The following data points were gathered from 4 different sources, using North America or US statistics where available. They were then averaged together for the final row.
Because each company uses different methods about how they collect stats, the numbers vary, sometimes wildly. In the case of Internet Explorer 8, as much as 16.4 percentage points of difference can be seen in the numbers. Because of this it’s important to review your own traffic statistics for your visitor information. However, these numbers do give us a couple of interesting trends.
TRENDS
Possibly the most important trend is the diminishing share of Internet Explorer 6. It has been estimated that development support for IE6 can take up to an additional 25% of time – a costly expense for anyone in the industry. Because of this many popular sites – including youtube and facebook – have dropped support for IE6, which is likely to have helped the demise of IE6.
While IE7 was a great leap forward from IE6, it has some similar problems with non-standard rendering. The latest browser statistics indicate that IE7 usage is nearly as low as Internet Explorer 6’s traffic. Version 8 is definitely the dominant version of Internet Explorer, which is great news for security and web development, as well as web standards.
Google’s Chrome browser has seen explosive growth in the past year, and while Firefox has mostly remained steady near 30%, Chrome has grabbed most of it’s market share directly from Internet Explorer. Because Google Chrome auto-updates its users to the latest available version, there is no worry about version fragmentation, which is great for web developers and also makes sure that users are on the most secure version of the browser. Firefox 4 and IE9 are looking to hold back chrome with their latest versions, which promise increased speed, javascript performance, and HTML5 and CSS3 support.
A NEW KING?
On average just 2 points behind IE8, Firefox 3.6 provides great promise for the fourth major version of Mozilla’s browser. It is possible that with the launch of IE9 and Firefox 4, Firefox may take over as leading browser version on the web. While overall Internet Explorer still has a commanding lead (average of 44.2%) over Firefox (average of 31.3%), much of IE’s market share is in legacy versions of it browser. Chrome ranks in 3rd at an average of 13.9%.
