Despite having sold 60 million Windows 8 licenses since launching at the end of October, the latest browser marketshare numbers from Net Applications shows that Internet Explorer 10 hasn’t even cracked one percent yet. Being exclusive to Windows 8 isn’t doing the browser any favors. There’s a beta for IE10 on Windows 7, but it has received little to no publicity from Microsoft. It probably didn’t add much to these numbers.

That being said, Internet Explorer is still king. Overall, the browser still has a majority of the browser marketshare at 54.77 percent. When broken down, the constantly hacked Internet Explorer 8 is used the most with 23 percent of the marketshare and the much safer Internet Explorer 9 coming in 21 percent.

As for the other browsers, Firefox and Chrome are still battling it out for second place. Firefox was in the lead in December with 19.82 percent of the market while Chrome lagged closely behind with 18.04 percent. Safari and Opera came in at 5.24 percent and 1.71 percent respectively.

In mobile browsers, Apple Safari for iOS is still by and large the dominant force with 60.56 percent of the marketshare. The generic Android browser and Opera Mini are the only other mobile browsers with percentages in the double digits with 22.10 percent and 10.71 percent respectively. Chrome is picking up pace, however, as it has increased from 0 percent to 1.48 percent in only a year. Not bad for a relative newcomer to the mobile browser scene.

Causation (n.) – a.) the act or process of causing b.) the act or agency which produces an effect (Merriam-Webster)

You decide.

[Altonncf via ILoveCharts, Tumblr]
[Lead Image source]

And the story comes from Don Melton, a retired programmer who is best known for working on the Safari project. He details how Safari got its name in a blog post.

Here’s how it all went down in the summer of ’02:

As I remember, Steve just started saying some names out loud — I suppose trying them out to see how they felt in his mouth and to his ears. Which is not as odd as it seemed then — it’s a good technique now that I think about it.

I don’t recall all the names, but one that stands out is “Freedom.” Steve spent some time trying that one out on all of us. He may have liked it because it invoked positive imagery of people being set free. And, just as possible and positive, it spoke to our own freedom from Microsoft and Internet Explorer, the company and browser we depended on at the time.

Of course, all I could think about was, “Please don’t let us name the browser after a feminine hygiene product!” But cooler heads and filthier minds prevailed. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in the room with that concern. So, after some discussion about its actual merits, “Freedom” moved off the candidate list.

According to Melton, Safari had a couple of internal names that were never really considered – they were just what the folks working on the project called it. “Alexander” was one of them. So was “iBrowse,” which Melton says “became a part of an elaborate joke that later appeared on a team shirt.”

Anyway, when someone on the team would really annoy me about needing to know the final name, I would often say something like, “I’ve just heard from Scott Forstall and it’s ‘iBrowse’ for sure.” Which really meant, “Don’t bug me with that shit right now.” This is how to endear yourself to your engineers

Eventually, Jobs chose a name. Here’s Melton describing his reaction when he was told that the browser he’d been working on would ship as “Safari”:

I honestly didn’t know what to think. My mind was a blank because I just didn’t expect it. The name seemed to come out of nowhere. It sounded more foreign at that moment than its actual origin.

‘It doesn’t suck,’ I finally offered.

Melton promises us more on the Safari story, but he’s saving that for a later date. It’s hard to imagine it not being called Safari, but then again we’d be saying the same thing about Freedom, if that wound up winning out.

[Don Melton]

Although WhatBrowser.org is a Google creation, they don’t simply recommend that everyone switches to the newest version of Chrome. For instance, accessing WhatBrowser with Firefox will suggest that you can try Chrome, Opera, or Safari. Not IE, it’s important to note.

For the truly technologically-challenged among us, Google also provides a short description of what a browser actually is. They also let users know that updating your browser, whichever one it may be, is necessary because it’s faster, safer, and more feature-rich.

With that in mind, Google has made some changes to the site, which they announced in a Chrome blog post.

“To reflect the changing browser landscape, we’ve completely revamped whatbrowser.org. The site has been fully rebuilt in HTML5, localized in 43 languages, and now works on mobile, too. The site also highlights why it’s so important to use a modern browser and keep it up to date: doing so saves you time, keeps you safer, and lets you do more online. The browser you choose is up to you; hopefully whatbrowser.org can help,” says Google Product Manager Jeff Chang.

