IE8 making progress, but Internet Explorer falls

Net Applications has released their global web browser market share breakdown for November 2009. Firefox is touching 25% while Internet Explorer continues to lose users.

New statistics have been released and once again disappointment for Microsoft and their Internet Explorer web browser. In terms of market share, it is no longer a question of tendencies but rather a real fall which is starting to take place, with the statistics coming out worse then ever before in November 2009.

While Internet Explorer is of course still the most widely used browser in the world according to Net Applications, with 63.72% market share, IE has been losing points for a good while now. The loss of 6.1 points since the beginning of the year and 1.02 points in November has to be worrying.

The release of Internet Explorer 8 in March hasn’t stopped the bleeding, but it has started to change Microsoft’s satisfaction levels, with IE 8 managing to improve according to users. Could this also be related to the Windows 7 affect ? It’s not sure, as in the Windows 7 satisfaction survey published by Technologizer, Internet Explorer 8 is the program which receives the most negative comments.

For Internet Explorer, version 6 is still the most widely used (22.08%) ahead of IE8 (19.34%) and IE7 (16.86%), with IE8 being the only version to increase their usage numbers. Over the last few weeks, Microsoft has particularly emphasised the positives that come with IE8 in terms of computer security, although there was a small issue with the Cross Site Scripting filter which had to be explained.

In November, while Apple Safari lost points (market share to 4.36%), it was Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera which gained with 24.72%, 3.93% and 2.31% market share respectively. On the eve of the first Google Chrome Mac OS X release, and with a Linux release in progress, the growth of Google Chrome is remarkable (anticipated third place in the world in 2010 ), although the most serious competition to IE remains Firefox.

At this speed, 2010 could be the year we see Internet Explorer dip under the symbolic 50% mark. This could come sooner rather then later according to StatCounter with IE only being at 56.57% in November (32.21% for Firefox).


Note : Net Applications bases their statistics on a collection of information from 40 000 sites with close to 160 million unique visitors per month.