IE8 - gaining significant market share?

[encyclo]

I was reviewing some stats today for one of my sites, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how rapidly IE8 was gaining ground. IE6 is also fading fast, now overtaken by Safari.

For April 2009, this is what I'm seeing (site is aimed at a European audience in a non-technical field, percentages based on about 150k visits):

IE8: 12.6%
IE7: 47.8%
IE6: 6.5%
FF3.0x: 24.7%
Safari: 6.6%

However on a different site, IE8 is under 3% and IE6 is still at nearly 20% - but for a site that is more likely to attract a business/corporate crowd. Anyone else seen similar shifts?

[jdMorgan]

I'm seeing a slow increase in MSIE8 use -- about 5%, but I don't think it will really take off until MS puts it into the "Recommended" or "Critical" update class on Windows/Microsoft Update. When that happens, most of the broadband users will switch, and many of the dial-up victims won't, just as with MSIE7.

Jim

[willybfriendly]

A whopping 3.2% on one generally informational site.

A measly 0.00% on another, strictly e-commerce site.

Doesn't appear to be taking off yet from my stats...

[rich_b]

Here's some percentages for a London, UK based dance school from Jan 1st to Apr 15th 2009.

Internet Explorer 66.85%
Firefox 19.57%
Safari 5.43%
Mozilla 4.89%
Chrome 1.09%
Konqueror 1.09%
Opera 1.09%

IE breaks down as:

IE 7.0 65.52%
IE 6.0 32.38% <-- so many still, sigh.
IE 8.0 2.10%

If I look at the last month alone then IE 8.0 comes in at 4.5%.

[swa66]

Travel related site for April 2009 so far:

visits, measured by Google Analytics

Internet Explorer: 66.97%
- IE7: 69.11% or 46.28% of total
- IE6: 24.85% or 16.64% of total
- IE8: 5.99% or 4.01% of total
Firefox: 21.62%
Safari: 8.46%
Chrome: 1.59%
all the rest is <1%

Interesting is to note on the OS part: a very high percentage of iphone and ipod users! with 1.5% of visits they beat the linux crowd with nearly double the usage.

To compare it with data a year older:
IE: 74,69%
- IE7: 61.78% or 46.15% of total
- IE6: 38.05% or 28.42% of total
FF: 18.35%
Safari: 5.47%
rest below 1%

Going from nearly 75% on a legacy browser to 63% in a year isn't bad, esp as the site still works properly in the legacy browsers. But I can't wait for legacy IE usage to be ignorable.

[RonPK]

IE8: 4% in the weekend, back to 3% now.
I fear that most IE8 users will be former IE7 users, and that we'll be stuck with 6 for a few more years.

[jdMorgan]

> we'll be stuck with 6 for a few more years.

Probably true, since Win98/Win98SE/WinME users are stuck with MSIE6 forever (MSIE7 and MSIE 8 don't support these older OS versions). "Windows Genuine Advantage" guarantees that some number of unlicensed users will persist in using these old OS versions as long as they possibly can. We may just have to wait for those old machines to physically fail and be replaced... :(

Jim

[mcneely]

Here's a bit from us;
(a USA based widget "services" website)

Internet Explorer 72 %

7.0 at 51.8 %
8.0 at 13 %
6.0 at 7.1 %

---

FireFox 21.3 %

Firefox 3.0.8 at 14.2 %
Firefox 3.0 at 3.3%
Firefox 2.0.0.20 at 3.5%

---

Safari at 3.8%
Mozilla at 0.4%
Chrome at 0.2%
Opera at 0.2%

Thought Chrome would have a better set of numbers to display, but all of our other sites show it at a whopping 0.00%.

[Seb7]

From one of my more popular sites: (past two weeks)

IE usage:
v8 - 7%
v7 - 64%
v6 - 28%

Browsers:

IE - 51%
Firefox -38%
Safari - 5%
Chrome - 3%
Opera - 2%

[poppyrich]

There should be two events that spark a big boost:

1) When MS pushes IE8 out as a critical update. This should happen fairly soon.

2) The release to market of Windows 7 with IE8 as a part of it. (Late this year, very early next.)

Of course, there is always the possibility that MS might decide to put some marketing dollars behind IE8 to raise awareness in the general user community - you never know.

[swa66]

Actually I'm not so much interested in a gain for IE8, than in the loss of legacy IE versions so that we can stop caring about them and their bugs and "features".

[SuzyUK]

ditto Swa

[Slinger]

ditto SuzyUK