Internet Explorer is still gaining market share
Microsoft's Internet Explorer has increased its market share for the third time in the past four months, according to numbers based on website access provided by Netmarketshare. The gains are very small, but the graph shows an unusual -- for IE -- upward trend. However, Windows XP has continued to stay ahead of Windows 7 in operating system market share.
The Netmarketshare share numbers published today, Tuesday, show IE increasing its global market share from 53.83 percent to 54.09 percent in April. In December 2011, it was at a low point of 51.87 percent.
All the other major browsers have lost market share since December 2011, though again, the differences are very slight. Firefox dipped from 21.83 percent in December to 20.20 percent in April, while Google's Chrome slipped from 19.11 to 18.85 percent. Apple's Safari went from 4.97 to 4.81 percent, via 5.24 percent in February.
IE's market share improvement is mainly due to the success of Microsoft's Windows 7, as Microsoft pointed out in a blog post yesterday: Continued Growth for Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7. Based on Netmarketshare numbers, Microsoft said: "The data is particularly encouraging for users and developers in the US, with IE9 growing 4 points of share on Windows 7, hitting 52.9% usage share in April."
Windows 7 ships with IE8 as standard, not IE9, and IE8 is still by far the most popular web browser. Many users who would like to upgrade to IE9 cannot do so because Microsoft does not provide a version of IE9 for Windows XP.
On Netmarketshare's numbers, IE8 had 26.22 percent of the market, which is bigger than Chrome 18 (13.97 percent) and Firefox 11 (11.35 percent) combined. This makes it unfortunate that websites such as Twitter, Google Plus and Quora are written to deliver mediocre performance with IE8.
IE6 (7.11 percent) and IE7 (4.14 percent) contribute to the total use of IE, and are followed by Apple's Safari 5.1 (3.49%).
Royal Pingdom recently looked at the Current status of the browser wars using on web-based numbers from StatCounter for the first 3 weeks of April. This showed that IE8 was still ahead of IE9 in South America, Africa, and Asia. As these regions upgrade from XP to Windows 7, IE9 could show further growth.
However, Netmarketshare's numbers show the upgrade making very slow progress. XP lost only half a percentage point from December to April, as it declined from 46.52 to 46.06 percent. Windows 7 gained a couple of points (up from 36.99 to 38.67 percent) but that was mainly at the expense of third-place operating system, Windows Vista (down from 8.44 to 7.32 percent).