The monthly StatCounter results came in today and the results aren’t that surprising. Chrome is still rising, Internet Exploer and Firefox are still trending downward. Safari and Opera remain pretty constant at the bottom of the pack.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

What’s interesting is that Chrome now owns a third of the entire global browser market. Internet Explorer still has a third as well, but that’s constantly dropping. The launch of Windows 8 may be enough to catapult Internet Explorer back up to the top, but Chrome is going to keep rising regardless. The downfall of Firefox is definitely attributing to that as the folks at Mozilla can’t seem to compete with Chrome, even with constant updates.

As far as the country by country basis goes, Chrome and Internet Explorer are mostly neck and neck. Firefox still holds a lot of Africa and Europe, but that’s also slowly moving to Chrome. Despite Chrome’s popularity, it still has yet to become the number one browser for most of the developed world with the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, China and Japan all predominantly using Internet Explorer.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

As we move into the launch of Windows 8, it will be interesting to see Internet Explorer is affected by that. If Microsoft has their way with Windows RT, Internet Explorer will be the only browser available on those devices. It’s also the only browser that actually works well within the Metro interface for now on Windows 8 Pro. Chrome is currently testing the waters, but it’s nowhere near as polished as Internet Explorer 10. Regardless, we’ll just have to wait and see.

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.

As pointed out by PC Mag, via the Windows Internet Explorer blog, the site responsible for the Google Chrome claim was StatCounter, however, when factoring the results, StatCounter included prerendered pages in their results, something Net Applications, another site that tracks these trends, does not.

With that in mind, Net Applications’ results concerning browser share is a little different. Let’s compare the two. First, StatCounter:

Click for full size image

You can find out more about StatCounter’s position in their FAQ.

With that in mind, prerendered pages doesn’t exactly explain why StatCounter’s count for IE is much less (32 percent) than Net Applications, which has IE with 54 percent of the browser share. According to the Microsoft blog post, this is due to “geoweighting browser usage baded on real world internet populations.” This topic is the subject of much scrutiny in their post, but suffice to say, after the geoweighting is factored in–something StatCounter does not do–StatCounter’s share for Internet Explorer increases to 44.6 percent, which is much closer to the Net Applications report.

How about adding a curveball to these proceedings? Another trusted web resource, W3 Schools, also keeps browser stats of their own, which are apparently based on visitors to the W3Schools.com website. Observe the disparity between theirs and other services:

April 2012 browser statistics:

Internet Explorer – 18.3 percent
Firefox – 35.8 percent
Chrome – 38.3 percent
Safari – 4.5 percent
Opera – 2.3 percent

Based on W3Schools’ numbers, Chrome and Firefox are absolutely smashing IE, which doesn’t fit with either of the prior reports. Apparently, people who visit W3Schools.com are experienced web users who have moved on from Microsoft’s browser.

In other news, it’s pretty weird seeing a skyscraper ad for Snorg Tees at W3Schools.com.

StatCounter said on the first day of its release Firefox 4 scored higher worldwide than Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 9 which launched more than a week ago.

“Although IE 9 has undoubtedly been hampered by its lack of compatibility with Windows XP.” By yesterday IE 9 had taken just 0.87% of the worldwide market.

When data for all versions of each browser are calculated, Internet Explorer still leads the global market with 45 percent followed by Firefox with 30 percent and Chrome with 17 percent. In the U.S., IE (all versions combined) leads the market with 48 percent followed by Firefox 26 percent and Chrome 14 percent.

On a monthly basis, StatCounter figures show a steady decline in the IE global market share from 55% in February last year to 45% this year. In the same time frame Google’s Chrome has risen steadily from 7% worldwide to 17%.

StatCounter recently reported that Firefox overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) to become the number one browser in Europe for the first time in December 2010.

The report found that globally Bing reached 4.37 percent in February ahead of Yahoo at 3.93 percent. Google continues to lead globally with 89.94 percent of the search engine market.

In the United States Yahoo (9.74%) still has its lead over Bing at 9.03 percent. Google’s share in the US is 79.63%. In July 2009 Microsoft announced an agreement that Bing would power the Yahoo search technology. This has been implemented in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico.

“It is significant that Bing overtook Yahoo! globally for the first time on a monthly basis but it remains a tough battle to claw back Google’s market share,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.

