Internet Explorer Faces Downturn
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
IE’s Falling Market Share
Statistics published Monday by tech analysis firm Net Applications show IE holding 67.55 percent of the worldwide browser market in January of 2009. That’s down a full 7.92 percent from the same time one year ago. The stats show IE steadily falling almost every month in the year-long period.
Over the same time, Firefox has been gaining ground and growing its global userbase. The Mozilla browser commanded 21.53 percent of the worldwide market in January 2009, Net Applications’ data shows, up 0.19 percent from the previous month and 4.55 percent from the same time in 2008.
Safari, Chrome, and Opera also all increased their market shares over the past year.
IE in the Future
It was just a few years ago that Internet Explorer held a whopping 95 percent of the worldwide browser market. Since then, of course, Firefox and the other “alternative” browsers have become more mainstream and more widely accepted, and the year-to-year rate of IE’s user loss has steadily increased.
Microsoft’s hope is that IE 8 will win back its comfortable lead in the browser game. The first release candidate of IE 8 came out last week and is said to be an “effectively complete and done” product that’ll be mirrored in the final version. The browser is an enormous step up from previous IE versions, but as I noted in my initial impressions, I’d be very surprised if any of its features are unique enough to convince Firefox, Safari, or Opera users to make the leap — or, for that matter, to convince non-devoted IE users not to jump ship themselves in the future.
July 8th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in that first location