendous speed and ease of use, with many users switching over from Firefox to Chrome. This can be seen with Firefox’s slight decline in the market.
The main problem I see with Firefox is it can be extremely heavy on RAM usage particularly if there are many plugins active. Unfortunately however, until Chrome sorts out the current lack of features and plugins that Firefox possesses, the latter is still the preferred browser for the majority of techies and I won’t be making the permanent switch over yet.
| Month | Internet Explorer | Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Opera | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| October, 2009 | 64.64% | 24.07% | 3.58% | 4.42% | 2.17% | 1.12% |
| November, 2009 | 63.62% | 24.72% | 3.93% | 4.36% | 2.31% | 1.06% |
| December, 2009 | 62.69% | 24.61% | 4.63% | 4.46% | 2.40% | 1.21% |
| January, 2010 | 62.12% | 24.43% | 5.22% | 4.53% | 2.38% | 1.31% |
| February, 2010 | 61.58% | 24.23% | 5.61% | 4.45% | 2.35% | 1.77% |
| March, 2010 | 60.65% | 24.52% | 6.13% | 4.65% | 2.37% | 1.67% |
| April, 2010 | 59.95% | 24.59% | 6.73% | 4.72% | 2.30% | 1.71% |
| May, 2010 | 59.75% | 24.32% | 7.04% | 4.77% | 2.43% | 1.69% |
| June, 2010 | 60.32% | 23.81% | 7.24% | 4.85% | 2.27% | 1.51% |
| July, 2010 | 60.74% | 22.91% | 7.16% | 5.09% | 2.45% | 1.66% |
| August, 2010 | 60.40% | 22.93% | 7.52% | 5.16% | 2.37% | 1.62% |
The release of IE9 in the next couple of weeks will be interesting and should see Microsoft take a healthy percentage of the browser market. They claim to focus their latest browser on speed and standards and hopefully introduce improved support for CSS scripts and increased Javascript performance. Visually from the snapshot below, the look is reminiscent of Chrome with its minimalist screen and clean borders, having removed all unnecessary buttons and toggles off the page.
If they succeed with this; and some claim this IE9 will be at least as successful as its predecessor IE8 – competing browsers will struggle to gain any significant ground in the market with the Microsoft giant dominating the majority share.
Let’s hope IE9 is as Ace as it looks!
Its good to see chrome gaining users, it will be good to see how the next version of firefox will change things
GREAT POST JULIE KEEP THEM COMMING AND YOU WILL BE PR 5 IN NO TIME!!