With the internet reaching more and more people across the world every day, searches like “what’s a browser” and “what browser am I using” will continue to see volume. Google’s WhatBrowser.org ranks near the top for many of these types of searches.

For fun, if you’re interested, you can take a journey through four years of the browser wars here. The visualization takes you from June 2008 to June 2012 – from a world dominated by Internet Explorer to one where Chrome and Firefox take up plenty of real estate.

Chitika looked at hundreds of millions of online impressions from their ad network during a week-long span, and found that outside web browsers and still struggling to gain any ground on default browsers, when it comes to their usage on the two popular mobile operating systems. According to their study, 85.03% of the iOS web browsing share belonged to Safari, while 91.26% of the Android web browsing share belonged to the default Android browser.

Although users of both OS seem content with sticking to their default browsers, it appears that iOS users are a bit more adventurous. Around 15% of iOS users opt for a non-default browser, with Google Chrome leading the way at 3.07%. The remaining 12% or so is spread out among many other mobile browsers including Firefox, Dolphin, Atomic, Mercury, and more.

When it comes to Android users, Opera is the #2 browser with 5.83% of the share. Chrome sees 2.34% usage, while Firefox only comes in at 0.56%.

Chrome for iOS, which launched to immediate popularity, continues to receive its first batch of updates and bug fixes. Google also just released an update for Chrome for Android which they say makes the browser more secure.

Meanwhile, Apple just released iOS 6, which included updates to Safari. These included full-screen mode, iCloud tabs, offline reading lists, and the ability to snap photos or take videos without ever leaving the app.

[Image courtesy Virtualwayfarer, Flickr]

The latest version of Silk has improved page load speeds, improved HTML5 support, and some UI changes. Here’s what it looks like:

It also comes with a new Trending Now feature, which will direct users to popular pages around the web.

Amazon says it “alerts our customers to pages that have experienced an unusual increase in their level of traffic, usually a good indicator that the page or topic may be particularly noteworthy right now.”

Here, you can see how it appears from the New Tab page:

It also has an additional new content discovery feature called “Selected Sites,” which simply shows other sites Amazon thinks you’ll find interesting.

[h/t: TechCrunch]

The update adds the ability to share directly from Chrome to social networks and email. Other features include: “more actionable” sync sign in error messages, improved detection for the welcome tour, and fixes for pages loading blank in Incognito mode.

Not a huge update, but an update nonetheless, for the highly anticipated mobile version of the popular browser. Google launched the iOS version of Chrome in June. Here’s a hands-on in case you’ve yet to test the waters.

In other Google-related browser news, Google has extended its partnership with Opera to remain the default search provider.

Chrome’s operating system counterpart, Chrome OS, also got some tweaks this week. More on that here.

So what’s the main thing that’s killing Firefox’ popularity? The blog post is titled “Everybody hates Firefox updates” so I think you can guess. DiCarlo says that he had an experience all too common last month with a Canadian woman who said she switched to Chrome because “Firefox kept breaking her extensions and asking her to restart.”

DiCarlo then goes on to say that everybody who has stopped using Firefox all tell him the exact same thing. The browser either broke their extensions, asked them to restart or both. He points out that the main culprit was the “rapid release process” that has Firefox becoming more like Chrome with an update going out every six weeks. This is where things start to get interesting.

DiCarlo writes that many people in the Mozilla community came out against the proposed plan. Mozilla is a community driven product that obviously cares about the users and developers above all else, right? Not in this case as he says that the order came from the top-down that Firefox was to enter into the “rapid release process.”

So here we are on Firefox 14 and it seems that there hasn’t been a lot of work done on the product since it hit Firefox 4. Sure, it has a few fancy new bells and whistles, but it’s essentially the same Firefox I’ve been using all my life. The updates don’t seem to really do anything for me and that’s problem according to DiCarlo. He says that there’s a disconnect between software developers and users with the developers not being able to see updates as anything but good. The users only see it as one more chance for the developers to screw them over.

