Internet Explorer (even IE6!) gains market share

[bill]

Oh look. A new IE forum! ;)

This isn't breaking news as it was reported earlier this month, but I thought it was interesting to note that IE use is not always on the decline.

Internet Explorer (even IE6!) gains market share [arstechnica.com]

We've seen IE drop more than one percentage point on multiple occasions, but even though IE's gain is substantial, it's not unheard of to see IE gain share once in a while. Months like this don't usually happen twice in a row, and until we see data for July we can't say that IE's long decline has started to reverse itself.

It may be grinding to a halt, though, given that May's loss was Microsoft's smallest decline in the last year (and IE actually saw positive growth in the US) and now IE is back above 60 percent.

Microsoft noted that the increase may be the result of a marketing campaign that it launched earlier this month to underline how IE8 helps stop online criminals from stealing your information.

[bill]

Ignore it and maybe it will go away? ;)
That doesn't seem to be the case. IE is slowly gaining market share for some reason.

Internet Explorer on a Roll - Gains Another .42% [netmarketshare.com]

Internet Explorer extended its usage share gains by another .42% in July, gaining about 1% global share since May. This is the second month in a row of global gains for Internet Explorer and the third straight month of gains for Internet Explorer 8 in the United States. The gain comes at the expense of Firefox (-.9%) and Chrome (-.08%).

[Fotiman]

I think it's worth noting that not all stats websites are the same. For example, StatsCounter still shows significant growth for Chrome and a decline for IE in the month of July:
[gs.statcounter.com...]
Those stats seem much more realistic to me than the ones from netmarketshare.com. If you compare by browser version, IE8 continued to have growth, but overall IE lost market share.

[txbakers]

IE8 on XP is very odd and slow. Blech.