It’s the beginning of a new month, and that means the various browser statistic tracking folks have posted updated charts for all to see. Several trends continued this month in the browser world: Internet Explorer and Opera slipped, Chrome and Safari rose, and Firefox remained mostly unchanged.
Chrome jumped .6%, which might not seem like much — but we’re talking about its cut of the entire population of the Internet, so fractions matter. Safari rose a modest .2%. Those gains came largely at the expense of IE (down about .6%) and Opera (down .3%), which recently saw the departure of one of its founders due to differences with the company’s board of directors.
But while Internet Explorer’s slight decline overall isn’t good news for Microsoft, there were some positives this month. Internet Explorer 9 is gaining popularity steadily among Windows 7 users and it’s now used by 1 in 5 Americans on Microsoft’s latest desktop OS. IE9 usage globally falls to 15.61%, but it and IE8 remain the browser of choice for more than half the Web’s users.
Another interesting figure in the this month’s numbers is the usage share of Firefox 5. At just 2.05% overall and with the overwhelming majority of Firefox users still running version 4 (or even 3.6), Mozilla’s first rapid release version didn’t have the near-instantaneous impact that a Google Chrome update does.
When Chrome jumps versions, the graph makes an incredibly sharp jump within the first couple days of its release. Chrome has been pumping out new versions at breakneck speed for quite some time, however, and the scheduling change is still very new to Firefox users. After waiting more than a year for Firefox 4 to go from alpha to final, the sudden arrival of Firefox 5 caught its less-savvy users off guard.
More at Netmarketshare
Source: geek.com
