For Browser Usage Share, a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Internet Explorer still dominates the browser landscape by a wide margin, but it has been slowly but surely losing share for years. Firefox, once thought to the be the future, has stalled at roughly 20-25 percent usage share and is, in fact, slowly declining too. Chrome, however, is on the rise, with steady gains since its release a few years back.

These are simple (and accurate statements). But sometimes a picture helps tell the story better. And in this case, Net Applications obliges with a graph showing the relative usage share of each of the major web browsers over the past few years.

browser-share-2011-06-01

Credit: Net Applications

Discuss this Article 7

pixelstuff
on Jun 2, 2011
Could you cover how they actually measure this?
AndyBlackburn
on Jun 3, 2011
Just wondering how there is such a big difference between your stats from Net Applications, which show IE maintaining a browser share of over 50%, when W3Schools shows a completely different story:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Your thoughts?


AndyBlackburn
on Jun 3, 2011
And, as a picture is worth 1000 words:

http://i.imgur.com/u1K8g.png



mog0
on Jun 3, 2011
@Andy For explanation of difference in stats on w3schools, scroll down that page you linked to and there is an explanation. Simple explanation: their stats are only for their own site, which has a very non-representative audience. Net Applications on the other hand monitor a huge number of sites around the world with a variety of audiences.
Dipsh t Admin
on Jun 3, 2011
Andy, w3schools is only the data of browsers that visit the w3schools site.
MISgrad96
on Jun 3, 2011
Normally I use IE9, but it causes me headaches too. Like my inability to run youtube videos within Microsoft's own websites like the Office 365 blog. All I get is the box where the video should run, but no video. The page and video work fine in Chrome though. Does anyone know of a fix for this? I already installed the latest version of the Adobe flash player.
Mustang17
on Jun 4, 2011
Hmm July 2010, it actually went up. Or rather it stopped falling briefly.

I like IE 9, I really do, but on the rare occasion if it hangs. I will fire up another browser. I then of course realise how cumbersome they appear in comparion.

I see Firefox is now persuading people to give up using 3.5. and move onto a better more secure browser. Thats something Microsoft did with IE6. People in my goverment office still use IE6, mostly by people who have no inclination to know or even worry about the browser they are using. Normal people I think they are called.



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