We now know that updates suck, and why to an extent. To give us the full story, DiCarlo lists the three things that make updates the worst possible thing:

If anything, DiCarlo wants software developers to take a lesson from Firefox’s mistake – “make sure the benefit to the users outweighs the pain” when it comes to updates. Firefox has been bleeding users everyday for the past few years and the update process has definitely been the main culprit. If Firefox wants to become a bigger player in the browser wars again, they must become user friendly to all instead of just some.

Interestingly enough, he says that Mozilla also worked its way to ruin by trying to compete with Chrome. He says that the company was constantly comparing Firefox to Chrome and thinking of ways to fight fire with fire instead of fire with water. Even though Opera doesn’t command the audience that Firefox or Chrome does, it’s still immensely popular among its users because they do something different.

So what advice does DiCarlo have for Mozilla? Make updates suck less and maybe work in a way to make them less obtrusive to users. Chrome delivers updates silently without the user ever knowing they received it, but Firefox still loves to alert you whenever it has downloaded a new update. Making the process as painless as possible is key if my favorite browser wants to ever get anywhere. I really don’t want to see Firefox ending up like Thunderbird, but it could happen if they don’t stop to take the users’ needs into account first.

UPDATE

A Mozilla spokesperson reached out to us with a statement in regards to this story:

Jono’s analysis is interesting, but outdated. Regular Firefox updates are good news for users and for the Web but only when they don’t interrupt what you’re doing. Today’s Firefox updates are applied in the background with no interruptions; they even keep your Firefox Add-ons compatible between releases. The result is that our users always have a fast, beautiful and secure browsing experience. Regular releases also let us get new features to our users faster than ever before, and we can listen to their feedback to improve things, just as we did with updates in 2011.

Ok, “a little less reliant” is putting it a bit mildly. In July of 2008, IE held over two-thirds of the browser landscape (66.87%). Nearly four years later, in June of 2012, IE owned just 32.49% of the share – a figure that puts it in a dead heat with Google’s Chrome browser.

All of these figures come from independent web analytics company StatCounter, who today released their “Evolution of the Worldwide Browser Landscape.” It’s a pretty fascinating look at how the world diversified in terms of how they browse the interwebs.

Check it out below:

And for the lazy, here are the two graphs from July 2008 and June 2012 back-to-back:

Of course, it’s hard to look at this and see anything other than a story of how Internet Explorer lost its mojo – but StatCounter makes a point to say that IE is not giving up browser supremacy without a fight:

IE is not taking Chrome’s challenge lying down. From May to June, IE increased its usage share by two-tenths of one percentage point, the first monthly increase since October/November 2011. On a weekly basis, while Chrome overtook IE in week 20 (14 – 20 May 2012), by week 24 (11 – 17 June 2012) IE had staged a fight-back and was exactly equal with Chrome in terms of browser usage for that seven-day period.

Still, we have to declare that the last four years have been won by Chrome, and it’s not even close. While Firefox, Safari, and Opera barely made any gains (and lost a bit of share in Firefox’s case), Chrome was basically the sole browser stealing all of IE’s pie.

While the reports are packed with great information on everything from who the top search engine provider is, to who the top cellphone manufacturers are, one thing stands out in all the reports. Not much has changed.

Each report features not only the company’s current market share, but also how much it has changed since last month. What you’ll find is that a company’s hold on a market is more than just a fleeting trend. Typically, significant events must occur for any of these players to either gain or lose any great momentum.

At the top of the list is Chitika’s graphic on the operating system market. No surprises here, Windows comes out on top by a very large margin. Also making the list are Mac and Linux.

Next, we have their graphic on the web browser market. There are quite a few competitors here, but again, no real surprises. Internet Explorer is at the top of the list as you would expect.

Next, they provide us with a great graphic on the search engine market. Guess who comes out on top here? That’s right, Google all the way.

Finally, we have the mobile manufacturing market. It’s pretty self-explanatory, it is an infographic after all.

So, there you have it. That’s how things are shaping up when you look at June 2012. I don’t know if we’ll see this changing anytime soon.