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IE's market share rises on changes to CIA data

Net Applications has reported an increase Internet Explorer's market share with the release of new data from the CIA showing a huge growth in Internet use in China. The NetMarketshare website bases its figures on browser use at a selection of websites then adjusts them to reflect the global population of net users.
Written by Jack Schofield, Contributor

Net Applications has reported an increase Internet Explorer's market share with the release of new data from the CIA showing a huge growth in Internet use in China. The NetMarketshare website bases its figures on browser use at a selection of websites then adjusts them to reflect the global population of net users. As the company explained:

"With the new C.I.A. numbers factored in, Firefox loses global share since many of the countries it is most popular in (Western European, in particular) now have a lower percentage of global internet users. Internet Explorer gains as browser usage shifts to countries with higher percentages of Internet Explorer users."

The result was that IE's market share increased from 56.00% to 56.77% while Firefox slipped from 22.75% to 21.74%.

In a blog post, IE9 Reaches 36 Million Downloads; Internet Explorer Share Grows, Microsoft's Roger Capriotti argued that:

"when adjusted using the older weighting, IE8 and 9 actually show even stronger growth on Windows: up 1.31% (versus 1.13% using the new February weighting) – or over three times Chrome’s 0.42% growth. We continue to measure our share progress relative to our addressable base, and in this case our addressable base is Windows."

Overall, IE8 remained the top browser with 34.95%. IE9 could take a long time to surpass that because it doesn't run on Windows XP.

In the chart devoted to the operating systems used for web browsing, Microsoft Windows XP dipped to 55.09% and Vista to 11.01%, while Windows 7 grew from 22.31% to 23.08%. Mac OS X 10.6 placed fourth with 3.40%, with the Mac's total dipping fractionally to 5.19%. This is a gain of 0.5 points in the two years since March 2009. Windows has taken a hit, but on NetMarketshare's numbers, this is due to the growing use of iOS (1.81%), Java ME (1.04%), Android (0.52%) and Symbian (0.35%) for web browsing, not Mac OS X.

Counted separately, the iPad's penetration was 0.66%, the same as IE9's.

On NetMarketshare's numbers, Linux's market share was 0.92%, which is a slight decline on the 1.01% it managed in March 2009.

@jackschofield

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