This week, Net Applications released their January browser market share report. Their report shows that Internet Explorer 8 is not only the most popular browser on Windows with 27.9% usage share, but that it now has 25.6% of market share across all OS’s on a worldwide-weighted usage share basis (data provided by Net Applications). We launched just less than a year ago, so it’s both humbling and thrilling to see so many people choose our product so quickly – making it the most popular browser of choice worldwide.
KenB
2:12 pm on Feb 3, 2010 (gmt 0)
Talk about spin doctoring!
IE8 SHOULD have a larger share than this as IE has the largest share overall to begin with. Basically in less than one year MSFT was only able to get 40%* of IE users to migrate from IE6/IE7 to IE8. As a comparison, 70%* of Firefox users are using Firefox 3.5 or higher and v3.5 was only released last summer.
If you dig even deeper you will find that around 20%* of IE users are still using IE6 where as less than 4%* of Firefox users are still using FF v2.0 or less.
What MSFT is trying to tote as some great triumph is actually a failure in that MSFT seems completely unable to get users to upgrade to the latest version of IE from older versions of IE in a timely basis. Where as with all other browsers obsolete versions fade out of existence within a year or so.
In the end, as has been historically the case, it is IE, specifically legacy versions of IE that are holding the web back and preventing websites from reaching their full potential.
---footnote---- * Based on my Google Analystics stats for ~380k visitors over the past month (which tend to track pretty closely to web wide stats).
Fotiman
2:54 pm on Feb 3, 2010 (gmt 0)
I think it depends on where you get your stats from. For example, StatCounter had IE8 at 21.86%, BEHIND Firefox 3.5 at 22.7% for the month of January. [gs.statcounter.com...]