“Although Google dipped below the 90% mark in February worldwide for the first time since August 2009 it shows little sign of losing its global dominance any time soon.”

This was perhaps not a pretty victory, as it only occurred due to a loss on IE’s part.  IE’s market share in fact fell from 38.91 percent in November to 37.52 percent in December, according to StatCounter, while Firefox’s market share declined from 38.50 percent to 38.11 percent.

Still, Aodhan Cullen, the CEO StatCounter, highlighted the significance of the occasion by stating, "This is the first time that IE has been dethroned from the number one spot in a major territory."

Then Cullen explained, "This appears to be happening because Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share."

Meanwhile, in America, StatCounter asserts that Internet Explorer has a market share of 48.92 percent.  Then Firefox is supposed to have a market share of 26.7 percent, followed by Chrome with a share of 12.82 percent and Safari with a share of 10.16 percent.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Microsoft adds a few more employees to the IE9 team as a result of this data.

The graph below, which was constructed by Pingdom’s bloggers using data from StatCounter, pretty much speaks for itself.  The bars corresponding to the mobile market shares of "Yahoo," "Bing," and "Other" just peek above the x-axis, and would be almost impossible to discern if not for the orange-on-black color scheme.

A post on the Royal Pingdom blog concluded, "If Google firmly believes that mobile is the future (which is the opinion of CEO Eric Schmidt), they are making all the right moves."

Indeed, according to StatCounter’s records, "One year ago, [Google's] share of the mobile search market was 95.58%.  That’s significantly less than today’s 98.29%.  Who knows, in a few months, perhaps they will pass 99%.  At this point this actually seems plausible."

But it should also be interesting to see if the launch of the Windows 7 Phone mobile operating system is able to in any way affect Google’s dominance.  Bing is supposed to be the sole default search option, after all.

Microsoft – and maybe every other company trying to compete in this field – can hope, at least.

The company says for the week beginning June 21 Chrome surpassed Safari to claim third place in the U.S. browser market.

"This is quite a coup for Google as they have gone from zero to almost 10% of the US market in under two years," said Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.

"There is a battle royal going on between Google and Apple in the internet browser space (Chrome v Safari) as well as in the mobile market (Android v iPhone)."

Chrome had 8.97 percent of the U.S. browser market, edging out Safari which had 8.88 percent. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still lead the U.S. browser market with 52 percent, followed by Firefox with 28.5 percent.

Globally Chrome has been well ahead of Safari for some time with 9.4% of the market compared to 4% for Safari. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has 53% of the global market followed by Firefox on 31%.
 

It is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which still rules the roost, however, in terms of browser market share on the desktop in the U.S. IE8 and IE7 have significant leads over all the competition, but IE6, while still having an edge over the rising Chrome, dropped to below 5% for the first time, according to StatCounter.

The analytics firm says usage of IE6 in the US and Europe has fell to that point – 4.7% (a year ago, it was at 11.5%).

"At these levels web developers now have valid justification not to support IE6 in the future," says StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen, with the firm adding that a number of sites including YouTube are already understood to have withdrawn support for IE6.

"IE6 has been a bit of a pain for many web developers and designers who have often had to recode their site to get it to work. There are also security implications in its continued usage," addsCullen.

In other parts of the world, IE6 is still a more significant part of the picture. Cullen says that if your target market is Asia, you’re "not out of the woods." According to the firm, it still has 20.8% usage there. In that part of the world, IE8 has only just overtaken it. It’s also still pretty big in Africa.

For December 20, StatCounter has IE 7 at 21.2% market share, and Firefox 3.5 at 21.93%. Microsoft’s IE 8 is closing in though. Its share has been steadily increasing, presumably making up for most of the lost IE 7 share, and has approached 20.33%.

The top browsers are as follows:

1. Firefox 3.5
2. IE 7
3. IE 8
4. IE 6
5. Firefox 3.0
6. Other
7. Safari 4.0
8. Firefox 2.0
9. Opera 9.6

Last month Mozilla celebrated the fifth birthday of the Firefox browser. They said that in the first four days of launch, over a million people downloaded Firefox 1.0. Firefox is available in over 70 languages and offers over 7,000 add-ons.

Firefox 3.5 also had over a million downloads in its first day of launch, and Mozilla surpassed a billion downloads in late July. Firefox has come a long way in five years and has really given Microsoft a run for its money in the web browser space.
 

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