Always fun to see a nice graph. Will be interesting to see if the rates are changed in any way if the EU forces Microsoft to include a "Choose your browser" screen in Windows.

David, if the EU imposes any remedies on Microsoft it'll be years of appeal and other foot dragging before anything happens.

I don't think it will have any measurable impact on Firefox which is doing just fine but I could imagine in a few years it giving a boost to the single-digit browsers.

- A

The Austrian newspaper "Der Standard" (left-wing, non-techie daily paper) reports that visitors to its site use Firefox more than IE (http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=1242317221994). Here are the numbers:

derStandard.at - entire site in May 2009

Browser Usage Share
Firefox 43,97 %
IE 41,93 %
Safari 9,13 %
Opera 2,60 %
Chrome 1,07 %
Mozilla 0,48 %

The tech section of the site shows an even larger difference:

Browser Usage Share
Firefox 56,14 %
IE 25,21 %
Safari 10,72 %
Opera 3,75 %
Chrome 1,87 %
Mozilla 1,03 %:

At least it shows Mac is growing ;)

Uploaded the same data to https://business.swivel.com/charts/1809-Browser-version-market-share so you can play with it more.

Firefox users seem to upgrade rapidly.

While I agree with you that it's sad that IE has grown it's user base so much, for me that's not as important as market share percentages. From a web developer's perspective, it is a lot easier for me to convince management that we should develop cross platform compatible sites when IE only has 80 to 85 percent of the market. When IE had 95%, managers didn't really care about the other browsers.

IE is such a CLOWN BOAT that if Ricky's mom climbed into it it'd sink like a AIR FRANCE JET. Ka-blooey!

How's that for IE-bashing? Tourette's!

Why is it "sad" that IE gained 100M users? IE8 is a very good browser. Stop hanging on to IE6 hate.

The page visnu linked to says that Chrome and Opera have 0% market share and that explorer, firefox and safari together are controlling 100% of the market.

Doesn't seem very accurate.

The page visnu linked to says that Chrome and Opera have 0% market share and that explorer, firefox and safari together are controlling 100% of the market.

Doesn't seem very accurate.

@Jeff: It's not hanging onto IE6 hate. IE8 is going to cause as many problems in the future as IE6 is now. Although it's CSS2 properties are now up to date an working, it's CSS3 and HTML5 properties are well behind all of the other browsers, particularly Safari. Also if you run a benchmark (http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/index.action) then you will see exactly how much slower it is at rendering pages.

@Microsoft: Please let it die. Your browser has always sucked, leave it to someone else and focus on what you were created to do.

@Jeff: It's not hanging onto IE6 hate. IE8 is going to cause as many problems in the future as IE6 is now. Although it's CSS2 properties are now up to date an working, it's CSS3 and HTML5 properties are well behind all of the other browsers, particularly Safari. Also if you run a benchmark (http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/index.action) then you will see exactly how much slower it is at rendering pages. Finally, following the trend of all Microsoft products it looks like it was designed by a 4 year old.

I actually prefer Windows(XP and 7) to OSX, but both need a lot of work and they should pull their resources out of the browser market and place them into their operating system, then I would be a convert fanboy.

IE8 is not going to hurt the web nearly as much as IE6, mainly for 2 reasons:

- It took 6 years for IE7 to show up, and I doubt the same will go for IE9. MS just can't afford it due to the competition.
- CSS3 isn't as important as proper CSS2 support. CSS3 is sugar icing. Not supporting something and having buggy support for something are 2 different kinds of issues. IE6 had both kinds of issues (and plenty of each), while in comparison, IE8 tends to only suffer from the former kind. If I can create a div and make it float without having to worry about IE messing up, then progress has definitely been made. Giving this div rounded corners, on the other hand, won't work everywhere that easily... but at least the fact IE doesn't support them won't break my layout.

Chrome should gain more market share right?

So at this rate (if I'm doing the math correctly) June 2014 Firefox will eclipse IE. Fingers crossed.

To "eclipse IE", Firefox will have to do some serious cleaning up or it will be unmaintainable soon. On the user side, it absolutely needs to stop leaking and crashing. I'm hanging on to it because I love the extensions, but I'm already switching to Chromium to quickly look something up because Firefox (with Greasemonkey, Adblockplus and some extensions) takes ages to load.

Echoing some of the above comments: I'm completely browser agnostic and use four in various combinations (IE/Firefox for webdev, Chrome for personal use, plus occasional Safari on my Mac.) IE serves its purpose, and as much as I'd like to see IE6 disappear, IE8 is fine. But despite the amazing technical achievements of Firefox and others, I don't think IE is a clearly inferior browser to most people outside the tech industry. They really don't care that much about browsers.

And I'd be really careful when decrying market gain by a "clearly inferior" browser. Firefox is, for my purposes, now "clearly inferior" to Chrome. I love the extensions, but if I look at it coldly, it offers me nothing but a hosting environment for Firebug. My browser usage represents that opinion - I haven't loaded Firefox in over a week, but IE and Chrome still get frequent use. (IE for "correctly" displaying legacy web apps)

According to: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9133747

Google's Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) were the big winners last month in the browser share sweepstakes, according to Web measurement company Net Applications.

Firefox's puny increase was significantly off its 0.3 point average for the last 12 months, and effectively stalled the open-source browser's march to the next major milestone of 25%, which Net Applications' data had earlier predicted Mozilla would reach by November. According to the newest numbers, Firefox now won't make the 1-in-4 mark until January 2010.

In short... IE8 is gaining ground, Asa. Your graphs are questionable.

@Douglas: erm... How about having a look at the previous article here?
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/one_year_of_int.html
That shows Asa acknowledges the fact IE8 is going up, but that doesn't prevent IE as a whole to keep sinking.

I don't think it's sad. What I care about is having choice and diversity and that's happening regardless of the absolute numbers. I don't want IE to die. I just want it below 50%.

If it's so clear why do you people have to keep pointing out how clear it is?

Thought it was interesting reading the comments here. Most of the does seem like they are on corporate computers and does sound totally technical illiterate, they just seems ill informed (if they don't have a point).
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/customsearch/thread?tid=7e907aa8280aa661&hl=en

Have the IE6 demographics been investigated? To see both who they are and what their reasons are for not switching (ie. a lack of official msi-package might hinder some all-windows mid-size corporate sites) and targeting information if they are in fact ill informed (they think that Firefox will be slow in their hardware, will be unfamiliar, ...) or fix it if they are not or do a "ie6 booster edition" of Firefox (official like the school edition, but styled to look like ie6) if that is what it takes. Some of us probably have access to accesslogs from websites from non-browser-related sites, where user agent could be tied to users, so they can just be called up.

In Poland, small real estate site with 10k UU monthly:

Firefox: 46%
IE: 42%
Opera: 8%
Chrome: 2%
Safari: 0.6%

Internet Explorer versions:
7.0 ~ 56%
6.0 ~ 33%
8.0 ~ 10%

IE6 is still pain in the ass, but it is slowly and constantly (hurray) going out of webdevs nightmares :)

@Ephilei
Spot on, when IE is below 50% it is plain obvious that everyone must develop for multiple browsers to not throw *more than half the users away*.

Too prejudiced review. Opera is not included ! Interesting why

Too prejudiced review. Opera is not included ! Interesting why

Tam, Opera doesn't have enough usage share to show up on these charts in a meaningful way.

- A

Hi! opuSWri